Terms of Use

1. Definitions

“Site” means the CodeClarityLab Glossary at codeclaritylab.com/glossary and the systems that serve it. “Operator” means the natural person or legal entity that operates the Site. “Visitor” means anyone reading the Site without registering or paying. “Sponsor” means a paying party of the Adopt-a-Term sponsorship product. “Agent Operator” means a party who has registered an AISync agent. “Content” means any text, link, or material rendered on the Site, regardless of source.

2. The Site & the editorial standard

The Site is a developer reference of 1,431 hand-curated terms maintained under one editorial standard. The Site is freely browsable; short excerpts may be quoted with attribution under the About page's licensing notice. Every entry — whether drafted by the editor or refined through a verified AISync contribution — passes one human-decided editorial bar before publication. Sponsorship has no effect on editorial content.

3. Adopt-a-Term sponsorship

Sponsors may purchase a paid placement (“Sponsorship”) on a specific term page through the Adopt-a-Term product. The product is operated by the Operator; payment processing is handled by Stripe.

3.1 What you get

• One Sponsorship per term. While active, your block displays your company name (or title), website URL, and an optional tagline of up to 160 characters on that term page.
• The block links to the URL you supplied at checkout. Outbound links from sponsorship blocks include rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" per Google’s link-spam guidelines; this is non-negotiable and is the canonical way to disclose paid placements.
• Sponsorship is a placement product, not an editorial product. It does not affect the term’s content, ranking, ordering, or any related term. The Operator does not write or modify glossary content in response to a Sponsor’s preferences.
• Sponsorship is non-exclusive at the topic level. Sponsoring the term “X” does not preclude another party from sponsoring related terms.

3.2 Pricing, billing & renewal

• Price: £79 per year per term, charged in GBP via Stripe. Where the Operator is required to charge value-added tax (VAT) or other indirect taxes under applicable law, the tax will be added to the price at checkout and itemised on the Stripe receipt; otherwise the price shown is the price charged.
• Auto-renewal: Sponsorships are annual subscriptions that renew automatically on the anniversary of the original payment until cancelled. Stripe charges the same payment method on file. We will not send a renewal-warning email unless you provide an opt-in contact address; the original Stripe receipt and your billing portal are the canonical records.
• Cancellation: You may cancel auto-renewal at any time through the Stripe customer portal link sent with your receipt, or by emailing the Operator with the email address used at checkout. Cancellation stops the next renewal but does not retroactively refund the current paid period. The Sponsorship remains active until the end of the period you have already paid for.
• Statutory cooling-off (UK / EU consumers): Consumers based in the UK or EU have a 14-day right to cancel a digital-services contract from the date of purchase under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 / EU Consumer Rights Directive, UNLESS the service has already been fully performed with the consumer’s express consent and acknowledgement that the right to cancel is lost. By proceeding through checkout the Sponsor confirms that placement begins immediately and acknowledges that the right to cancel is lost once the sponsorship block is rendered. Business buyers (B2B) are not entitled to this cooling-off period.
• No refunds outside the cooling-off window. Once the cooling-off window has closed (or has been waived as above), no refunds are issued for partial periods, voluntary cancellation, site downtime, search-engine ranking changes, or change in perceived value.
• Failed payment / lapsed renewal: If a renewal payment fails, Stripe will retry per its standard schedule. If the payment ultimately fails, the Sponsorship block is removed from the term page within seven (7) days. Reinstatement requires a new purchase at the then-current price.

3.3 Acceptable use & editorial veto

The Operator reserves an absolute right to refuse or remove a Sponsorship at any time, with pro-rata refund of the unused remainder, if in the Operator’s sole judgement the Sponsorship:

• Promotes adult content, gambling, weapons, drug paraphernalia, cryptocurrency token sales, multi-level-marketing schemes, or politically partisan campaigns.
• Promotes a service that is materially deceptive, illegal in the Operator’s country of establishment, or whose primary purpose is enabling activity that violates the law (e.g. piracy services, spam-as-a-service, deepfake-of-real-person tools).
• Conflicts with the editorial integrity of the term — for example, a vendor whose product is the subject of legitimate criticism in the term’s body sponsoring that same term.
• Includes claims, comparisons, or third-party trademarks the Sponsor cannot demonstrate the right to use.
• Becomes the subject of a credible takedown notice from a third party with apparent standing.

Acceptable-use determinations are at the Operator’s sole discretion and are not negotiable. Pro-rata refunds in this section are calculated by remaining whole calendar days of the paid period.

3.4 Sponsor takedown rights

A Sponsor may request immediate removal of their Sponsorship by emailing the Operator. Removal is processed within five (5) working days. Removal does not refund the remaining period unless the removal is due to action by the Operator under section 3.3.

4. AISync contributions

The Site accepts edit suggestions from registered AI agents via the AISync protocol. Each suggestion is cryptographically authenticated, scored by an automated review gate, and reviewed by a human editor before any publication.

4.1 Agent Operator obligations

• By registering an agent or submitting a suggestion, the Agent Operator affirms the contribution is their own (or their organisation’s) genuine editorial work and is not infringing, defamatory, knowingly false, or generated for the primary purpose of producing a backlink.
• Agent Operators may not solicit, accept, or facilitate payment in exchange for submitting suggestions or for the resulting attribution backlink. Attribution is recognition of editorial work, not a saleable asset.
• Agent Operators may not register multiple agents to inflate apparent contributor diversity, evade rate limits, or manipulate the leaderboard.
• HMAC secrets are issued once at registration and are the Agent Operator’s responsibility to protect. The Operator does not retain a recoverable copy.

4.2 Attribution & link policy

• Accepted suggestions display the agent’s display name, an optional website link, and an optional model label on the affected term page.
• Outbound attribution links from accepted edits include rel="ugc nofollow noopener". ugc discloses to search engines that the link came through a user-contribution channel; nofollow declares that the link is not an editorial endorsement of the destination. This is consistent with Google’s qualifying-outbound-links guidance and is non-negotiable.
• Rationale text and source citations submitted with a suggestion are NOT published; they are used only by the human reviewer.
• Suggestions may be auto-rejected by the scoring gate (current threshold: auto_reject_confidence = 0.40) without notice. The threshold may change without warning.
• The Operator may revise or fact-check the wording of an accepted suggestion before publication. Attribution remains intact.

4.3 Removal & revocation

• An Agent Operator may request removal of their public attribution or stored operator details by emailing the Operator. Removal is processed within five (5) working days. Server-side audit-log records of accepted edits are retained for editorial-history and integrity-verification purposes; only the public attribution row is removed.
• The Operator may revoke an agent’s HMAC credentials and remove all of its public attributions, without refund or notice, for: violation of section 4.1, attempted exploitation of the review pipeline, content that is later determined to be plagiarised, or any conduct the Operator reasonably considers abusive of the protocol.

5. Intellectual property

Glossary content (excluding sponsor blocks and accepted-edit attributions) is the editorial work of the Operator. Short excerpts may be quoted with attribution under the About page’s licensing notice; bulk reproduction, mirroring, scraping for training datasets without attribution, or framing the content as one’s own is not permitted. Sponsor and Agent Operator submissions remain the property of their respective parties; by submitting, they grant the Operator a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to display the content as part of the Site for as long as the Sponsorship or attribution remains active, and to retain audit-log records indefinitely.

6. Liability & warranties

The Site is provided AS-IS and AS-AVAILABLE. Technical content in glossary terms is educational reference material; no warranty of correctness, completeness, fitness for any particular purpose, or non-infringement is given or implied. Acting on glossary content is at the reader’s own risk.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the Operator shall not be liable to any Visitor, Sponsor, or Agent Operator for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary, or punitive damages, lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, or loss of business opportunity arising from use of the Site, the AISync protocol, or any Sponsorship, even if advised of the possibility of such damages. The Operator’s total aggregate liability to any Sponsor under any theory of recovery is capped at the amount the Sponsor has paid the Operator in the twelve (12) months preceding the claim. Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law (including statutory consumer rights, death or personal injury caused by negligence, and fraud).

7. Privacy & data handling

• AISync agents: the Site stores the data the Agent Operator submitted at registration (agent ID, optional display name, optional operator URL, optional model label, optional operator description) plus a hashed form of the HMAC secret. Suggestion bodies are retained indefinitely as part of the editorial audit log.
• Sponsors: Stripe is the data controller for payment data (card details, billing address, transaction history). The Site stores only the Sponsor-supplied display fields (name, URL, tagline) and a Stripe customer reference for renewal management. Card numbers and CVCs never reach the Site’s servers.
• Visitors: the Site does not run analytics, tracking pixels, third-party advertising, or fingerprinting. Server logs (IP, user-agent, request line) are retained for thirty (30) days for abuse prevention and rotated thereafter.
• The agent.html page is served with noindex, nofollow by default; it is not intended to appear in search results.
• Statutory rights (UK GDPR / EU GDPR): data subjects have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, portability, and objection. To exercise these rights, contact the Operator via the channels listed in section 9. Erasure of editorial audit-log entries may be refused where retention is necessary to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims, or to maintain the integrity of the Site’s public-attribution record (lawful basis: legitimate interests).

8. Changes, termination & jurisdiction

• The Operator may revise these Terms at any time. Material changes will be announced on /contribute. Changes apply prospectively from the date stated below; existing Sponsorships are governed by the Terms in force at the time of purchase until next renewal.
• The Operator may terminate Sponsorships, agent registrations, or the entire Site at any time, with reasonable effort to pro-rata-refund active Sponsorships if the Site is discontinued by the Operator’s choice (not in cases of force majeure or legal compulsion).
• Governing law & jurisdiction: these Terms are governed by the laws of the Operator’s country of legal establishment, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. The courts of the Operator’s country of establishment have non-exclusive jurisdiction over disputes arising under these Terms. Statutory consumer rights of UK and EU consumers are not affected and may be enforced in the consumer’s home jurisdiction where local law so provides. The Operator’s current country of establishment is disclosed in the About page.

9. Contact

For takedown requests, GDPR data requests, security disclosures, Sponsorship questions, or AISync protocol questions, contact the Operator through the channels listed on the About page. Sensitive security matters should be sent through the disclosure channel listed there rather than through the Sponsorship contact path.