Terms of Service
These terms cover two different things, and it is worth being clear about which is which:
- The BSFChat apps — the desktop, iPhone and Android clients. Software you run.
-
The servers we operate —
bsfchat.com,chat.bsfchat.comandid.bsfchat.com. A service we run for you.
BSFChat is self-hosted software. Most BSFChat servers are not ours. Where these terms say "our servers", they mean only the three addresses above.
1. Who you are agreeing with
"We", "us" and "BSFChat" mean Joshua Griffith,
trading as BSFChat — the operator of
bsfchat.com, chat.bsfchat.com and
id.bsfchat.com, and the publisher of the BSFChat
apps. BSFChat is not a registered company; it is one person,
which is why you are agreeing with a name rather than an
entity. You can reach us at
[email protected].
By using the apps or our servers, you agree to these terms. If you do not, do not use them — and note that you can still run the software against a server of your own, which these terms only cover to the extent of the app itself.
2. The app licence
You may install and use the BSFChat apps on devices you own or control, for free, for personal or commercial purposes.
If you got the app from the Apple App Store, Apple's standard Licensed Application End User License Agreement governs your licence to that copy, and it takes precedence over this section where the two disagree. Apple is not responsible for the app and provides no warranty for it; we are, to the extent set out below.
If you got the app from Google Play, the Google Play Terms of Service apply alongside these terms.
3. Age
You must be at least 13 years old to use BSFChat. Age requirements for a service like this one vary from region to region, and in some places the age is higher than 13. Where the law where you live sets a higher age, that is the age that applies to you, not ours.
We have tried to keep the app out of the regions where it would be unlawful for the people there to use it, and where we have got that wrong we will put it right as soon as we are made aware of it. We do not verify anybody's age. The app asks for no date of birth and contains no age gate, so what is written here is what we intend and require, not a check we perform. BSFChat is not designed for children and we do not knowingly hold accounts for them. If you believe a child has an account on one of our servers, email [email protected] and we will remove it. The privacy policy says the same thing in more detail.
4. Your account
You are responsible for your account and for everything done with it. Keep your password to yourself. Turn on two-factor authentication if you want it — it is in your identity account settings.
That responsibility does not move, and it is worth being
blunt about what it means. If your account is used to break
section 5, the consequence lands on the account: it can be banned
from a chat server we run, from id.bsfchat.com, or from
both. It makes no difference whether you did it yourself, let
somebody else use your account, or were careless enough with your
password that they did not have to ask. Those three look identical
from where we sit, we have no way to tell them apart, and the only
person who can decide who uses your account is you. If you think
somebody else has got into it, change your password, turn on
two-factor authentication, and tell us.
You can delete your account from inside the app at any time: your settings → Delete account. Read what deletion does and does not do before you use it.
5. What you may not do
On servers we operate, and using accounts issued by
id.bsfchat.com, you must not:
- Post, upload or share content that is illegal where you are or where we are. Child sexual abuse material, in particular, is reported to the authorities and the account is terminated immediately and permanently — see below.
- Harass, threaten, stalk, impersonate, or incite violence against anyone.
- Post content that is intended to humiliate or degrade a specific person, or that sexualises a minor in any way.
- Send unsolicited bulk messages, run scams, phish for credentials, or distribute malware.
- Attack the service: probing for vulnerabilities is fine and welcome if you tell us ([email protected]); denial-of-service, credential stuffing and mass scraping are not.
- Use someone else's account, or evade a block, ban or account termination.
- Infringe someone else's copyright or trade marks with content you upload.
There is no tolerance for abusive content or abusive users. Every BSFChat client lets you block a user and report a message; reports reach the administrators of the server the message was sent on. On our servers, we act on reports ourselves. We may remove content, suspend an account or terminate it — with notice where that is reasonable and without it where it is not.
Child sexual abuse material. This is the one point in these terms that is addressed to server operators as well as to users. If you run a BSFChat server, material of this kind must be reported to the authorities in your country, and we expect anyone running a server to do exactly that. On a server we operate, where we are made aware of such material we will report it to the appropriate authorities and terminate the account immediately and permanently. A report keeps its own copy of the reported message even after the message itself is deleted — the privacy policy explains why — and that copy is what makes reporting to an authority possible at all.
Being exact about the limits of that, because the opposite impression would be worse than useless: nothing is scanned. There is no automated detection anywhere in BSFChat — no image scanning, no matching against any database of known material, no classifier — on our servers or in the app, and nobody is reading your messages looking for anything. What we can do is therefore entirely reactive. We act on what is reported to us, and we cannot act on what nobody reports, which is the plainest reason there is to use the report button.
6. Servers we do not run
This is the part most chat services do not have to explain, so we will be blunt about it.
When you connect the BSFChat app to a server that somebody else runs, we are not involved. We do not host that server, we cannot see its messages, we cannot moderate it, we cannot delete anything on it, and we cannot help you recover an account on it. Its operator sets its rules, holds its data, and is the person you deal with. Sections 5, 7 and 9 of these terms apply to our servers, not to theirs.
The block and report features work on any server, because they are in the app. A report on somebody else's server goes to that server's administrators, not to us.
7. Your content
What you write and upload is yours. You keep every right in it. You grant us only the narrow, boring permission we need to actually operate the service: to store your content, transmit it to the people you sent it to, and make the copies a running system makes (backups, search indexes, caches). That permission ends when the content is deleted, except for copies already in backups, which age out.
We do not use your messages to train anything, sell them, mine them for advertising, or hand them to a third party for any purpose other than running the service. There is no advertising in BSFChat and no plan for any.
8. Our software and our name
BSFChat's source is published at github.com/BSFChat. It is source-available: no open-source licence has been applied to it yet, so publication alone does not grant you rights to copy, modify or redistribute it. If and when a licence file is added to those repositories, that licence governs and this paragraph is superseded by it.
The BSFChat name and logo are ours. Run your own server, call it whatever you like — just do not pass it off as an official BSFChat service.
9. No warranty, and limits on liability
The apps and our servers are provided as is. This is a small project run by very few people. We do not promise that it will be available, that it will not lose data, or that it is free of bugs. Back up anything you cannot afford to lose.
To the maximum extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost data, lost profits, or loss arising from anything anyone else does on a server we do not operate. Nothing here limits liability that cannot legally be limited — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
10. Changes, ending, and law
We may change these terms. If a change matters, we will note it on this page and update the date at the top. Carrying on using the service after a change means you accept it.
You can stop using BSFChat whenever you like. We may suspend or end your access to our servers if you break section 5, or if we stop running them — in which case we will give what notice we reasonably can.
These terms are governed by the law of the United Kingdom, and the UK courts have jurisdiction — without taking away any consumer-law right you have to bring a claim where you live.
11. Contact
[email protected] for anything about these terms. [email protected] for vulnerabilities. See also the privacy policy and the support page.