Terms of Service

1. Agreeing to these Terms

HackHoster is operated by its owner, an individual operating HackHoster as a sole proprietorship, in the United States (“HackHoster”, “we”, “us”). By creating an account, registering for a hackathon, or otherwise using hackhoster.org (the “service”), you agree to these Terms, the Privacy Policy, and the Community Guidelines, which are part of these Terms. If you don’t agree, don’t use the service.

If you use HackHoster for an organization, such as a company, school, or club that hosts a hackathon, you confirm that you are allowed to accept these Terms for it, and “you” includes that organization.

2. Who can use HackHoster

• Age. You must be at least 13 years old. We ask for your date of birth when you set up your profile and block anyone under 13. If we learn that someone under 13 has an account, we delete it.
• Users aged 13 to 17. You may use HackHoster only with the permission of a parent or legal guardian, who agrees to these Terms on your behalf and is responsible for your use of the service. You confirm that permission during sign-up. Profiles of users under 18 show a first name only and no country.
• Hackathon rules can be stricter. An organizer may set a higher minimum age or other eligibility rules (for example, students only, or residents of certain places). Those rules apply to that hackathon in addition to these Terms.
• Sanctions. You may not use HackHoster if you are on a U.S. government list of restricted or blocked persons (such as the OFAC Specially Designated Nationals list), if you are located in a country or region under a comprehensive U.S. embargo (currently Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and the Crimea, so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, and so-called Luhansk People’s Republic regions of Ukraine), or if U.S. law otherwise prohibits us from providing the service to you.
• Previously removed accounts. If we have permanently suspended you, don’t create a new account without our written permission.

3. Your account

• You can sign in with Google, GitHub, or an email address and password. One person, one account. Accounts are personal and can’t be transferred or sold.
• Give accurate information, including your date of birth, and keep your email address current so you receive notices about your hackathons.
• Keep your sign-in methods secure. You are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us at support@hackhoster.org if you think someone else has access to it.
• Your handle must follow the Community Guidelines. We may reclaim a handle that impersonates someone or infringes a trademark.
• We send service emails that are part of using HackHoster, such as team invitations, submission confirmations, winner notices, and security messages. You agree to receive them electronically, and electronic notices satisfy any requirement that a notice be in writing.

4. Joining hackathons and submitting

• Each hackathon has its own rules. When you register, you agree to that hackathon’s rules, which the organizer sets. If the rules conflict with these Terms, these Terms control how you use HackHoster, and the rules control the competition.
• Registration shares your details with the organizer. Registering shares your name, handle, and email address, your team, and your submission with that hackathon’s organizer, as the registration dialog explains. The Privacy Policy has the details.
• Teams. A team’s captain manages invitations and members. Everyone listed on a project is credited for it and shares its result. Agree within your team how you will share any prize; HackHoster doesn’t split or deliver prizes.
• Deadlines are enforced by the platform clock. Submissions close at the time shown on the hackathon page. Submit early; we can’t accept late work because of a slow connection or an outage on your side.
• Judging and winners are the organizer’s decision. Organizers decide eligibility, disqualifications, scores, and winners. Questions about a result go to the organizer’s contact email shown on the hackathon page.
• When projects become public. Your project is visible to your team and the organizer while the hackathon runs, and becomes public in the project gallery and your portfolio after the organizer announces winners.

5. Hosting a hackathon

If you create or co-host a hackathon (an “organizer”), these extra terms apply. Hackathons, their rules, and their prizes are the organizer’s responsibility.

Prizes

HackHoster does not hold, guarantee, or distribute prize money or prizes. Prize amounts and descriptions on the site come from the organizer. The organizer is solely responsible for awarding and delivering prizes as described, and for any taxes, tax forms, and reporting that come with them. Every hackathon page says this, and organizers confirm it before publishing.

What organizers must do

• Publish clear, complete rules before registration opens: who can enter, the timeline, what to submit, judging criteria, prizes, and how winners are chosen and contacted. Follow your own rules and apply them to everyone in the same way.
• Run a contest of skill. Don’t charge an entry fee or require a purchase to enter or win, and don’t choose winners by chance. HackHoster isn’t built for lotteries, raffles, or sweepstakes.
• Comply with the laws that apply to your hackathon and prizes, including contest and promotion laws, tax rules, export controls and sanctions, and consumer protection and privacy laws in the places where you run it.
• Keep a working contact email on each hackathon you host. It is shown on the hackathon page so participants can reach you. Only add co-hosts you trust: they can edit and run the hackathon with you.
• Use participant data you receive (names, handles, emails, and anything participants submit) only to run your hackathon and to contact participants about it. Don’t sell it, don’t add participants to unrelated marketing lists without their consent, and protect it. You are responsible for your own handling of that data under the laws that apply to you.
• If your hackathon accepts participants under 18, take extra care: follow the teen-safety rules in the Community Guidelines and any laws about minors where you operate.
• Only claim a sponsor, partner, judge, or prize you actually have permission to list, and only upload logos and photos you have the right to use.

We may remove or unpublish a hackathon that looks misleading or unsafe, that breaks these Terms, or about which we receive credible reports that prizes weren’t delivered. We may also tell participants why.

6. Your content

“Your content” means everything you submit or post on HackHoster: projects, code, descriptions, images, video, links, profile details, discussion threads, replies, and hackathon pages.

• You keep ownership. We don’t claim ownership of your content. Any open-source or other license you choose for your code stays in effect.
• The license you give us. You grant HackHoster a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, process (for example, resize images, create thumbnails, and read video length), display, and distribute your content to operate, improve, and promote the service. Promotion means showing public content as it appears on HackHoster, for example linking to or featuring a winning project with credit to its team. We won’t sell your content.
• How long the license lasts. The license ends when you or we delete the content, except for copies kept for a limited time in backups, and except for team content that other team members still use (a team project stays with your teammates when you leave it).
• Organizers and hackathon rules. A hackathon’s rules may ask you to give the organizer additional rights, such as permission to feature your project. That agreement is between you and the organizer.
• Your responsibility. You confirm that you have the rights to everything you submit, including code, libraries, images, video, music, and trademarks, and that your content doesn’t break the law or anyone else’s rights.
• Feedback. If you send us ideas or suggestions about HackHoster, we may use them without owing you anything.

7. Acceptable use

Follow the Community Guidelines. In particular, don’t:

• break the law, or help anyone else break it;
• harass, threaten, or exploit anyone, or post sexual content of any kind involving minors;
• impersonate a person or organization, or misrepresent your affiliation with one;
• submit work that isn’t yours or your team’s, or otherwise cheat in a hackathon;
• manipulate likes, reputation, registrations, or team membership, for example with fake or duplicate accounts;
• upload malware, phishing pages, or anything designed to harm devices, accounts, or data;
• access the service by automated means (scraping, bots, bulk downloading) except as a normal web browser or search-engine crawler that respects our robots.txt;
• probe, scan, or test the security of HackHoster without our written permission, or interfere with how the service runs;
• collect other users’ personal data, including emails from participant lists, for purposes unrelated to the hackathon;
• use HackHoster to send spam or unsolicited advertising.

Found a security problem? Email legal@hackhoster.org with the details and give us reasonable time to fix it before telling others. We won’t take action against good-faith research that follows this rule and doesn’t access other people’s data.

8. Reputation, wins, and awards

Reputation scores, levels, and wins are computed only from platform records: hackathons you joined, projects you submitted, and prizes organizers awarded on HackHoster. They are not a certification or an endorsement by us. We may recalculate or correct them, for example when an organizer fixes a result or after a moderation decision. Reputation can’t be bought, sold, or transferred.

Project of the Month

• Each month you may submit one application for HackHoster’s Project of the Month award. Applications are open from the 1st to the 25th of the month (New York time), and it’s free: there is no entry fee and nothing to buy.
• The HackHoster team reviews applications and chooses one winner based on skill: how useful, working, well made, and well explained the project is. Our decision is final, and we may choose not to award a month. We aim to announce the winner on the 1st of the following month.
• The award has no cash value. Winners and their teammates receive a Project of the Month badge on their profiles, and we may send a certificate of excellence. A project that has already won can’t win again.
• You must have built the project (alone or with the teammates you list) and have the right to share everything in your application. Applications stay private to you, your teammates, and our team; if yours wins, you agree that we may show the application publicly on HackHoster, with credit to the team.
• We may remove applications that break these Terms or the Community Guidelines.

9. Moderation, suspension, and leaving

• We may review reports and remove content, hide projects, unpublish hackathons, or suspend or close accounts that break these Terms or the law, or that put other users at risk. When we act on your account or content, we’ll tell you why where practical and lawful.
• You can appeal a moderation decision by emailing support@hackhoster.org within 30 days. A person will review it.
• You can stop using HackHoster at any time and ask us to delete your account from Settings → Account or by email. We process deletion requests within 30 days, as described in the Privacy Policy.
• We may change, pause, or stop the service or any feature. If we shut HackHoster down, we’ll give at least 30 days’ notice by email and on the site where we reasonably can, so you can save your work.
• Sections 6 (license for content that remains), 10, and 13 to 17 continue to apply after your account ends.

10. Copyright and DMCA

We respect copyright and respond to notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If you believe content on HackHoster infringes your copyright, send a written notice to our designated agent with the subject “DMCA notice”:

HackHoster Copyright Agent
Email: legal@hackhoster.org

The notice must include:

1. your physical or electronic signature;
2. a description of the copyrighted work you say is infringed;
3. the URL of the content on HackHoster, so we can find it;
4. your name, postal address, telephone number, and email address;
5. a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
6. a statement that the information in your notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the owner or authorized to act for the owner.

When we receive a valid notice, we remove or disable the content and tell the person who posted it. If you believe your content was removed by mistake or misidentification, you can send a counter-notice to the same address with your signature, the removed content and where it appeared, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith it was removed by mistake or misidentification, your name, address, and telephone number, and your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for your address (or, if you are outside the United States, any district in which we may be found) and to accept service from the person who sent the notice. We forward counter-notices to the complainant promptly, and restore the content no sooner than 10 and no later than 14 business days after we receive the counter-notice, unless the complainant tells us first that they have filed a court action to stop the infringement.

Sending a notice or counter-notice that you know is false can make you liable for damages. We close the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe copyright.

11. Other services

HackHoster links to and works with services we don’t control, including Google and GitHub sign-in, YouTube, Vimeo, and Loom video players, Discord servers that organizers connect, and project repositories and demo sites. Your use of those services is governed by their own terms and privacy policies, and we aren’t responsible for them.

12. Changes

We may update these Terms as HackHoster changes or the law requires. The date at the top shows the latest version. If a change materially affects your rights, we’ll tell you on the site or by email at least 14 days before it takes effect, unless the change is needed sooner for legal or safety reasons. If you keep using HackHoster after a change takes effect, the new Terms apply. If you don’t agree, stop using the service and you may delete your account.

13. Disclaimers

HackHoster is provided free of charge, “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We don’t promise that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure, or that content on it is accurate.

We aren’t responsible for what organizers or other users do or post, including whether a hackathon runs as described, how it is judged, and whether prizes are awarded or delivered. Hackathon listings are information from organizers, not an endorsement by us.

14. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, HackHoster and its operator will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data, prizes, or goodwill, arising from or related to the service or these Terms, even if we were told such damages were possible.

Our total liability for all claims about the service or these Terms is limited to the greater of US$100 or the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim. HackHoster is free, so you have paid us nothing.

Some places don’t allow these exclusions or limits, so some of them may not apply to you. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that can’t be limited by law, such as liability for fraud, gross negligence, or willful misconduct.

15. Indemnity

If a third party makes a claim against us because of your content, your hackathon (including its prizes and rules), your breach of these Terms, or your violation of the law or someone else’s rights, you agree to cover our reasonable losses and costs, including reasonable attorneys’ fees, to the extent the law allows. We’ll tell you about the claim and let you take part in the defense. This section doesn’t apply to users under 18, except as their parent or guardian agrees.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms and any dispute about HackHoster are governed by the laws of the State of New York and applicable U.S. federal law, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

Before filing a claim, please email legal@hackhoster.org and give us 30 days to try to resolve it informally. If we can’t, any claim must be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in New York County, New York, and you and we consent to their personal jurisdiction. Either of us may instead bring an eligible claim in small claims court. There is no arbitration agreement in these Terms.

If you live in a country whose consumer laws give you the right to bring claims in your local courts or under local law, nothing here takes that right away.

17. General terms

• These Terms, with the Privacy Policy and Community Guidelines, are the whole agreement between you and us about the service.
• If a court finds part of these Terms unenforceable, that part is limited as little as possible and the rest stays in effect.
• If we don’t enforce a provision right away, we haven’t waived it.
• You may not transfer your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours, for example to a company formed to run HackHoster or in a sale of the service, and we’ll tell you if that happens.
• We aren’t responsible for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control, such as outages at our hosting providers.
• We send notices to the email address on your account. Send notices to us at legal@hackhoster.org.
• Headings are for convenience only. “Including” means “including without limitation”.