Terms

These are the rules for using plopslop.com, for having an account, and for playing the game. Using the site means you accept them. Last updated 24 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 a game where you call an article slop or top. How it works explains the checks. Cards carry a title and a snippet of 200 characters or fewer, and every card links out to the publisher.

The scores are estimates, never findings

The number the game shows you is an automated probability estimate produced by a statistical model. The calls other players make are guesses. Neither is a finding about who or what wrote or made any specific work.

plopslop makes no claim of authorship about any article, any writer, 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. 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 deck, the feed, or the leaderboard.
• 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, or the one judgment per article rule.
• 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 licence to store your judgments, to use them to train, test, and calibrate plopslop's detection models, and to publish aggregate results drawn from them. That licence is sublicensable for one purpose, which is releasing a dataset or a model built from the judgments of many players. Any such release carries the judgments without usernames and without email addresses.

Deleting your account withdraws the judgments themselves, and they stop being available for future training. A model already trained on them keeps what it learned, and aggregate results already published stay published. Neither can be reversed.

To be completed before launch. Decide whether the licence stays sublicensable. That word sits in this draft for one reason, which is to keep a public dataset release possible later. Strike it and plopslop is limited to its own training and to publishing aggregate numbers.

Publishers and their work

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

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 the 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.