Terms of Service

Accepting these terms

By creating an account, signing in or placing a room on a website, you agree to these terms. If you are running a room for an organisation, you confirm that you are allowed to agree on its behalf. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

What the service is

ChatSocket hosts realtime chat rooms. You configure a room in the control panel, publish it and place it on your website with an iframe or the script loader. We run the servers, the storage and the delivery of messages. You decide how your room behaves, who may enter and who may moderate.

Your account

• Give a working email address. It is how a password reset and a billing notice reach you.
• Keep your credentials to yourself. Anything done from your signed in session is treated as done by you.
• One person may hold more than one account, but an account may not be sold or transferred.
• Tell us at support@cybercafestore.com if you think your account has been accessed by someone else.

Plans, trials and billing

A new room starts on a three day trial, limited to one trial per connection address. When the trial ends, a plan keeps the room running:

• Basic is $9 a month.
• Premium is $19 a month and includes everything Basic does.

A plan runs for the month it was bought for and renews on the same date unless you cancel it. Payment is taken by our payment processor, and every payment produces an invoice you can read in the control panel. If a payment fails the room is given a short grace period to put it right; if it is still unpaid after that, the room is suspended and the pages it powered will show a notice instead of your chat. Cancel any time from the control panel and the plan runs to the end of the period already paid for.

Prices may change with notice. A change applies from your next renewal, never to a payment already taken. If a charge looks wrong, write to us before disputing it and we will sort it out.

Acceptable use

Do not use ChatSocket to:

• Break the law, or plan or encourage anything unlawful.
• Harass, threaten, abuse or exploit anybody, and especially not minors.
• Post content you do not have the right to use, such as material infringing copyright.
• Send spam, phishing, malware or unsolicited advertising.
• Impersonate another person or misrepresent who you are.
• Try to get past a security control, a rate limit, a filter or a ban.
• Scrape, harvest or mine accounts or messages beyond what a room offers its own visitors.
• Resell the service, or use it to power somebody else's paid product without agreeing it with us first.

Your room and its content

What you put in your room is yours. You keep ownership of it, and you grant us the licence we need to host it, deliver it to the people in the room and back it up. That licence ends when the content is deleted.

You are responsible for your room: its name, the topic it publishes, the ranks you create and the people you make moderators. A room listed in the public directory has to be honest about what it is. Make sure visitors to your room know what they are agreeing to, and provide your own contact detail if your local law requires it.

What other people post

Visitors to your room keep ownership of what they send. You can set the room to guests, registered members, or both, and you decide which ranks may delete or restrict a message. What a person sends is visible to the room it was sent in and to whoever moderates that room.

Moderation and removal

Every room carries its own rules, set by whoever runs it. On top of that, we may remove content, limit an account or suspend a room when we have reasonable grounds to believe these terms were broken, when a lawful request requires it, or when leaving it up would put other people at risk. Where we can, we tell you first. A serious or repeated breach ends the account.

Embedding

When you place a room on a website, the frame opens only where you allowed it: on your own address, on a domain you listed, or anywhere you pass the key issued on the Embed API page. Details are in the iframe API reference. Do not frame a room on a site whose purpose is deceptive, and do not strip the key out so a room can be passed off as somebody else's.

Availability

We aim to keep rooms up and we publish an uptime target on the plans page, but the service is provided as it is. Maintenance, faults outside our control and work on the platform can take a room offline for a while. We are not responsible for losses caused by downtime, by a visitor's own connection, or by a site you embed the room on.

Ending things

You can close your account from the control panel at any time, and your rooms and their content are removed with it. We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and will give notice where the breach allows it. Closing an account does not refund a period already paid for.

Liability

To the extent the law allows, ChatSocket is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profits, goodwill or data, or for what a visitor says in your room. Our total liability for a claim about the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits rights you have that the law does not let us limit.

Changes to these terms

We update these terms as the service changes. The date at the top moves when we do. A material change is also emailed to account holders. Using the service after a change means you accept it.