Terms of Service & End-User License Agreement

1. Eligibility & Account Responsibilities

• Organization: These Terms constitute a binding legal agreement between you and EloClarity LLC (“EloClarity”), a Virginia limited liability company.
• Age Requirement: You must be at least 18 years of age (or the legal age of majority in your jurisdiction) to establish an Adult or Parent Account.
• Child Accounts (Under 13) & Binary Parent Approval: Any user under the age of 13 must declare their age via the Under-13 checkbox during registration. Parental approval is strictly binary: a child under 13 is strictly prohibited from accessing, logging into, or using the Platform unless and until their parent or legal guardian provides affirmative authorization via the Parent Portal. If a parent declines approval, withholds consent, or revokes authorization, the child account is immediately blocked and prohibited from using the Platform.
• Account Integrity: You agree to provide accurate registration information and keep your credentials secure. You are responsible for all activity conducted under your account.
• Anti-Threading & 30-Day Username Lock: To prevent multi-account threading, database abuse, and unfair rating manipulation, any external chess handle (from Chess.com or Lichess) linked to your profile is locked for thirty (30) days from initial import before it may be changed.

2. Intellectual Property Rights & Content Ownership

EloClarity Proprietary IP: All software code, algorithms, 200+ engine heuristics, Cognitive Archetype Matrix frameworks, diagnostic models, instructive masterclass games, custom puzzle databases, coaching commentaries, and visual interface assets are the exclusive intellectual property of EloClarity LLC and are protected by United States and international intellectual property laws.

Prohibition on Bulk Scraping & Content Harvesting: You are granted a limited, revocable, non-exclusive license to access the Platform solely for personal, non-commercial educational study. You are strictly prohibited from:

1. Scraping, harvesting, bulk-downloading, or programmatically extracting our puzzle database, instructive game collections, opening classifications, or heuristic datasets.
2. Interacting with our content other than one puzzle or lesson object at a time through authorized application interfaces.
3. Decompiling, reverse engineering, disassembling, or extracting the underlying algorithms, heuristics, or scoring formulas of our profiling engines.
4. Utilizing EloClarity content, puzzles, or annotations to train competing machine learning models or commercial chess platforms.

User-Uploaded PGNs: You retain full ownership of your original chess game records. By uploading PGNs to EloClarity, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free license to parse, evaluate, and generate diagnostic profile telemetry for your account.

3. Advertising & Sponsorship Terms

• Platform Advertising: EloClarity provides access to certain educational tools and gameplay modes supported by commercial advertisements and direct sponsorships.
• General Account Advertising: Adult and standard accounts may display third-party advertisements delivered via Google Ads or verified advertising partners.
• Youth & Child Account Protections: In accordance with our COPPA compliance standards, approved Child Accounts under 13 are strictly excluded from Google Ads and behavioral ad-network tracking. Advertisements shown to Child Accounts consist exclusively of non-behavioral, kid-appropriate educational sponsorships and scholastic announcements.
• Prohibited Ad Tampering: Users agree not to reverse engineer, click-fraud, automate queries against, or manipulate advertising containers or scripts on the Platform.

4. Educational Profiling & Chess Engine Disclaimers

Educational Purpose Only: EloClarity provides diagnostic evaluations and training drills for educational purposes. While our 200+ engine heuristics reflect comprehensive chess analysis, we do not guarantee specific rating increases in FIDE, USCF, or online platforms. Chess advancement depends on individual study and practice.

Algorithmic Evaluations: Centipawn scores, blunder classifications, and best-move recommendations represent mathematical heuristic approximations and may vary across engine depth, hardware, and engine revisions.

5. Parental Oversight & Governance of Child Accounts

Parents and legal guardians who approve Child Accounts agree to:

1. Provide affirmative authorization for their child to use the Platform, understanding that access is binary and withholding approval blocks site access.
2. Authorize the algorithmic profiling of their child’s game moves for the purpose of serving custom, weakness-targeted puzzles and instructive masterclasses.
3. Manage, suspend, or terminate their child’s account access through the Parent Portal at their sole discretion.
4. Assume legal and financial responsibility for any credit purchases or actions initiated through linked child profiles.

6. Credits, Subscriptions & Virtual Balances

• Credit Functionality: Platform credits are virtual units utilized to access computational diagnostic processing, deep game imports, and AI coaching summaries.
• No Cash Value: Credits have no cash value, do not accrue interest, are non-transferable, and cannot be redeemed for legal currency.
• Purchases: All credit pack purchases or subscriptions are processed securely via third-party billing providers. Except where required by applicable consumer protection laws, all credit transactions are final and non-refundable once applied to an account.

7. Acceptable Use & Prohibited Conduct

You agree that you will NOT:

• Use automated crawlers, scrapers, bots, or scripts to access our APIs or extract application content.
• Attempt to bypass authentication headers, forge user identity tokens, or manipulate credit balances.
• Interfere with server infrastructure, launch Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, or attempt to compromise system integrity.
• Access or attempt to access restricted administrative interfaces, internal endpoints, or unauthorized server controls.
• Transmit or inject malicious scripts, viruses, or cross-site scripting (XSS) payloads.

Violation of these conduct rules will result in immediate account termination, forfeiture of unused credits, and permanent IP-range access restrictions.

8. Open-Source Engine Licensing & Attribution

EloClarity interfaces with Stockfish 18 and open-source chess engines. Engines execute client-side inside sandboxed WebAssembly (WASM) Web Workers communicating via Universal Chess Interface (UCI) protocol. All distributed engine binaries are governed strictly by the GNU General Public License v3 (GNU GPLv3). In compliance with GPLv3, the complete, unmodified source code for the Stockfish versions distributed by EloClarity is available in our Open Source Components & Licenses section.

9. Disclaimer of Warranties & Limitation of Liability

“As-Is” Service: The Platform is provided on an “AS IS” and “AS AVAILABLE” basis without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, statutory, or otherwise.

Limitation of Liability: To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, EloClarity LLC shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your access to or inability to access the Platform. Our aggregate liability for all claims related to the Platform shall not exceed the total amount paid by you to EloClarity LLC in the twelve (12) months preceding the incident.

10. Governing Law & Dispute Resolution

These Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States, without regard to its conflict of law principles. Any legal suit, action, or proceeding arising out of or related to these Terms or the Platform shall be instituted exclusively in the federal or state courts situated in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

11. Contact Information

• Company: EloClarity LLC
• Support Email: support@eloclarity.com
• In-App Support: Submit a request via our Contact & Support portal