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Legal

Terms of Service

These terms are the deal: a public room on every URL, no email gate, no staff sitting in judgment of your opinions - and an as-is service from a small project.

Effective 5 September 2026 · Updated 8 September 2026 · Binding if you use everch.at or the Everchat extension

Speech first. Everchat does not employ a moderation team to decide which views are allowed. Votes can collapse a comment in the interface. Collapse is not deletion. We do not take down lawful speech because it is offensive, unpopular, political, religious, rude, wrong, or aimed at people in power.

The only content we will remove (or accounts we will restrict) is content or conduct we are not legally allowed to host, that we must remove under a valid compulsory order or valid intellectual-property notice process, or that attacks the service itself, as listed in §5-§6. “Harm,” “misinformation,” and “hate” as political slogans are not viewpoint categories we moderate.

1. The agreement

By installing the extension, creating a handle, or posting, you agree to these Terms and to the Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use Everchat.

Everchat is provided by the publisher named on the Chrome Web Store listing (“we,” “us”). Contact: legal@everch.at or the email on that listing.

The Everchat software is source-available, not open source. You may install official builds and review the published source as described in the LICENSE. You may not redistribute Everchat as your own product, publish modified builds, or run a substitute service. The Everchat name and logos are reserved.

You must be at least 13 years old (or the higher digital-consent age in your country, if applicable) to create a handle or post. If you use Everchat on behalf of an organization, you represent you have authority to bind it.

2. The product

Everchat attaches a public discussion to a canonical URL. Anyone can read. To write or vote you claim a handle and unlock it with a passkey. There is no password and no email gate.

Tracking parameters are stripped from the room ID so an article is one thread, not a forest of campaign URLs. That is a product rule, not a promise that the rest of the internet stopped tracking you, and not a promise of zero operational logs (see the Privacy Policy).

The service is free to use. We do not sell seats, badges, or “visibility.” We therefore have no advertiser to keep comfortable, and we will not start moderating speech to court one. We may ask for voluntary support via Buy Me a Coffee to keep the project running. Payment details are processed by Buy Me a Coffee and its payment partners under their own policies; Everchat does not receive card numbers. Support does not buy preferential ranking, viewpoint protection, warranties, or ownership of Everchat.

Everchat is a small indie project. Features, uptime, and availability can change or stop. Chrome Web Store rules, hosting limits, and our capacity all constrain what we can ship.

3. You speak; we host

You are solely responsible for your posts, GIFs, avatars, handles, and links. Everchat is a venue for user-generated content. We are not the author of user comments, we do not endorse them, and we do not adopt them as our own speech. Other users’ views are theirs.

You understand that comments are public, may be indexed or scraped by third parties, and may be associated with the page URL you commented on. Using Everchat means you accept a public audience and the risks of public speech.

Other people will disagree with you. They may downvote you. They may quote you elsewhere. That is the public internet.

Nothing in these Terms requires us to pre-screen or continuously monitor content. We do not generally monitor. Where law imposes a notice-and-action duty, complying with that duty is not a promise that we will hunt for lawful opinions we dislike.

4. Viewpoint neutrality (what we will not do)

We will not, as a matter of product policy:

Delete or hide lawful posts because of the opinion they express
Run a staff queue that picks winners in politics, journalism, religion, or culture war
Shadowban, quietly throttle, or “reduce distribution” of a handle for ideology
Demand real names, ID uploads, or email “for safety”
Add keyword automod that treats slogans as contraband
Honour flag campaigns, journalist pressure, or brand-safety lists as a reason to silence someone
Treat “community notes,” fact-check NGOs, or advertiser tools as a takedown trigger

Community collapse is not censorship by us. If a comment is downvoted past the threshold, the interface can fold it the way Reddit folds a thread. Anyone can expand it. The words remain. Score is peer signal, not an admin ruling.

Reports are stored (reporter, message, optional reason) and reviewed on a monthly basis for illegal abuse, Terms violations, and other legal-floor patterns - not for ideology or opinion takedowns. A report does not make us your moderator of convenience.

Rate limits exist to stop floods and bots. They are counted per action per short window. They are not a secret ranking of which opinions may ship.

§4 is our speech posture. It does not waive §5-§6, Chrome Web Store rules, hosting-provider requirements, or compulsory law.

5. The legal floor (what we will act on)

We are not a law-free zone. We also refuse to let “illegal” become a rubber word for ordinary disagreement. We may remove or disable content, restrict accounts, or comply with process in these cases:

Child sexual abuse material and other content that is illegal to host under applicable criminal law regarding the sexual exploitation of minors. We will not host it. We will not debate it as “speech policy.”
A valid court order, warrant, or other compulsory legal process that binds us, limited to its terms. We do not expand the order.
Content we are strictly forbidden to host as a matter of criminal law in a jurisdiction that actually has power over the operator or the servers - for example, certain malware distribution or non-consensual intimate imagery where the law requires hosts to act. This is not a grant to police insults.
Intellectual-property notices we reasonably believe we must act on (including copyright complaints sent to legal@everch.at). See §6. Acting on a specific allegedly infringing post is not a viewpoint ban.
Technical abuse of the service itself - not the topic of a comment, but attacks on Everchat: breaking in, scraping in a way that knocks us over, stealing other users’ sessions, impersonating Everchat staff or system accounts, spamming to occupy the database, or using the extension as a malware dropper.
Chrome Web Store or hosting-provider prohibition we cannot refuse without losing the ability to ship the extension or keep the site up. If Google or the infrastructure host forces a removal, we will do the minimum required to keep the product alive, and we will treat that as their rule, not a conversion of Everchat into a speech nanny. We will not use this clause to launder ordinary viewpoint bans.

If something is merely controversial, hateful, false, blasphemous, unpatriotic, or upsetting, it stays under our policy. Government websites are not sacred. Journalists are not sacred. We are not your HR department.

6. Copyright and intellectual-property notices

If you believe content on Everchat infringes your copyright (or other IP rights), send a notice to legal@everch.at that includes, at minimum:

Your contact information
A description of the work you claim is infringed
The URL of the Everchat thread and enough detail to locate the specific post (handle, timestamp, or message text)
A statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized
A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and that you are the owner or authorized to act
Your physical or electronic signature (typing your full name is enough for email)

We may remove or disable access to the material, and may tell the poster. We are a small project without a registered DMCA agent listing unless and until we publish one; email is the intake channel. Repeat or abusive notices may be disregarded. This section does not create a duty to search for infringement on our own.

7. Handles, passkeys, and loss

One public handle per account. Reserved names (admin, mod, everchat, and similar) are blocked so nobody can cosplay as the operator.
You must not impersonate another person in a way that is fraud, not parody.
Authentication is passkeys. If you lose every passkey, the account is not recoverable by us. Add a second device while you still can.
You may delete your own posts. Editing after publish is not offered. When you delete, we remove the post content from our live systems. If replies still need a place in the thread, the UI may show a “Deleted comment.” placeholder with no recoverable body or media. Residual copies may briefly remain in ephemeral backups or legal holds as described in the Privacy Policy.

We do not ban handles for having the wrong politics. We may suspend, lock, rate-limit, or delete an account or content that violates these Terms (especially §5-§8), which is not a speech category based on viewpoint.

8. Your content license

You keep whatever copyright you have in your posts and avatar. You grant Everchat a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, display, reproduce, and distribute that content solely to operate the public threads (including caches, backups, and the side panel). If you delete a post, we remove it from our live systems (and stop displaying it as a living comment), subject to residual copies already made by other people, ordinary backup lag, and any temporary legal hold we are required to keep.

You represent that you have the right to post what you post, including GIFs you insert, and that your content does not infringe others’ rights. Giphy’s terms apply to their files; we proxy search so we are not stuffing their API key into the extension.

9. Acceptable use (conduct, not creed)

You may not:

Try to break, overload, or bypass the service’s technical limits
Harvest other users’ data by automated means at a scale that is not ordinary browsing of public threads
Use Everchat to operate a botnet, drop exploits, or phish credentials
Interfere with someone else’s passkey or session
Misrepresent yourself as Everchat staff or a system account
Use the service in violation of applicable criminal law

You may be harsh. You may be wrong. You may talk about news, wars, and officials. That is allowed. Spamming the same string to occupy the database is not an opinion; it is an attack on the forum.

10. Suspension, termination, and changes

You can stop using Everchat at any time. We can stop offering it, change features, or migrate infrastructure without liability beyond what these Terms allow.

We may suspend or terminate access, delete content, or refuse service when we reasonably believe it is needed for §5-§9, security, abuse, legal compliance, or to protect the viability of the project. We will not add a moral-clause termination that fires merely because your posts trend or are unpopular.

We can change these Terms. The effective date at the top will move. Continued use after the new date means you accept the updated Terms, except where local law requires a different acceptance method. If a change narrows §4 (viewpoint neutrality) or expands collection beyond the Privacy Policy’s stated design, that is not a “clarification” - it is a different product posture, and we will say so in plain language.

11. No warranty

Everchat is provided “as is” and “as available.” Threads can go down. Passkeys can fail. A URL canonicalization can surprise you. Data can be lost. We do not warrant uptime, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or that a comment will be read by anyone in particular. We do not warrant that the service is free of bugs, abuse, or third-party interference.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we (and our suppliers) are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, data, goodwill, or reputation, arising from the service, downtime, decisions of other users, or other users’ speech - whether based in contract, tort, or otherwise, even if advised of the possibility.

Our total liability for any claim relating to Everchat is capped at the greater of (a) USD $50 or (b) the total amount you paid us for Everchat in the twelve months before the claim (usually $0). Some places do not allow certain limits; in those places, we limit liability to the fullest extent the law allows.

If you are a consumer in the EEA or UK, your mandatory statutory rights are not displaced by this section.

12. Indemnity

If your posts or your use of Everchat get us sued, fined, or forced to spend money because of something you did (other than our own decision to violate these Terms), you will indemnify and hold us harmless for the reasonable cost of that mess - including claims that your content infringed someone else’s rights - to the extent the law allows. This does not apply to consumers where local law says it cannot.

13. Law

These Terms are governed by the laws applicable to the operator identified on the Chrome Web Store listing, without giving effect to conflict-of-law rules that would import a more speech-restrictive regime as a gotcha. Courts in that operator’s forum may hear disputes, except where a consumer is entitled to their home courts.

If a clause is unenforceable, the rest stays. Failure to enforce a clause once is not a waiver forever. Sections that by their nature should survive (including license grants already exercised, disclaimers, limits of liability, indemnity, and this §13) survive termination.

These Terms are the whole agreement about Everchat between you and us. They do not make you an employee, partner, or journalist of ours. Marketing copy on the site is descriptive; if it conflicts with these Terms or the Privacy Policy, the legal pages control for legal purposes.