Terms

These are the rules for using plopslop.com, for having an account, and for playing the games. Using the site means you accept them. Last updated 25 August 2026.

This is a draft under legal review. The parts marked below are not settled yet.

To be completed before launch. Name the person or company these terms are with, and give a registered address for it.

What plopslop is

plopslop lists news and essays from sources whose recent articles pass automated human-writing checks, and it runs two games, both called spot the slop. In one you call an article slop or top. In the other you call a picture the same way. How it works explains the checks and says what sits behind each game. Article cards carry a title and a snippet of 200 characters or fewer, and every one of them links out to the publisher.

The scores are estimates, never findings

The number the article game shows you is an automated probability estimate produced by a statistical model, and your points come from whether you read the article the same way it did. That is agreement with a piece of software. It is not a finding about who or what wrote any specific work.

A small open model reads the pictures, on plopslop's own server. The number the picture game shows you after a call is that model's estimate of the chance a machine made the picture, and the reveal names the checkpoint that produced it. Your points come from whether you read the picture the same way it did, 10 for a match and nothing for a miss. That model is right about 75 percent of the time on the kind of picture it was trained on and does worse than guessing on the newest generators, so the number is a weak estimate about pixels and not a finding about who or what made the picture.

What other players said about the same picture is counted and stored. It is not shown to you and it pays nothing.

plopslop makes no claim of authorship about any article, any picture, any writer, any photographer, any artist, or any publisher. Absence from plopslop implies nothing about any publication. Do not present a plopslop score as evidence that a named person or a named outlet used a machine. It is not evidence of that, and using it that way breaks these terms.

Your account

• You need to be 18 or older. Both games measure how accurate each player is and rank players against each other, and India's DPDP Act does not allow that kind of monitoring for anyone under 18. There is no parental consent route, and the signup form does not ask your age or verify it, so this is a rule plopslop acts on when it learns of a breach rather than a gate on the form. An account found to belong to someone under 18 is deleted. Reading plopslop needs no account.
• One account per person. Do not run several to work the leaderboard.
• One browser may create 2 accounts in 30 days. Deleting an account does not hand back the slot it used.
• Your username is public on the leaderboard. It is set once and cannot be changed afterwards.
• Do not pick a username that poses as plopslop, as staff, or as another person.
• Passwords are at least 8 characters. An account made with a username holds no email address, so there is no password reset and a lost password cannot be recovered. Keep it somewhere safe.
• What happens on your account is your responsibility.

Playing fair

These are the things that break the game, so they are not allowed:

• Automated play of any kind. Scripts, bots, headless browsers, and anything else that answers rounds without a person reading them.
• Calling the game endpoints directly, outside the site, or scraping the feed, the leaderboard, or the deck.
• Coordinated voting or coordinated judging, whether by one person with several accounts or by a group answering to a plan.
• Working around the rate limits, the signup puzzle, the rule of one judgment per article, or the gate on the reasons you write.
• Probing plopslop to work out which articles or sources are missing, or publishing claims about that.
• Anything unlawful, and anything that interferes with the service for other people.

The calls you make in the game

Your judgments are the reason the game exists. plopslop keeps them and learns from them. The privacy policy lists every field stored with a judgment.

You keep whatever rights you hold in the calls you make. By playing, you give plopslop a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, sublicensable licence to store your judgments, to use them to train, test, and calibrate plopslop's detection, to publish aggregate results drawn from them, to share them with other efforts against machine slop, and to release them as a dataset. The licence covers every field stored with a call, including the mode, how you made the call, the reasons you tapped and any line you wrote in Deep mode, and how long you took as plopslop measured it. It also covers the nightly summary plopslop builds of how you play, which the privacy policy sets out in full. Nothing under this licence trains a language model.

plopslop intends to use that last part. A dataset of judgments will be published or licensed, free or for money, and the calls you make are collected for that purpose from the start. Any release carries the judgments with no usernames and no email addresses in it. You are told this before you play rather than after, because a purpose cannot be added to data that was already collected for something else.

Deleting your account withdraws the judgments themselves, and they stop being available for future training and future releases. A model already trained on them keeps what it learned, aggregate results already published stay published, and a dataset already released stays out there. None of those three can be reversed.

To be completed before launch. A lawyer needs to check that this licence actually carries a dataset release, including a paid one, and to say whether that use needs its own consent at signup under India's DPDP Act instead of a licence in the terms. The decision to release has been made. The wording that has to carry it has not been checked by anyone qualified.

What you bring to the game

Bring your own lets you paste a link or a text and see what plopslop would call it. By doing so you confirm that you may share that text with plopslop for this purpose. plopslop keeps a private copy to score it, shows the estimate to you and to nobody else, never lists it anywhere, and deletes it with your account. Do not paste anything confidential, and do not paste anything you have no right to share. The estimate you get back is an automated estimate about a text you chose, and presenting it as a finding about a named person or outlet breaks these terms in the same way the feed's score does.

Publishers and their work

Articles belong to their publishers. plopslop shows a title and a snippet of 200 characters or fewer on every card, nothing more, and links every card straight to the source. It honors robots.txt on every fetch and identifies itself as plopslopbot. A source that asks to be removed is removed.

To run the checks at all, plopslop keeps a private copy of the extracted text of an article, along with the byline, the word count, the language, the topic, and two fingerprints used to spot duplicates. That copy exists for the automated checks and for nothing else. It is never shown, it is never returned by any page or feed, and the database role the website runs on cannot read it.

Pictures

The picture game is closed while its deck is rebuilt, and these rules stay in force for the pictures plopslop still holds and for the game when it returns. Pictures belong to whoever made them. The game shows pictures from public web pages and public posts. plopslop makes a small copy, about 320 pixels on its long side, at the moment it fetches a picture, and keeps that copy while the picture waits for the deck and while it is in the deck. The copy is deleted when the picture leaves the deck, and a picture that never reaches the deck has its copy deleted 30 days after it was fetched. plopslop never keeps the original file. It does keep measurements taken from the original while it was open, which the privacy policy lists in full. The reveal links back to the address the picture came from. The deck holds pictures made by machines and pictures made by people, which is said here and on the game page rather than kept back.

plopslop claims nothing about who or what made any picture. It never puts the name of a site next to a call about a picture. The number you see is a weak automated estimate about one picture, and presenting it as evidence that a named person or a named outlet used a machine breaks these terms in the same way the article score does.

The deck can contain pictures of people, and plopslop records nothing about who is in any picture. Anyone who appears in one can ask for it to be removed, with no account and no reason given.

Notice and takedown, in two lines:

• If you hold rights in a picture and want it out, write to hello@plopslop.com with the address of the picture or of the page it sits on. It leaves the deck and the small copy is deleted. You do not have to prove anything first, and plopslop does not argue the point before acting.
• If you are the person in a picture, the same address and the same result. You do not have to explain why and you do not need an account.

To be completed before launch. A lawyer needs to set out the basis on which plopslop stores and shows a small copy of someone else's picture inside a game, under Indian law and for readers in the EU and the UK. The owner has weighed this and accepted the exposure. That is a decision about risk, and it is not the same thing as a legal basis written down.

To be completed before launch. A lawyer needs to settle credit. Showing no site name beside a call keeps a machine-made call away from a named outlet, and it does nothing at all about copyright. India's Copyright Act gives an author the right to be credited, so dropping the credit can be a wrong on its own, while adding one puts a name next to a machine estimate. The choice between a visible credit, a link only, and a permanent credits page is a legal one and has not been guessed here.

To be completed before launch. Name the turnaround for a picture removal and the person answering those requests, and say whether a picture that has been taken out is blocked from being dealt again.

Closing an account

You can delete your account at any time from the account page. It takes your judgments, your dealt cards, your reading events, your preferences, and your leaderboard standing with it, as far as that is technically possible. The privacy policy sets out the parts that cannot be pulled back.

plopslop may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and may drop judgments made in breach from the leaderboard and from training. Where the case is not obvious, plopslop will say what happened rather than close an account in silence.

The service as it is

plopslop is offered as it is. It can be down, the checks can be wrong in both directions, and articles can appear or disappear as sources pass or fail. plopslop may change or end any part of the site, including either game and the leaderboard.

To be completed before launch. A lawyer needs to write the warranty disclaimer and the limitation of liability for a free consumer service, and check them against consumer law in India, the EU, and the UK.

Changes to these terms

The date at the top changes whenever this page does. A change that affects the licence you give or the rules you play under will be said plainly at the top.

Governing law and forum

To be completed before launch. The governing law and the place where disputes are heard are for the owner and their lawyer to set. Nothing has been assumed here.

Contact

To be completed before launch. Add the address for questions about these terms once the mailbox receives mail.