Terms of service

1. Who we are, and agreeing to this

Ratify.Vote is a North Carolina company. It runs this site. These terms are an agreement between you and it. Using the site — voting, reading results, making an account — means you accept them. If you don't, don't use the site.

The Privacy Policy explains what we collect and why. It is part of this agreement, and where the two overlap the Privacy Policy governs what happens to your information.

2. Who can use the site

You must be at least 13. We don't ask your age; the birth year list simply stops at 13 years ago, and if we learn an account belongs to a child under 13 we delete it.

If we have closed or suspended your account, you may not make another one to get around that.

3. Your account

• Give an email address you actually control. It is how you sign in and how we reach you.
• Keep your password and your sign-in links to yourself. Anything done from your account is treated as done by you.
• You may sign in with Google, Discord or Facebook instead of a password, and connect or remove those any time — except the last one, if you have no password set, since that would leave you with no way back in.
• Tell us at support@ratify.vote if you think someone else is using your account.

4. Voting

One question opens each day and closes at midnight Eastern time. You get one vote on it, and one prediction of which answer will win. You can vote without an account; the site allows one anonymous vote per network per poll, and one vote per account.

Don't vote more than once. Using several accounts, several networks, or anything automated to add votes to a poll is the one thing that breaks what this site is for. We may discard votes we believe were cast that way, re-tally the poll, and suspend the accounts involved.

Votes are final. There is no changing one after it is cast.

5. Suggesting a poll

Registered users can suggest a question with two answers. There is a limit on how many per day, shown on the page when you write one. Suggestions go to us for review, and we may run one, hold it, edit it, or decline it without explaining why.

What you are giving us

You keep whatever rights you have in what you wrote. By suggesting a poll you give us permission, worldwide and without payment, to publish it on the site, edit it — the wording, the answers, the topics — and keep it in the archive along with its results, including after you close your account. We need the editing part because a question often needs a word changed to be fair to both answers, and the archive part because removing a past poll would change results other people are counting on.

Credit is yours to ask for. The suggestion form has a box for it, ticked by default. Ask for credit and your display name appears on the poll as “Suggested by”; untick it and nothing names you. You can tell us later if you change your mind.

Only suggest questions you wrote. Don't suggest anything that isn't yours to give us.

6. Display names and what you post

Your display name is public. It appears in the crowd of voters, on results you are credited for, on your profile, and on invite links you send. Keep it clean and don't pretend to be somebody else.

We filter display names automatically and the filter is not perfect in either direction. We may refuse a name, change one, or ask you to pick another.

The same goes for anything else you write here, a suggested question most of all: nothing that harasses, threatens, or demeans people for who they are, nothing unlawful, and nothing designed to mislead about who wrote it.

7. Friends and invites

Friendships are mutual: both people agree. You can invite someone by email address or with a link, and a link can be limited to a number of uses.

Only add addresses belonging to people who would want to hear from you. Invites are not a mailing list, and using them to reach strangers in bulk will cost you the feature and possibly the account.

8. Things you must not do

• Vote more than once on a poll, by any means.
• Automate the site — scripted voting, scraping, bulk requests — or get around rate limits.
• Probe, scan or test the security of the site, or try to reach data that isn't yours.
• Interfere with how the site runs for other people.
• Impersonate anyone, or imply you speak for Ratify.Vote.
• Use the site to break the law, or to help somebody else do it.

If you find a security problem, tell us at support@ratify.vote rather than showing us. We will not pursue someone who reports a genuine problem in good faith and gives us a chance to fix it.

9. Results, scores and the archive

Results are published as totals, with breakdowns that stay hidden until enough people are in a group. We decide how results are presented.

Your score measures how often you were with the majority and how often your prediction was right. It stays provisional until you have voted on enough polls. We may re-tally a poll, correct a mistake, or change how scoring works, and your score may move when we do. A score is a bit of fun, not a possession.

Past polls and their results stay in the archive. We may close a poll early or keep it open longer, and we may edit a live poll's wording to fix a mistake — though not in a way that changes what an answer means, since votes are recorded against a position rather than the words.

10. The site will change

This is a young site and much of it is configuration rather than promise: how often polls run, when they close, what a profile holds, which sign-in providers exist, what the pages look like. Any of it may change. Features may be added, altered or taken away, and we may stop offering the site altogether.

11. Ending it

You can stop using the site whenever you like, and you can have your account deleted by writing to privacy@ratify.vote. What deletion removes, and what stays, is set out in the Privacy Policy: in short, your account and profile go, and your past votes remain in the results as anonymous totals, permanently separated from you, because otherwise every past result would change.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, or where we must for legal reasons. Where it is fair to do so we will say why, and you can reply to us about it. Sections 5, 9, 12, 13 and 14 continue to apply after an account ends.

12. No warranty

The site is free and provided as it is, with whatever faults it has. We don't promise it will be available, uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, that a poll will open on schedule, that results are free of mistakes, or that anything you put here will be preserved. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

Nothing on the site is advice. A daily poll is entertainment: results describe who happened to answer, not a representative sample of anybody.

13. What we owe if something goes wrong

To the fullest extent the law allows, Ratify.Vote is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, data or goodwill, arising from your use of the site. Our total liability for any claim relating to the site is limited to one hundred US dollars.

Some places do not allow these limits, in which case they apply as far as that place permits.

14. Disputes and governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. Any dispute goes to the state or federal courts sitting in North Carolina, and both of us agree to that.

Talk to us first. Most things are a misunderstanding, and support@ratify.vote is faster than a filing.

15. Changes, and contact

If we change these terms we post the new version here with a new date. If a change matters to you, we will say so on the site or by email before it takes effect. Carrying on using the site after that means you accept the new version.

If any part of this is unenforceable, the rest still stands. Our not enforcing something once doesn't mean we have given it up.

Ratify.Vote, a North Carolina company. 99 Wall Street #610, New York, NY 10005. support@ratify.vote for anything here; privacy@ratify.vote for anything in the Privacy Policy.