Terms & Privacy

1. Who runs this

Patternflow is operated by Seunghun Lee, an individual based in the Republic of Korea. Contact: contact@patternflow.work.

2. Your account

• You need an account to publish, comment, or report. Browsing needs nothing.
• An account is a username and a password. An email address is optional and is only ever used to help you recover access — we send no marketing, and we never verify it.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account. Keep the password to yourself.
• You must be old enough to enter into this agreement where you live.

3. Your patterns stay yours

You keep the copyright in everything you publish. There is no copyright assignment and no contributor licence agreement.

When you publish, you choose the licence the public gets — currently CC BY-SA 4.0 (the default) or CC BY 4.0. Both let anyone use and adapt your work, including commercially, as long as they credit you; CC BY-SA additionally requires their versions to carry the same licence. That choice is a licence to the world, and a licence once given cannot be taken back— deleting a pattern stops us distributing it, but it does not undo anyone's existing rights.

See the licence summary for how this fits with the rest of the project.

4. What you let us do

So that the site can function, you grant Patternflow a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, display, and transmit what you publish, and to:

• render it in the browser preview and generate thumbnail images from it,
• compile it into firmware images and loadable pattern modules on request,
• distribute those build artifacts to the person who asked for them,
• show excerpts of it in listings, search results, and link previews.

This licence exists only to run the service and ends when you remove the content, except for copies already distributed and for backups that age out normally. It does not let us sell your work or licence it to anyone else.

5. What you promise

By publishing something here you confirm that:

• you made it, or you otherwise have the right to publish it under the licence you chose,
• it does not infringe anyone else's copyright, trademark, or other rights,
• if it is a fork, you have kept the original author's credit — the site writes this into the source for you, and removing it is a breach of the upstream licence, not just of these terms,
• it contains no code intended to damage, mislead, or take control of anyone's device or browser.

6. What is not allowed

• Publishing work that is not yours to publish.
• Malicious code, or anything designed to break other people's hardware.
• Harassment, abuse, or content that is unlawful where it is read.
• Bulk-publishing low-effort output to flood the feed.
• Automated scraping or requests that degrade the service for everyone else.

7. Reporting something

Every pattern, post and comment has a Report control. If you are not a member — a rights holder sending a takedown notice, for example — email contact@patternflow.work. Please include a link to the content, what is wrong with it, and for a copyright claim a link to the original and enough contact detail for us to reply.

Reports are read by a person. We may remove content, and we keep a record of reports so that repeated problems from the same account are visible. Accounts that repeatedly infringe other people's rights will be suspended.

8. Removal and account closure

We may remove content or suspend an account that breaks these terms. Where it is reasonable to do so we will say why.

You can delete your own patterns, posts and comments at any time. To close your account, email contact@patternflow.work.

What closing your account does not do: patterns you have already published stay up, shown as by a deleted user, with the author credit that was written into the source at publication time. This is not us keeping your data — it is because the licence you granted is irrevocable, other people have built on those patterns, and deleting them would break work that is legitimately theirs. Your account details are removed.

9. Privacy

What we store

• Account — username, a hashed password, and an email address if you chose to give one. Passwords are never stored in a readable form.
• Sessions — a session token, plus the IP address and browser user-agent of the sign-in. This is for security and abuse handling, not analytics.
• What you publish — patterns, comments, posts, likes, and firmware build requests.

How long we keep it

• Sessions — deleted when they expire, and in any case within 90 days.
• Firmware build artifacts — 30 days. They can always be rebuilt.
• Account and published content — until you remove them, subject to section 8.
• Reports — kept after the reported content is gone, because that record is the only way a repeat problem is visible.

These are not aspirations. A job runs daily and deletes what is past its window; the code is in the open, in web/src/lib/community/retention.ts.

Who else sees it

The community runs on hardware operated by us. We do not sell personal data and we do not share it with advertisers. We use privacy-respecting analytics on the main site to count page views; it does not identify you.

Your rights

Email contact@patternflow.work to see, correct, export, or delete your personal data. Depending on where you live you may have further rights under local law — including the Korean Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) or the GDPR — and those apply regardless of anything else in this document.

10. No warranty

This is a free service run by one person. It is provided as-is, without warranties of any kind. Patterns are code written by other people: they run in a sandbox in your browser, but firmware you build and flash runs on your own hardware at your own risk.

Patternflow is not a party to any licence between you and someone whose pattern you use. That licence is between the two of you, and its terms come from the licence the author chose.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death, personal injury, fraud, or wilful misconduct.

11. Photosensitivity

Patternflow patterns are rapidly changing light. They can trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy. Stop immediately if you feel unwell.

12. Changes

These terms will change as the community grows. Significant changes will be announced in the community and on Discord before they take effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Korea, and disputes go to the Seoul Central District Court. If you use this service as a consumer somewhere else, you keep whatever mandatory protections your local law gives you — this clause does not take those away.