Terms of Service

What this is

Writer Roll Call is a tool for logging word counts and seeing your writing habits over time. By creating an account you agree to these terms.

Your writing data is yours

Everything you log belongs to you. We claim no rights over it beyond what's needed to store it and chart it back to you. You can export it — your writing log as CSV, or everything on your account as JSON — or delete it, along with your whole account, from Settings, anytime.

Contests

Contest entries are the one place we hold your prose. By entering, you agree to the contest rules: entries display anonymously during voting, winners' entries display publicly with their names, and non-winning entries are permanently deleted when results publish. You keep ownership throughout, and deleting your account removes your entries too.

Writing groups

Writing groups are small, invite-only circles for swapping work in progress. A piece you share is visible to every member of that group, and their notes attach to it. Everything shared is deliberately short-lived: a piece and its notes are automatically and permanently deleted once the deadline after its own passes. When a group reaches its end date it enters a wrap-up window one cycle long — no new pieces, but notes stay open on the final cycle's pieces — and when that window closes the group and everything still inside it are deleted for good. Leaving a group — or being removed from one — permanently deletes the pieces you shared there; notes you left on other members' pieces stay, without your name, until their scheduled deletion. Deleting your account erases your notes immediately and deletes any groups you host, for all their members. Content flagged for moderation is copied into a moderation record that survives this deletion until it has been reviewed, then the copied text is deleted too. Keep master copies of your work in your own files; there is no undo on any of this.

Classrooms

If you're a teacher using the classroom feature, the classroom is yours to run. By creating a classroom assignment you represent that you hold whatever authorization your school, district, or students' parents require for it. Students are participants, not account holders: they sign in with a randomly generated handle and a passcode you hand out, and the 16-and-up rule for accounts doesn't apply to them because they never create one. Students can submit only word counts, never text of any kind. You keep the list of which student holds which handle; we never have it and can't recover it. A classroom and every student's numbers are permanently deleted 60 days after the assignment ends, and deleting your account deletes your classrooms immediately.

Pennames & author pages

You can publish a public author page under a penname of your choosing. Pennames are handles, not verified identities — don't claim to be an author you aren't, or otherwise mislead readers about who is behind a page. We may unpublish pages and reclaim pennames that impersonate someone or abuse the feature, and repeated abuse can close the account. Every author page carries a link for reporting problems.

Your account

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account (and 18 to enter contests). Keep your password to yourself; what happens under your login is your responsibility. Use a real email address — password recovery depends on it.

Acceptable use

Don't abuse the service: no attempts to break in, scrape other writers' data, spam the public forms, or overload the API. We may close accounts that do.

The embeddable widget

If you enable the progress widget, the fields you choose become publicly readable by anyone with your embed key — that's its purpose. You can revoke the key or switch the widget off in Settings whenever you like.

No warranty

The service is provided as-is, without warranties of any kind. We work to keep it reliable and your data safe (including daily database backups), but we can't promise uninterrupted service, and to the maximum extent permitted by law we aren't liable for losses arising from your use of it. Keep your manuscripts in your own files — outside contest entries and writing-group pieces (which delete themselves), we track counts, we don't hold your prose.

Changes

If these terms change in ways that matter, we'll say so on Updates. Questions to [email protected].