Terms of Service
Last updated: 19 August 2026
Introduction
These terms are the agreement between you and the operator of Cordice. Using the service means accepting them in full. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.
Cordice is in alpha
Read this part even if you read nothing else.
Cordice is early software, opened to people on purpose but not finished. That is not a disclaimer written to be safe; it describes what you are about to use.
- Things will break. Features may behave wrongly, stop working, or vanish between one day and the next.
- Data may be lost. Not as a plan, but as a real possibility. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.
- Things will change. Features may be redesigned or withdrawn. Limits may move. Nothing you see today is promised for tomorrow.
- We may need to reset something. If a fault requires it, accounts, servers or messages may have to be rebuilt or cleared. We would tell you first if we could, and we cannot promise we always can.
None of this suspends the rest of this agreement, and none of it is a reason to treat the service carelessly — the rules below apply from the first day.
Definitions
Cordice — the chat service at cordice.org, together with its clients, its mail addresses, and everything we run to provide it.
We / us — the operator named below.
You — the person using Cordice, whether or not you have an account.
Content — anything you send, upload, publish, or transmit through Cordice: messages, files, images, links, profile details, server and channel names.
Server — a space inside Cordice created and run by a user, with its own members, moderators, and rules. Not one of the machines we rent.
Who runs this
Cordice is operated by an individual, not a company. Contact: [email protected] for anything concerning the operator, [email protected] for everyday matters.
The source code is open under AGPL-3.0. These terms cover the service we run at cordice.org — not copies run by anyone else. We are not responsible for other people’s instances, whatever they are called.
1. Your account
You need a working email address and you must be at least 16 years old. By registering you confirm that you are.
Keep your credentials to yourself. Everything done through your account is treated as done by you, and you are responsible for it, whether or not you authorised it.
One person, one account. Registering again to evade a suspension is itself grounds for suspension.
You may close your account at any time, in two different ways. Disabling takes it out of use and keeps the data. Deleting queues it for removal; there is a seven-day window in which you can ask us to stop, and after that it is gone.
Before an account can be deleted you have to deal with any server you own — hand it to somebody else or delete it. An account cannot be removed while it owns a room other people are standing in.
What happens to your data in each case is set out in the Privacy Policy.
2. Acceptable use
You may not use Cordice to:
- break any law that applies to you or to us
- harass, threaten, stalk, or impersonate anyone
- share material that sexualises children — this is reported to the authorities, not merely removed
- distribute malware, or deceive people into giving up credentials
- send bulk unsolicited messages
- attack the service, probe it, or attempt to reach data that is not yours
- evade any restriction we have placed on you
The Community Guidelines form part of these terms.
Bots and automated access. You may create bots and use the API; it is documented at developers.cordice.org (opens in a new tab). A bot is your responsibility as completely as your own account — what it posts, what it collects, and what it does to the service are yours to answer for.
Do not use automation to collect messages, profiles or member lists in bulk, to work around a rate limit, or to do anything through the API that you may not do by hand. Rate limits exist so that one program cannot spoil the service for everybody else; treating them as an obstacle to route around is a breach of these terms.
3. Your content stays yours
You keep every right you have in your content. Uploading it grants us only the permission needed to run the service: to store it, and to transmit and display it to the people you sent it to. That permission ends when the content is deleted, except for copies in backups for the period described in the Privacy Policy.
We do not sell your content, use it for advertising, or train machine-learning models on it.
4. You are responsible for what you send
By sending anything through Cordice you confirm that you have the right to send it, and that doing so breaks no law and infringes nobody’s rights.
Responsibility for content rests with the person who sent it, not with us. We do not endorse it, adopt it, or vouch for it.
If your content causes a claim against us, section 13 applies.
5. We do not read your messages in advance
We do not review content before it is sent, and we are under no obligation to go looking for anything. Cordice is a place where people talk; it is not moderated in advance, and nothing here creates a duty to monitor.
We do act when told. Report anything to [email protected] and a person will read it. Where content is unlawful or breaks these terms, we remove it and take whatever action against the account we think fit.
Acting on a report does not make us responsible for content nobody has told us about, and does not oblige us to go looking for similar things ourselves.
6. What we may do about breaches
We may, at our sole discretion and without prior notice: remove content, restrict what an account can do, suspend it, or close it permanently.
We may do this for a breach of these terms, for conduct we reasonably believe is unlawful, or where we believe it necessary to protect other users, the service, or ourselves.
Where it is reasonable we will say why and you may reply. Where someone is being harmed, we act first.
No refund arises from any of this.
7. Servers run by users
Every server on Cordice belongs to the user who created it. Its rules, its moderation, and what happens inside it are that owner’s responsibility, not ours.
We are not a party to disputes between users, or between a user and a server owner. We step in only where these terms or the law are broken.
8. Legal requests
We comply with valid legal process. Where we receive a lawful order or request from a competent authority, we provide what it requires, and we preserve data when lawfully directed to.
Where we are permitted to tell you this has happened, we will. Where we are forbidden to, we will not.
9. Copyright
If material on Cordice infringes your copyright, write to [email protected] identifying the material, the work it infringes, and your authority to act.
We remove material that is clearly infringing. If yours is removed and you believe we were wrong, reply and say why. Accounts that repeatedly infringe are closed.
10. Our name, our software
Cordice is free software under the AGPL-3.0, and you are welcome to run it, change it and pass it on. The full picture — the source, who else we are built on, and every third-party notice we are obliged to carry — is on the licences page.
That licence covers source code and nothing else. The name Cordice, the mark, the wordmark, and the design and wording of this site and of the clients remain ours. Running the software has never included the right to present the result as us.
You may say truthfully that your service runs on Cordice. You may not use our name or mark as the name or mark of your own service, or in any way that suggests we run it, endorse it, or answer for it.
11. Availability
Cordice is a small service run by one person on rented machines. It will be unavailable at times, planned and unplanned. There is no uptime guarantee and none is implied.
There is nothing to pay and nothing to buy. Cordice has no paid tier, no subscription and no purchases, and we take no payment details of any kind. If that ever changes, these terms will change first and you will be told before anything is asked of you.
We may change, restrict, or discontinue any part of the service at any time.
We do not guarantee that your data will be preserved. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. If the service closes entirely we will give notice and a period to retrieve your data, but nothing obliges us to preserve it beyond that.
Current state: status.cordice.org (opens in a new tab).
12. Warranty
Cordice is provided as it is and as available, without warranty of any kind, express or implied — including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.
We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, free of faults, or free of harmful content posted by others.
13. Indemnity
To the fullest extent the law allows, you will indemnify us against any claim, demand, loss, or expense — including reasonable legal costs — arising from your content, your use of Cordice, or your breach of these terms.
This does not apply to claims arising from our own acts, nor to claims we could have prevented by acting on a report we received and did not act on.
14. Liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any loss arising from your use of Cordice or your inability to use it. That includes lost messages, lost or corrupted data, lost profit, lost opportunity, interrupted service, and anything done to you by another user.
Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to what you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim — which, for a free service, is nothing.
None of this applies where the law does not permit it. Where a limit cannot lawfully apply, it does not apply, and the rest of this section still stands.
15. Changes
These terms will change as the service grows. Substantive changes will be announced before they take effect. Continuing to use Cordice afterwards means you accept them; if you do not, close your account.
16. Assignment
You may not transfer your rights under these terms. We may transfer ours, including if the service passes to another operator, in which case you will be told.
17. General
If any part of these terms is unenforceable, it is narrowed to whatever the law allows and the rest stands unaffected.
If we do not act on a breach, we do not give up the right to act on it later.
These terms, together with the Community Guidelines and the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between us about Cordice.
18. Which law applies
These terms are governed by the law of Uzbekistan, and disputes are heard by the courts there.
This does not remove rights given to you by the law of your own country that you cannot agree to give up. If you are in the European Union, your data protection rights remain as described in the Privacy Policy.
Contact
[email protected] — anything at all [email protected] — reports [email protected] — legal notices