timescale.info — terms of service

Effective 25 October 2026. Operator: Athan Clark, an individual (the "operator"). Contact: privacy@timescale.info. The privacy policy describes how information is handled. These terms cover the hosted service at timescale.info and desktop connections to that service. Independent installations have their own operators and policies.

Accounts and use of the service

Creating an account or using authenticated hosting services constitutes agreement to these terms. Public visitors may read timelines without an account. Keep credentials and connected identity-provider accounts secure, provide truthful information, and report unauthorized access. An account is personal unless you are authorized to act for an organization. Accounts are for people aged 13 or older; the service does not offer accounts to children under 13 or parental-consent accounts. Sign-up asks for your year of birth. Anyone may read public timelines without an account. This eligibility rule does not restrict rights under the software license or use of a separate offline installation.

Young people

Accounts of people who may be under 18 (by the year of birth they gave) get the most protective settings, which they cannot turn off:

• warnings before sensitive content (below) always show, and its images stay blurred until chosen;
• the timelines they star are not shown on their profile;
• browsing leaves out labelled timelines.

Timelines start private for everyone. The service has no private messages, no contact between people outside public pull-request discussions, no location features, no advertising and no profiling for advertising. A parent or guardian who believes their child under 13 has an account, or who has a concern about a teenager's account, can contact the operator; the account can be closed and its data deleted. If you are young and something here upsets or worries you, use Report or tell an adult you trust.

Your data and collaborators

You retain ownership of your timelines, moment metadata, images, comments, and original plugin and time-formatting scripts. You must have the rights needed to upload, link, copy, and share those materials. Images are shown by linking to where their owners host them; the service stores the links, not copies. Link only images you may share, and respect any limits their hosts set. Do not upload passwords, sensitive secrets, or other people's private information without authorization. The service is not designed for regulated confidential records or safety-critical decisions.

You grant Athan Clark a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free permission to store, process, reproduce, back up, transmit, and display your submitted content solely to operate, secure, and provide the service and the sharing you request. You grant authorized recipients permission to view, execute attached restricted scripts, and export content, and to fork and prepare change recommendations where forking is enabled, through the functions and access you enable. This is not an ownership transfer, an advertising license, or permission to sell your content. This permission ends when content is deleted, subject to necessary backup removal, legal preservation, and recipients' previously obtained copies.

Timelines start private. Public timelines are readable, searchable, and exportable by anyone. Public visibility does not automatically make your content GPL-licensed, public domain, or freely reusable for every purpose. Specify a content license if you want broader reuse rights. Making a timeline private later cannot retract copies already downloaded. Sharing a private export is your own sharing decision. Signed-in users can fork public timelines into independently owned copies. Private forking requires the owner's authorization; those platform copies remain private. Forks retain their own collaborators and survive upstream deletion. Saving records immutable checkpoints; submitted reviews pin a saved snapshot rather than following later edits automatically. A fork does not transfer ownership of the original or grant unlimited reuse rights beyond these service features and a stated content license.

The owner controls visibility, membership, and timeline deletion. A viewer can read; a contributor can propose changes; a writer can update the upstream version, merge recommendations, and close or reject them. Signed-in readers of public timelines can propose changes. Recommendations retain proposed and base snapshots and discussion until the timeline is deleted. Submitting a recommendation grants the owner permission to incorporate and share the proposed changes under the timeline's stated content license, if any; do not submit material with incompatible rights. Contributors retain their copyright. Permission to collaborate is not permission to impersonate the owner or change ownership.

Plugins, scripts, and the library

Official OpenChronology plugins are part of the GPLv3 software. Original custom scripts remain their author's property, subject to any applicable derivative-work requirements and licenses on incorporated code. Installing a plugin stores its definition in the timeline; exporting a timeline includes that definition. Removing a library listing cannot retract installed or exported copies.

Publishing to the plugin library grants service users permission to download, install, execute, and include that version in timelines and their exports. Include your own license notice for additional modification or redistribution rights. This functional permission does not waive other copyright rights. Do not publish code you lack permission to distribute. Library availability or an official-looking name is not an endorsement; official plugins are identified separately. Restricted execution reduces available capabilities but cannot guarantee defect-free output.

Acceptable use and moderation

The service is for knowledge: history, science, education, journalism, art and records. Educational, historical, medical, artistic and news depictions of nudity, violence and disturbing events are allowed, but must be labelled as sensitive content (nudity, graphic violence, disturbing content) on the timeline, moment or duration that contains them. Readers are then warned before it opens and its images are blurred until they choose to see them. Not allowed at all: pornography or other sexually explicit material made to arouse; gore or cruelty shown for its own sake; and any sexual content involving minors, which is removed, preserved as the law requires and reported to the authorities.

Do not use hosted services for illegal content, infringement, harassment, threats, fraud, doxxing, malware, attempts to escape script restrictions, access-control bypass, credential theft, or deliberate disruption. Respect technical rate and size limits. Report suspected security defects privately using the published contact; do not access other users' data or disrupt the service while investigating.

How content is moderated

Anyone, with or without an account, can report a timeline, moment, duration, comment, published plugin or suite, or account they can see, choosing what is wrong (child sexual abuse or exploitation, other illegal content, sexually explicit content, graphic violence, promoting suicide or self-harm, harassment or private information, spam, copyright infringement, or something else). The owner is not told who reported. Reports of child abuse and other illegal content are reviewed first.

People, not automated systems, review reports and decide. The operator and the site's administrators may:

• dismiss a report;
• add a sensitive-content label, which the owner cannot remove;
• restrict content, so only its owner (and administrators) can see it;
• suspend an account;

for violations of these terms, security incidents, or legal obligations. Apparent child sexual abuse material is restricted at once, preserved as the law requires and reported to the authorities (in the US, to NCMEC). Immediate action may be necessary; unlawful or harmful material need not remain available. Where practicable, the operator will provide an opportunity to export lawful data. This discretion does not transfer ownership of user data. Copyright complaints and repeat infringement are handled under the copyright and abuse policy.

The service uses no automated content detection. Two automatic measures shape what appears, not whether it is allowed: browsing ranks public timelines with an account standing (from account age, email confirmation, two-factor authentication, stars and forks received, and moderation decisions), leaving out new accounts' timelines until they are established; and signing up, sending email, reporting, publishing plugins, repeated failed sign-ins and new accounts' contributions to others' timelines may ask for a human-verification challenge. Search ranks by relevance to what you typed.

Complaints

• About content: use Report on it.
• About a decision on your content or account: you are told what was decided and why, by notice in your account and by email, and can ask once from Account for it to be reviewed by someone. A suspended account asks by contacting the operator. Signed-in reporters with a confirmed email are told the outcome of their report.
• About anything else: contact the operator, for example about how a report was handled, about the service not meeting these terms or its legal duties, or about being wrongly treated as under 18.

Complaints are answered as soon as practicable and are not used against the person who makes them. Where you live may also give you the right to complain to a regulator or a court, or (in the EU) to an out-of-court dispute settlement body.

Availability, departure, and liability

Keep independent exports. Local edits do not publish automatically: saving to the server changes the timeline or proposal you explicitly select. The service may change or be interrupted and does not promise perpetual hosting, particular storage capacity, recovery of every version, or a service-level guarantee. You can delete, through the interface, the timelines you own, your comments, and your account (Account → Delete your account), which deletes what it owns and wrote, as the privacy policy describes. Other data requests go to privacy@timescale.info.

To the extent permitted by applicable law, the service is provided as available, without promises of uninterrupted availability or fitness for a particular purpose. The operator is not liable for indirect or consequential losses to that extent. These terms do not exclude liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including mandatory consumer rights, nor limit remedies for intentional wrongdoing where prohibited. The software's separate warranty terms are in the GPLv3 license.

Software rights, identity, and changes

OpenChronology software is copyright 2026 Athan Clark and licensed GPL-3.0-only. These hosted-service terms do not restrict copying, modification, redistribution, self-hosting, or commercial use permitted by that license. Names and domain rights are distinct; forks may accurately acknowledge their origin but must not suggest they are the official timescale.info service without authorization.

No nonprofit currently operates the service. A future operator or copyright assignment will be disclosed; it is not assumed by these terms. Material service policy changes will receive prospective notice before taking effect, except when immediate changes are necessary for law or security. Archived policy versions should remain available. No arbitration clause or exclusive forum is imposed by these terms, and mandatory rights under applicable law remain available.