Terms of Use

Last updated 7 September 2026

These terms cover probability.media, including the Engine, the Research Library and the Forum Laboratory. By using the site or creating an account you agree to them.

1. Who runs this site

probability.media is operated by the Systems Geometry Group, an independent research project. Contact: contact@probability.media.

2. What this site is, and is not

The Copy And Paste Model is a theoretical framework under active development. It has not been empirically validated. The Engine is a simulator whose outputs are dimensionless model quantities, not measurements.

3. Accounts

You agree to these terms and to the Privacy Notice when you tick the box on the sign-up form. We record which version you agreed to and when, so that it is clear what you were shown at the time. That record is kept for every version you have accepted, not only the most recent one.

If these terms change materially you will be asked again, and until you accept, publishing, replying and voting are paused. Reading the forum, opening your own research identity and closing your account all continue to work: we are not willing to hold your own account hostage to a document you have not agreed to.

The Privacy Notice is different, and deliberately so. It describes what happens to your data rather than setting rules you agree to, so a change to it is announced rather than put to you for consent. Presenting it as something to consent to would imply the processing depends on that consent, and it does not.

• You must be at least 16 years old to create an account, and you confirm this when you sign up. We do not ask for your date of birth.
• One account per person. Keep your password to yourself. Passwords must be at least eight characters and include a lower-case letter, a capital, a digit and a symbol.
• Reading the forum needs no account. Opening another member's research identity does, and so does voting, replying and submitting.
• Usernames must not contain profanity, slurs or hate speech, and must not impersonate another person, the project, or its staff.
• You are responsible for what is posted from your account.

4. Posting

When you publish a submission or reply, you agree that:

• You have the right to post the content, and it does not infringe anyone else's copyright.
• If a claim was produced with the help of an AI system, you disclose it using the provided field. Transcript links must point to a recognised AI provider.
• You will not post unlawful, harassing, defamatory or deliberately misleading material, spam, malware, or attempts to break the site.
• You will not present model outputs as clinical findings.
• Your username, display name, bio and affiliation will not contain links. The profile is not an advertising space.

Engine configurations

A Framework + Engine submission carries the configuration that produced it, so that anyone can reproduce the run rather than take your word for the result. Only a file the Engine exported is accepted: named as the Engine saved it, valid JSON, and 25 KB or less. It is stored as data rather than as a file, and what another member downloads is rebuilt from that data.

• You must have the right to publish the configuration, and it must not contain anyone else's personal data. It is public, permanently, to anyone including people without an account.
• You must not attach a configuration intended to damage, mislead or exploit whoever runs it.
• Configurations are not reviewed by us, and publishing one here is not an endorsement of it or of the person who posted it. Anyone downloading one is shown that before they do.

Nobody has any legitimate reason to ask you to disable your antivirus or firewall in order to use a configuration from this site, at any point. If somebody asks you to, that request is itself the warning, refuse it! and tell us at contact@probability.media. Protecting your own device remains your responsibility, and we cannot do it for you.

Posting is rate limited: one submission every six hours and one reply per minute per account. These limits exist to keep discussion considered rather than rapid.

Length

Submissions and replies are capped, and the caps widen once your account is a week old. This makes a throwaway account a poor vehicle for flooding the forum, without permanently constraining anyone who stays.

Moderators and administrators are not subject to the first-week caps.

Links

Submissions may not contain links anywhere, not in the title, the claim, the method, the anchor or the version field, and this applies to moderators and administrators as well. There are two exceptions. The AI transcript field accepts links, but only to a fixed list of recognised AI providers. And the message of an announcement may contain them.

An announcement is a notice to the forum rather than a claim against the framework. It carries no equation anchor, no framework version and no topic, and it can be published only by an administrator; a moderator's work is replies and submissions, and a notice to the whole forum is not moderation. Its title is subject to the same rule as any other: no links. The database refuses an announcement from any other account, so this is not a matter of the button being hidden.

Replies may not contain links either, except from moderators and administrators. This is to stop the forum being used to route traffic elsewhere. Any link that does appear is shown behind a notice telling you where it leads before you follow it.

5. Your content stays yours

You keep copyright in everything you post. By posting you grant the project a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, display and distribute that content as part of the site, including in archived form so that the record of a discussion stays intact. This licence exists only to run the site and survives account deletion for content others have already replied to or cited. If you want your content removed, see the Privacy Notice.

Deleting what you posted

You may delete your own submissions and replies at any time. The two are not the same operation:

• A reply is redacted. Its text and your name are removed permanently and the votes on it are deleted, but the reply itself stays in place as *Deleted* so that the answers other people wrote beneath it survive. The vote totals it had received are frozen and remain visible as a record of how it was received. A redacted reply cannot be edited or restored, and no new reply can be added beneath it, there is nothing left to answer. Replies already written beneath it stay, and can still be answered themselves.
• A submission removes you from it, not the discussion. Your claim and your name are removed permanently, and every reply you wrote in that thread is redacted with it, so nothing of yours is left there. The submission stays in place as *Deleted*, no new reply can be added to it, and the vote totals it had are frozen as a record.
  
  Replies written by other members stay exactly as they are. They are theirs, not yours, and on a forum whose purpose is falsification the objections are frequently the part worth keeping. You are shown all of this before it happens.
• Neither can be undone, and neither is available to anyone else. Only you can withdraw your own submission; a moderator cannot do it for you, because that route leaves no record of who acted. If you need something removed that you can no longer reach yourself, write to us and an administrator will consider it.

If you need the text of something removed that you can no longer reach yourself, write to contact@probability.media.

A closed circle

You may close your peer list to everyone but yourself and an administrator, at the cost of opening nobody else's, and you may close the Submissions and Replies tabs on your identity to your accepted peers. None of this withdraws anything from the forum: what you publish there is published, and these switches decide who may read it gathered under your name, not whether it is on the site.

Notes

Every account has a private notebook: up to twelve notes, each named and holding up to 5,000 characters, or 10,000 for moderators and administrators. Notes are yours alone; nobody else can open one, and we do not read them. They are plain text: nothing you write in one becomes a link or runs as code, and they are not published anywhere. Because they cannot be seen, the posting rules above do not apply to them, but they remain subject to the law, and unlawful material is unlawful wherever it is kept.

6. Peers

You may ask another member to be a peer, and they may accept, decline or ignore it. Either of you can end the link at any time, without notice to the other.

A request can be sent from a member's research identity, or by looking up their username from your own peer requests. That search matches the beginning of a username, needs at least two characters and returns a handful of results: it is a way to reach a name you already have, not a directory of the membership.

Your list of peers is not public. It can be opened by you, by the people you have accepted as peers, and by an administrator reviewing an account for abuse; not by moderators. Any signed-in member can see how many peers you have, but not who they are. A request that is still pending is visible only to the two of you.

There is one exception, and it is worth understanding before you accept a request. When two peers reply to one another in a public thread, the line joining those two replies is drawn differently, and that mark is visible to everyone, including people without an account. It describes that exchange rather than either of you, and it appears only where you are already answering each other in public. Ending a peer link removes it. The Privacy Notice sets out what can and cannot be inferred from it.

7. Mentions

Writing @name or >name notifies that member, but only if they are an accepted peer of yours and have not switched mentions off. Anyone else's name simply appears as text and reaches nobody. This is deliberate: a mention puts something in another person's inbox without their asking, and restricting it to people who have already agreed to hear from you is what stops it becoming a way to reach strangers.

A submission may name up to ten people and a reply up to three. Repeatedly naming somebody who has asked you to stop, or using mentions to route around a restriction, is treated as harassment under section 4.

8. Moderation

We may redact or remove any submission or reply, restrict an account for a defined period, or terminate an account, where these terms are broken.

The two restrictions

• A mute prevents replies. Submissions and votes remain available.
• A ban prevents submissions, replies and votes for its duration. It does not close the account or prevent signing in, and nothing already written is removed by it.

Both are enforced by the database rather than by the page, so they hold however the site is reached.

A restriction normally runs for a set number of days, and the end date is shown to you. It may also be applied indefinitely, in which case it has no end date and runs until a moderator lifts it. An indefinite restriction is for repeated or serious breaches; it is not a closure of your account, and you can still read, use your identity, and close the account yourself.

What you are told

Every restriction is accompanied by a notice delivered to the inbox on your research identity. It names the moderator who acted, states the grounds in their own words, and shows when the restriction ends. Where the restriction was applied for something you wrote, the notice contains a copy of that text, so that you can see what was objected to even though it has been removed from the thread. Only you and the moderation team can read a notice.

Marking what it was applied for

A moderator may redact the reply or the submission a restriction was applied for at the same moment, in which case it is shown as *banned* or *muted* in place of the ordinary *Deleted*. That mark is visible to everyone, including people without an account, and it is permanent.

Where the restriction was applied for a submission, its replies are locked rather than removed: everything written in answer to it stays readable, and nothing new can be added. Those replies belong to the members who wrote them, and are frequently the record of the objection itself. Voting on that thread ends at the same moment, and the totals stay visible as they finished.

What the mark shows is only that a restriction was applied. Your words and your name are removed by the same redaction as any other deletion, and the reasons are never published: the thread does not say what was written or why it was objected to. Replies beneath it survive and no new reply can be added to it.

Lifting a restriction restores the account to full use. It does not restore a redacted reply and it does not withdraw a notice already delivered. The restriction is reversible; the record of what prompted it is not. If you think a decision was wrong, the notice is the thing to quote when you write to us.

You are told when a restriction is lifted. A notice arrives in the same inbox naming the moderator who lifted it. That record is kept for the same reason the restriction's own notice is: a restriction is visible to anyone reading the thread, while a pardon would otherwise be invisible, and the decision that is harder to see is the one more in need of a record.

Removal outright

Content that must leave the database entirely, such as unlawful material, is removed rather than redacted. An administrator may erase a reply together with every reply beneath it, or a submission together with its whole thread, leaving no marker and no frozen vote totals. This exists for spam floods and pile-ons, where redacting each item in turn would leave a column of tombstones through a discussion, and it removes work written by other members along with the rest.

Erasing a whole submission is reserved to an administrator, and deliberately is not available to a moderator. Redacting a submission leaves the discussion standing; erasing it does not, and destroying everyone's contribution to a thread is not an ordinary moderation decision.

Removal of unlawful content and restriction for repeated breaches may happen without prior warning. If you think a moderation decision was wrong, write to contact@probability.media.

Removal without a restriction

A moderator can take down a single reply without any restriction on its author: a duplicate, something posted by accident, a misfire. The thread then says the reply was removed by the moderation team rather than by its author, you are told the reason, and nothing is counted against you. This is not a punishment and does not appear in your history as one.

Purging

Destroying a submission or a branch outright, leaving no marker and no frozen totals, is reserved to administrators and always requires a written reason. It is used where content must not remain in any form, for example unlawful material. Because a purge leaves nothing to examine afterwards, the reason and a copy of what was removed are kept in the staff record.

Your profile picture

The moderation team may remove a profile picture that breaks these terms, with a written reason, without any restriction on the account. You are told, and a copy of the picture goes on the staff record with the reason. While a ban is in force your picture is held back and the default is shown in its place; it returns when the ban ends, unless it was removed separately.

Hiding a submission

An administrator may take a submission out of the listing without redacting it, with a written reason. It no longer appears in the lists, but it is not made secret: anyone with its link can still open it, and its replies and votes stay as they were. The author is told when it is hidden and when it is listed again, and the decision is on the staff record. A submission that must actually be unreadable is redacted or purged instead.

Announcements

An administrator can place a notice in every member's inbox, for a change to these Terms or anything else that has to be read. These are not marketing and cannot be used for it.

9. Availability

The site is provided as it is, with no guarantee of availability, accuracy or fitness for a particular purpose. It runs on free-tier infrastructure and may be slow, interrupted, changed or discontinued. Keep your own copy of anything you would be sorry to lose.

10. Liability

To the extent permitted by law, the operator is not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from use of the site, from reliance on the framework or the Engine, or from content posted by other users. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

11. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of Croatia. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the EU, you keep the protection of the mandatory rules of your own country.

12. Changes

These terms may change as the project develops. The date at the top shows the current version. Significant changes will be announced in the Forum.