The house rules

Shelf-Lives is a room with a shelf in it. You catalogue the games you own, track the ones you are hunting, read the magazine, and talk to other people who care about the same machines. That is the whole product. Using it means these rules apply to you.

Every part of Shelf-Lives is free. There is no paid tier, no locked feature and no checkout.

You can buy us a coffee through Ko-fi if you want to, and if you do, your avatar gets a shirt with a back print on it. That shirt is a thank you, not a purchase: it buys no feature, no advantage and no priority, and nothing in the game is worse without it. Because it is a gift rather than a sale, we make no promise about refunds. Ko-fi holds the payment and its own rules apply there.

One account per person. Give us an email address that is really yours, because it is the only way back in if you lose your password, and pick a name between 3 and 16 characters that is not already taken and not on the small list of names we keep back.

Your password and your sign-in are yours to look after. Anything done while signed in as you is treated as done by you. If you think somebody else has got in, change your password: cutting a new key signs every other session out.

You can leave whenever you like, and you do not have to ask permission or give a reason. The deletion page explains what happens when you do.

Your collection, your ratings, your feedback and your messages stay yours. We do not claim ownership of anything you write. We do need your permission to store it and to show it where it belongs, which for a message in the channel means showing it to the other people in the channel, and that permission is what posting means.

The channel is a transcript and we keep it as written, alongside the name you were using when you posted. Deleting your account does not unsay what you said there. The deletion page is straight about this, and it is worth reading before you post rather than after.

The rule is short: do not be cruel, do not post other people’s private information, do not spam, and do not use this place to break the law. We would rather set one sentence you can remember than twenty you will not.

The mechanical limits are there to keep the room usable rather than to police you: a message is at most 400 characters, and you can send 5 of them every 10 seconds.

We reserve the right to remove anything and to close an account that makes the place worse. In the interest of not overstating ourselves: today there is no moderation console, so acting on a report means somebody going into the database by hand. Reports are read, and they are acted on slowly.

The games in the catalogue, their titles, their box art and their scans are the property of the people who made and published them. They are here to let you catalogue a collection and to look at, which is the same thing a shelf in your own room does. Nothing here is for sale, and none of it is ours. If you hold a right in something on these shelves and want it taken down, write to us and it comes down.

Do not try to reach another player’s account or data. Do not hammer the service or work around the limits above. Do not scrape the catalogue wholesale. Do not upload anything designed to do harm. None of this is unusual, and all of it is the sort of thing that gets an account closed.

Shelf-Lives is offered as it is. We do not promise it will be available, that nothing will break, or that a record will never be lost. It is a young thing running on a small budget, and pretending otherwise would not make it sturdier.

We take care with your collection because it matters to you, and we would rather you keep your own note of anything you would be sad to lose.

To the extent the law allows it, we are not liable for loss that follows from using Shelf-Lives. Where the law does not allow that, the law wins, and nothing on this page is meant to take away a right you have where you live.

We will add things, change things and sometimes take things away. When a change matters to you, the date at the top of this page moves and the wording changes with it.

If Shelf-Lives ever has to close, we will say so in the room and give you a reasonable chance to take a copy of your collection with you before it goes.

Write to us first. Almost everything is a misunderstanding that one message clears up, and we would much rather hear from you than from anyone else.

We have not published a contact address yet. That is a gap we know about and it is being fixed; until it is here, this page cannot tell you where to write, and we would rather say so than print an address that goes nowhere.