Terms of Service

1. Eligibility

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you are under 18, you may use it only with the involvement of a parent or guardian who agrees to these Terms on your behalf. By creating an account you confirm that you meet this age requirement and that the information you provide is accurate.

2. Accounts and authentication

Account creation is optional and most of the Service works without one. When you choose to sign in, you may authenticate through third-party providers (currently Google and Discord) or via an email link. We rely on those providers' own terms and security; their handling of your credentials is governed by their respective terms and privacy policies.

You are responsible for keeping your authentication method secure, which means your email inbox, your Google account, or your Discord account. You agree to notify us at michael@ffbeacon.com promptly if you believe your account has been accessed by someone else. You may not share an account, sell one, or use another person's account.

3. What the Service is, and what it is not

FF Beacon publishes fantasy football analysis: player values, rankings, projections, trade grades, league summaries, and written commentary. All of it is opinion and estimation produced from public data. It is offered for information and entertainment.

It is not advice. Nothing on the Service is financial, investment, legal, tax, or professional advice, and nothing on it is a recommendation to place a wager. Some pages display betting market data such as game totals and spreads, which are shown because they are useful inputs to a projection. They are not a tip, a prediction, or an inducement to gamble, and we take no part in any wagering. Gambling laws differ by state and country and complying with yours is your responsibility. If gambling is causing you harm, help is available in the US at 1-800-GAMBLER.

Some content is AI-assisted. Parts of the Beacon Brief and some analytical commentary are drafted with the help of automated language models working from public NFL news and our own data, then published under our editorial responsibility. Automated systems make mistakes, including confident ones. Check anything that matters before acting on it.

Every roster decision you make is yours. You are responsible for your own lineups, trades, waiver bids, and league conduct.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Scrape, crawl, or otherwise harvest data from the Service in a way that interferes with other users or imposes a load disproportionate to a typical interactive session.
• Attempt to access accounts, leagues, or data that do not belong to you, including through credential stuffing, session hijacking, or social engineering.
• Probe, scan, or test the security of the Service, or interfere with it by denial of service, malware, or automated abuse. Good-faith security research reported privately to michael@ffbeacon.com is welcome and we will not pursue anyone who reports a genuine finding responsibly and does not access or destroy other people's data.
• Submit content, including Sleeper usernames, handles, team names, league names, profile text, and uploaded images, that is unlawful, abusive, harassing, hateful, sexually explicit, deceptive, or that infringes anyone's rights.
• Impersonate any person or organization, or claim an affiliation with FF Beacon that you do not have.
• Use the Service or its output to train a machine learning model, or to build a competing product, without our prior written permission.
• Circumvent rate limits, quotas, or the admin and commissioner force-refresh controls, or use automated means to create accounts or submit content.
• Remove, obscure, or alter any attribution, notice, or branding on the Service.

We may remove content and suspend access for a breach of this section without notice where the breach is causing harm.

5. Your content

Some parts of the Service let you post: a Signal profile and its handle, posts and images on it, questions submitted through the guide and contact forms, and votes and feedback inside the games. You keep ownership of everything you post.

By posting it you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, adapt for formatting, and display that content for the purpose of operating and promoting the Service. The license lasts as long as the content is on the Service, and it survives afterwards only to the extent that copies persist in backups or in caches we do not control. You confirm you have the rights to grant this for anything you post.

A Signal profile is public. Its handle, display name, avatar, and posts can be read by anyone, indexed by search engines, and quoted elsewhere. Do not put anything on one that you would not want a stranger to read.

If you send us feedback, a bug report, or a suggestion, we may use it without restriction and without owing you anything for it. That is not a claim over anything else you own.

We do not pre-screen posted content and we are not obliged to monitor it, but we may remove anything at our discretion, particularly where it breaches section 4.

6. Copyright complaints

If you believe material on the Service infringes your copyright, email michael@ffbeacon.com with: your contact details, identification of the work you say is infringed, the URL of the material you want removed, a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized, a statement that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorized to act for them, and your physical or electronic signature. We will act on valid notices promptly, and we terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

7. Third-party data, and who we are not affiliated with

The Service reads public information from third-party providers including the Sleeper API, KeepTradeCut, FantasyCalc, DynastyProcess, betting odds feeds, and the Sleeper player image CDN. We do not own that data, we cannot guarantee it is accurate or available, and a provider changing or withdrawing an interface may change or remove features here without notice.

FF Beacon is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to the National Football League, any NFL club, Sleeper, KeepTradeCut, FantasyCalc, Discord, or any other provider named on the site. Player names, team names, logos, and league marks belong to their respective owners and are used descriptively.

By linking a Sleeper username to your account, or by entering one into a tool, you authorize the Service to fetch and store the public Sleeper data for the leagues that username belongs to, so that league sync, power rankings, trade analysis, and the other league tools can operate. You can disconnect this at any time by clearing your Sleeper username in your preferences. League data that other members of the same league can also see may remain visible to them.

8. The Discord community

Our Discord server is part of the Service for the purposes of these Terms, and section 4 applies there. It is also hosted by Discord and subject to Discord's own terms and community guidelines. Server moderators may remove messages and remove members. Help given in Discord is offered by volunteers and by us informally; it is opinion, not a service commitment.

9. Donations

FF Beacon is free to use and is funded personally. You may make a voluntary one-time donation through the Service by card or digital wallet (processed by Stripe), or through PayPal or Venmo.

• A donation is a gift, not a purchase. It buys no product, no service, no feature, and no support commitment. Nothing on the Service is behind a paywall and donating does not unlock anything, change your rankings, or give you any influence over the data.
• Donations are final. Because nothing is being sold, there is nothing to return, and we do not offer refunds. If a payment is clearly a mistake, such as a duplicate charge or an amount that is obviously not what you intended, email michael@ffbeacon.com and we will try to put it right. That is a goodwill practice rather than a right you have under these Terms, and nothing here limits any refund or chargeback right you may have under your local consumer law or your card network's rules.
• It is not tax deductible. FF Beacon is not a registered charity or a tax-exempt organization, and a donation is not a charitable contribution for tax purposes.
• We never see your card details. Card and wallet payments are handled entirely on Stripe's own systems; PayPal and Venmo payments are handled on theirs. Your payment is also subject to that processor's terms. See the Privacy Policy for what each one receives.
• Donations are one-time. We do not set up recurring charges and we do not store a payment method to reuse. We email you a receipt for a donation made by card or wallet; a donation sent through PayPal or Venmo is receipted by that service instead.
• We may decline or return a donation at our discretion, for example where a payment appears fraudulent.

10. Availability, changes, and experimental features

The Service is provided on an as-is, best-effort basis by one person. We may add, change, suspend, or remove features at any time, including data sources, rankings, tools, and League Pulse coverage. Some features are clearly labelled as new or experimental and may change or disappear without notice.

We are not liable for downtime, data loss, or content that becomes unavailable because a third-party provider changed or withdrew an interface.

11. Intellectual property

The Service's name, logo, written content, design, and code are owned by Michael Walsh. You may read, link to, and quote reasonable extracts with attribution. You may not reproduce, redistribute, or republish substantial parts of the Service, or use its content or output to train a machine learning model, without permission. Player names, team logos, NFL marks, and Sleeper avatars remain the property of their respective owners.

12. Termination

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service if you breach these Terms, or where we reasonably need to in order to protect the Service or other users. You may stop using the Service and request account deletion at any time by emailing michael@ffbeacon.com; deletion removes your preferences, your Signal profile, and your voting history. Public Sleeper league data synced for a league persists for the other members of that league. Sections 5, 9, 11, and 13 through 17 survive termination.

13. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, error free, or that any value, projection, ranking, or grade on it is accurate.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Michael Walsh is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost opportunities, arising from or relating to your use of the Service. That includes, without limitation, lost fantasy matchups, failed waiver bids, trade outcomes, league disputes, and any wager placed by anyone for any reason.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the total amount you paid or donated to us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or one hundred United States dollars.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. Where that is the case, the exclusions and limits above apply only to the extent permitted, and nothing in these Terms limits liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

14. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Michael Walsh from any claim, demand, loss, or expense, including reasonable legal fees, brought by a third party and arising from content you posted, your breach of these Terms, or your misuse of the Service. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and will not settle it in a way that admits fault on your behalf without your agreement.

15. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Indiana, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. If your local consumer law gives you protections that cannot be contracted out of, this does not take those away.

Talk to us first. If you have a dispute with us, email michael@ffbeacon.com with a description of it and what you would like to happen. We both agree to try in good faith to resolve it informally for sixty days from that email before starting any formal proceeding. Most problems end here.

If that does not resolve it, any proceeding must be brought in the state or federal courts located in Indiana, and we both consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts. Either of us may still bring an individual claim in a small claims court that has jurisdiction. There is no mandatory arbitration in these Terms.

16. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we do, we will update the "Effective" date at the top of this page. Material changes will be highlighted on the homepage or through an in-app notice before they take effect. Continued use after a change takes effect constitutes acceptance; if you do not accept a change, stop using the Service.

17. General

• Severability. If any part of these Terms is held unenforceable, that part is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to a successor of the Service, and will say so on this page if we do.
• Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service and replace anything said before.
• Events outside our control. We are not responsible for failures caused by things we cannot reasonably control, including outages at hosting, data, or payment providers.
• Notices. We may contact you at the email address on your account or by a notice on the Service. You can reach us at michael@ffbeacon.com.
• No third-party beneficiaries. Nobody other than you and us has rights under these Terms.

18. Contact

Questions about these Terms, or anything else legal, go to michael@ffbeacon.com. You can also reach us through the contact form on the About page.