Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of WeChessUp — a hosted service for organising and running chess tournaments, publishing live event pages, and following rated players — operated by CoreSync Technology Inc., a Massachusetts corporation, at 148 Concord Road, Wayland, MA 01778, United States. “We” and “us” mean that company; “the service” means everything at wechessup.com. By creating an account, or by using the service, you agree to these terms and to the Privacy Policy.

1. Who may use WeChessUp

You must be at least 16 years old to hold a WeChessUp account, and old enough to form a binding contract where you live. Tournament directors routinely enter data about players who are minors, and adults follow the records of players who are minors; both are expected and supported — but every account belongs to someone 16 or older who is responsible for it.

2. Your account

One account can hold two views — the organiser console and the player & family view — and these terms cover both. You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for everything done under your account. Tell us promptly at admin@wechessup.com if you believe it has been compromised. You may not sell, transfer or share an account, and you must give us accurate information when you register.

3. Your content stays yours

Tournaments, player records, pairings, results, reports, listings and photos you put into WeChessUp remain yours (or remain the property of whoever owns them — entering data here transfers no ownership to us or to you). You grant us the licence we need to run the service: to host, store, process, back up, transmit and display that content, to the people your settings say may see it, for as long as you keep it here. That licence ends when the content is deleted, except for backups that age out on their own schedule and records we must keep by law. If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without obligation.

4. Your responsibilities as an organiser

When you enter information about players — names, ratings, federation IDs, ages, grades, team assignments, contact details — you are the party who decided to collect it. You confirm that you have the authority to do so, including any consent required from a parent or guardian where a player is a minor, and that you will use WeChessUp’s publication controls appropriately. Public event pages have privacy defaults that reduce what is shown when the field appears to include minors, or when ages are unknown; these are defaults, not a substitute for your own judgement. You are responsible for complying with the laws and federation rules that apply to your event.

5. Player & family accounts — adding a rated player

The player & family view lets an account follow up to three rated players and see their official record, statistics and progress. The rules that make this feature safe are part of these terms:

• Use the record lawfully. The player & family view shows the federation’s public record, so you do not need to be the player or their guardian to add someone — a player studying their own section, a director reading a field, a coach preparing a student and an adult analysing an opponent all have a legitimate reason. What you must not do is use it to harass, contact, impersonate, track or build a profile of anyone, or to republish it. The affirmation you tick when adding a player is a representation to us; making it falsely is a breach of these terms.
• Adding is rate-limited on purpose. An account may hold a limited number of players and may add only a limited number of distinct players in a rolling period. Removing a player does not reset that period. This is how we keep our use of the federation’s API within what we told it we would do, and working around it — extra accounts, automation, or cycling players to read many records — is prohibited (§10).
• We may verify claims — for example by comparing the name you entered against the federation’s record — and we may flag, suspend or remove a claim we reasonably believe is false, abusive, or used to monitor someone against their wishes.
• A claimed record is visible only to accounts that claimed that player. There are no public player profiles, and you must not republish another person’s claimed record in a way that harasses or exposes them.
• If a player (or their parent or guardian) tells us they do not want their record followed on WeChessUp, we may remove claims on that player and block new ones, even where the data itself is public.
• Removing a player deletes what we stored about them, as the Privacy Policy describes. Syncing is periodic and rate-limited by design; the button that refreshes a record has a cooldown, and automating around it is prohibited (§10).

6. US Chess data

Ratings, tournament results, crosstables, rankings and titles shown in the player & family view are the official public records of the United States Chess Federation, fetched through the federation’s API and cached here. WeChessUp is an independent product: we are not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by US Chess, and the federation’s own database remains the authoritative record. If a rating or result looks wrong, the correction happens at the federation (usually via the event’s tournament director); our copy updates when the federation’s record does. We identify our traffic honestly, pace and cap it, and will change or stop how we access federation data if the federation asks — which may reduce or interrupt the feature without liability to us.

7. Photos and other uploads

For any image or file you upload — a player photo, an account avatar, an event asset:

• You must own it or have the right to upload it, including the permission of anyone recognisable in it (for a child, their parent or guardian’s permission — which, for a player photo, the claim relationship itself is expected to carry).
• A player photo must be a respectful picture of that player. Nothing sexualised, violent, hateful, misleading (a photo of a different person), or otherwise inappropriate — the audience for these images includes families and children.
• Player photos are private to the player’s followers and never appear on public pages; that is a product guarantee, not just a setting.
• We may remove any upload that we reasonably believe breaks these rules or the law, without notice, and repeated abuse is grounds for closing the account. To report an image, email admin@wechessup.com.

8. Plans, free tier and payment

• The free tier lets you run a limited number of rounds per section, so you can evaluate the pairing engine on a real event. Live pages are never gated by tier.
• Paid plans are billed in advance on a recurring basis through Stripe. We never see or store your card details.
• You can cancel at any time from Settings. Cancellation stops future charges and takes effect at the end of the paid period. Refunds are handled as described at the point of purchase and in billing settings; where we offer a fresh-subscription refund window, it is honoured automatically.
• Prices may change; we will give notice before a change affects a renewal. Taxes may apply depending on where you are.

9. Live pages, following and notifications

• Where you enable them, WeChessUp can send event notifications to people who opted in. Email and SMS follows are double opt-in; SMS requires a separate consent naming sender, purpose, frequency and rates; every message carries a way to stop, and STOP/HELP are honoured. Message and data rates may apply; frequency varies with the event.
• Directors agree to use these features only for genuine notifications about their events — never marketing, never bulk mail.
• Following a named player on a live page may require the code from that player’s badge, at the director’s option. Signing in can highlight the players your account already follows; it never reveals your follows to anyone else.
• Do not use live pages or follows to monitor, harass or locate a person against their wishes. We may remove followers, revoke event codes, and involve the event’s director where we see abuse.

10. Acceptable use

Do not use WeChessUp to:

• upload unlawful content, or content you have no right to upload;
• attempt to access other accounts’ data, or probe, scan or overload the service;
• scrape, harvest or bulk-export data about people who are not yours to export — including automating claims, follows or refreshes past the limits built into the product;
• misrepresent who you are, your relationship to a player, or your authority over an event;
• resell or white-label the service without a written agreement;
• send unsolicited messages through the notification features;
• interfere with the security features, rate limits or privacy controls of the service.

11. The tournament directory

Anyone may list a tournament in our public directory, free of charge and without an account; listing is free and will remain free. By submitting a listing you confirm that you are involved in organising the event and that the details are accurate. We review listings before they appear and may decline or remove any of them. You keep whatever rights you have in what you send us; you grant us permission to publish those details in the directory and to show them to search engines. Nothing in a directory listing identifies a player, and you must not put personal details of entrants — particularly of children — into one.

We are not the organiser. A listing describes somebody else’s event. Entry fees, refunds, cancellations, venue and the running of the day are matters between the entrant and the organiser named on the listing. We aim to keep listings accurate but cannot guarantee it; check with the organiser before travelling. Some listings are compiled from calendars organisers have already published publicly — factual details only, source named and linked, exclusion honoured in one email (wechessup.com/bot). Where we later handle registration or payment for an event, separate terms will say so explicitly at the point you pay.

12. Our intellectual property

The service — its software, design, pairing engine, text and branding, including the WeChessUp name and the knight mark — belongs to us or our licensors. These terms give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service; they transfer no ownership, and you may not copy, modify, reverse-engineer or create derivative works of the service except where the law says we cannot forbid it. Federation report formats, chess rules and ratings belong to their respective federations.

13. Third-party services

The service is built on providers named in the Privacy Policy (hosting, payments, email, SMS, human verification) and displays data from third parties such as US Chess (§6). Their availability is not ours to guarantee, and their terms govern your direct dealings with them — for example, Stripe’s terms when you pay.

14. Availability and disclaimers

We work to keep WeChessUp available and correct, but the service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, to the extent the law allows. Pairings, tiebreaks and rating reports are computed to the published rules of the relevant federation; you remain the tournament director, and you are responsible for reviewing what you submit to a federation. Ratings and results shown in the player view are the federation’s records, cached — we do not warrant them, and a delayed or interrupted sync is not a defect in your tournament.

15. Limitation of liability and indemnity

To the extent permitted by law, our total liability arising from your use of WeChessUp is limited to the greater of USD 100 and the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential losses, including lost entry fees, lost data you chose not to export, or the cost of re-running an event. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations; where that is you, these limits apply to the fullest extent they lawfully can.

If a third party brings a claim against us arising from content you entered or uploaded, a claim you made falsely under §5, or your breach of these terms, you agree to indemnify us for the reasonable costs and damages of that claim. This clause is not meant to reach honest mistakes — it exists for the director who publishes data they had no right to, and the account that claims a player it had no right to claim.

16. Suspension and termination

You may close your account at any time from Settings, and you can export your data first. We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, abuses other people through the service, or where required by law — with notice where we reasonably can, and immediately where a child’s safety or the integrity of the service demands it. Sections that by their nature survive (3, 12, 15, 17) survive termination.

17. Changes, governing law and the rest

We may update these terms; material changes will be announced in the app before they take effect, and the “last updated” date above will change. If you keep using the service after a change takes effect, that is acceptance of the new terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them, and you and we each consent to that jurisdiction. Nothing here removes a consumer protection you have under the mandatory law of your own country of residence.

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stands. A failure to enforce a clause is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these terms; we may assign them as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of the service, with notice to you. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us about the service.