Legal
Terms of use
Using this site means agreeing to what follows. It is short because the site is small.
Your account
One account per person. You are responsible for what happens under it, so use a password you do not use elsewhere.
New accounts wait a short period before they can post. This is a spam measure and it applies to everyone.
We can suspend an account that is used to harass people, to post illegal material, or to attack the service.
Your content stays yours
You keep ownership of everything you write here. By posting it you give us permission to store it, display it, and distribute it as part of the site, including in search results and link previews. That permission is what makes a public forum function.
If you delete your account, that permission ends for anything that can be removed without destroying someone else's contribution. Replies to a deleted post are anonymised rather than erased.
What you may not post
The short version: nothing illegal, nothing that targets a person, and nothing designed to break the site.
- Material that is unlawful where you are or where we are hosted.
- Harassment, threats, or content that exists to humiliate a specific person.
- Impersonating another person, a scholar, an institution, or this site.
- Fabricated sources, forged documents, or invented quotations presented as genuine. This is the one rule this site cares about more than most.
- Spam, scraping at a rate that degrades the service, or attempts to bypass rate limits and access controls.
The reference desk is not an authority
The desk finds digitised documents and describes what the catalogue says about them. Catalogue records contain errors, dates are often approximate, and a digitised text can be a poor transcription of a poor edition.
Check anything that matters against the source itself. Nothing here is a substitute for a librarian, an archivist, or a peer-reviewed citation.
Availability
The site is provided as it is, with no guarantee that it will be available, complete, or free of errors. Features can change or be withdrawn. The reference desk depends on third-party catalogues and stops working when they do.
Liability
To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss arising from your use of the site, including reliance on anything it returns. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.
Ending it
You can delete your account at any time from your settings, without asking us.
We can close an account that breaks these terms. If you think that was a mistake, write to contact@centuriesuntold.com.
Changes
These terms can change. The date at the top of this page is the date of the current version. A material change will be announced on the site rather than made quietly.
This is a plain-language description of how the site works, written by the people who built it. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer and is not a substitute for legal advice.