Terms of Service

These Terms form a legally binding agreement between you and the operator of 衍象坊 ("we", "us", "the platform") governing your access to and use of our website, mobile pages, APIs and related services (the "Service").

By registering an account, signing in, browsing pages or using any feature, you confirm that you have read, understood and accepted these Terms and our Privacy Policy in full. If you disagree with any part, stop using the Service immediately.

If you use the Service on behalf of an organisation, you represent that you are duly authorised to do so and that these Terms bind that organisation.

The Simplified Chinese version of these Terms prevails. Other language versions are provided for convenience only; in case of discrepancy the Simplified Chinese version governs, except where local law requires the local-language version to prevail.

衍象坊 is an online toolset and content platform combining research into Chinese traditional metaphysics, the digitisation of classical texts, and artificial intelligence. Current offerings include, without limitation:

• Chart calculation tools: Qimen Dunjia, Da Liuren, Liuyao, Dayan Shifa, BaZi (Ziping structural method and the Blind School work method), Zi Wei Dou Shu, Qizheng Siyu, Taiyi, Wuyun Liuqi, and the Feng Shui compass.
• Astronomy and calendar tools: True solar time conversion, the sexagenary calendar, solar terms and lunar phases, sky maps, historical celestial-event lookups, and 2D airflow simulation.
• Classical and excavated texts: Full texts of transmitted classics, side-by-side plates and transcriptions of excavated bamboo and silk manuscripts, source-text analysis, and encyclopaedias of terminology, imagery, the night sky and official learning.
• AI services: AI character divination and interpretation, AI face reading, AI agents, and AI role-play conversations.
• Community features: The public square, wish wall, gratitude wall, comments and private messages.
• Store and paid services: Credits (in-platform virtual items), membership subscriptions, cultural-creative merchandise, and bookable services.

An important statement about the nature of this service: our presentation of traditional metaphysics is grounded in cultural research, the digitisation of classical sources, and entertainment. We do not promote superstition, do not organise or advertise divinatory rituals, and do not sell "fate-changing", "misfortune-dispelling", "remedial" or "consecration" services of any kind, nor do we use divinatory conclusions to market goods or services to you. Nothing on this platform — chart results, AI interpretations, encyclopaedia entries — constitutes medical, psychological, legal, financial, tax, family, career or other professional advice. For significant decisions, consult a suitably qualified professional.

• Provide accurate, truthful and complete information when registering, and keep it up to date;
• Accounts are personal and may not be rented, lent, transferred, sold or otherwise licensed to others;
• Keep your username, password and credentials secure. All activity under your account is deemed to be yours; notify us immediately if you discover unauthorised use or a security vulnerability;
• Under Mainland China's Cybersecurity Law and the Provisions on the Administration of Internet User Account Information, we may require real-identity verification before you use content-publishing or messaging features;
• We may warn, restrict, suspend or close accounts that breach these Terms, are subject to complaints, appear compromised, or remain inactive for an extended period.

You agree to comply with the laws of your own jurisdiction as well as those where the platform is operated and hosted. You must not:

• Create, reproduce, publish or distribute content that endangers national security, discloses state secrets, subverts state power, or undermines national unity and ethnic solidarity;
• Publish content that incites violence or terrorism, promotes extremism, obscenity, gambling, drug trafficking, human trafficking, or self-harm and suicide;
• Use platform content to promote superstition, or to engage in fraudulent fortune-telling for gain, unlicensed medical practice, illegal fundraising, pyramid schemes or deception;
• Insult, defame, harass or threaten others, or infringe their reputation, privacy, likeness or personal-information rights; publish or forward another person's personal data without consent (in Hong Kong such "doxxing" may be a criminal offence under the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance);
• Infringe copyright, trade marks, patents, trade secrets or other rights of third parties;
• Upload viruses or malicious code, or attempt cracking, reverse engineering, circumvention of rate and permission limits, bulk scraping, stress testing or denial-of-service attacks (conduct regulated by Singapore's Computer Misuse Act and the United States Computer Fraud and Abuse Act);
• Use our AI features to generate or spread disinformation, deepfaked likenesses or voices, discriminatory content, or automated decisions that materially affect others' rights;
• Send unsolicited marketing or bulk spam through the platform (regulated by Hong Kong's Unsolicited Electronic Messages Ordinance, Singapore's Spam Control Act and Do Not Call Registry, and the US CAN-SPAM Act);
• Impersonate another person or our staff, or make false or misleading commercial representations (regulated by Hong Kong's Trade Descriptions Ordinance, Singapore's Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act, and Section 5 of the US FTC Act);
• Use the Service in, or on behalf of entities in, countries or regions subject to economic sanctions or export controls.

If you breach these rules we may remove content, restrict or terminate your access without prior notice, and report to or cooperate with the competent authorities. You remain liable for any loss caused to us or to third parties.

You are solely responsible for the text, images, audio and video you post ("User Content") and warrant that you hold the necessary rights.

To operate and promote the platform, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable licence to store, display, reproduce, cache, distribute, translate and recommend the User Content you publish publicly. When you delete content, that licence ends within a reasonable technical processing period, except for backups retained as required by law and copies lawfully reproduced by others.

We do not undertake to pre-screen User Content. For third-party content we rely on Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act and comparable rules, while reserving the right to remove content that breaches these Terms or the law.

Notice and takedown: if you believe content here infringes your rights, send us a written notice at the address below identifying yourself, evidencing your rights, specifying the exact location of the content, and stating your grounds and the accuracy of the notice. We handle such notices under Article 1195 of China's Civil Code and the Regulations on the Protection of the Right of Communication through Information Networks, Section 512 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and comparable rules, forwarding the notice to the affected party, who may submit a counter-notice. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

• Parts of the content here are produced by generative AI models and may be inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, internally inconsistent or simply wrong ("hallucinations"). Verify before relying on them;
• In line with China's Interim Measures for the Administration of Generative AI Services, the Provisions on the Administration of Deep Synthesis, and the Measures for Labelling AI-Generated Content, we flag AI-generated output and continue to improve both explicit and implicit labelling. You must not remove, alter or conceal those labels when reposting;
• You are responsible for the legality of the prompts, photographs and other material you submit, and must not input other people's personal information, confidential material or infringing content;
• AI output does not represent our views. To the extent permitted by law you may use it for personal, non-commercial purposes, but we make no warranty as to its copyrightability or ownership;
• You may not use output from this platform to train, fine-tune or distil other AI models, nor scrape it systematically or in bulk, without our prior written permission;
• If you encounter unlawful or clearly inappropriate AI output, please report it through our feedback channels; we will act on it and continue to improve our models and prompting.

Our own material — interface design, software code, calculation and inference algorithms, graphics, original writing, database structure and data arrangement — belongs to us or to the respective rights holders and is protected by China's Copyright Law, Hong Kong's Copyright Ordinance (Cap. 528), Singapore's Copyright Act 2021, US copyright law and international treaties including the Berne Convention.

Classical texts and excavated manuscripts: the underlying source texts are largely in the public domain, but we hold rights in our digitisation, collation, punctuation, annotation, arrangement and image processing. Where plates or transcriptions come from third-party sources, we credit them and use them within the scope of the applicable licence or fair use. If you believe a particular use exceeds that scope, please contact us.

Within the limits of fair use / fair dealing you may quote our content for personal study, research, commentary or news reporting, with attribution. Copying, mirroring, bulk scraping, commercial adaptation or redistribution beyond that requires our prior written permission.

Our name, logo and trade marks may not be used without written permission.

• Credits and other in-platform virtual items may only be used within the platform for their stated purpose. They cannot be withdrawn, exchanged for legal tender or transferred, and they are not a prepaid card, deposit, security or payment instrument;
• Memberships renew automatically for the billing period you select. We give clear advance notice before each charge, and you may cancel at any time from your account page, effective at the end of the current billing period (this follows the advance-notice requirement of China's Regulations for Implementing the Consumer Rights Protection Law, and the US Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act and FTC expectation that cancelling be as easy as subscribing; California users are additionally protected by the state's Automatic Renewal Law);
• Prices, taxes and settlement currency are as displayed at checkout. Cross-border transactions may incur exchange-rate differences and card-issuer fees, which you bear;
• Refunds: for consumers in Mainland China, under Article 25 of the Consumer Rights Protection Law, digital goods delivered immediately upon your confirmation are generally not subject to the seven-day no-reason return right; you may still request a refund for portions not yet used or consumed, which we will assess in accordance with the law. Statutory rights under Hong Kong's Trade Descriptions Ordinance, Singapore's Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act and applicable US state consumer-protection law are not limited by these Terms;
• If you voluntarily close your account, unused credits are forfeited unless the law provides otherwise. If we discontinue the Service, we will refund the unused portion on a reasonable pro-rata basis or provide equivalent compensation;
• Payments are processed by third-party providers such as Stripe. We never receive or store your full card number, and the provider's own terms and policies apply to the payment;
• Delivery, returns and after-sales rules for merchandise and bookable services are set out on the relevant product pages. Online transactions are governed by China's E-Commerce Law, Hong Kong's Electronic Transactions Ordinance (Cap. 553) and Singapore's Electronic Transactions Act.

• The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all express and implied warranties, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement;
• We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, nor that chart calculations, inferences, astronomical computations or AI interpretations are accurate, complete or reliable. They are for reference only and should not be your sole basis for any significant decision;
• To the fullest extent permitted by law we are not liable for indirect, incidental, punitive, special or consequential loss, including lost profits, lost data, loss of goodwill or the cost of substitute services. Our aggregate liability under these Terms is capped at the total amount you actually paid us in the twelve months preceding the event giving rise to the claim;
• Nothing above excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by our wilful misconduct or gross negligence, liability for fraud, and liability that cannot be excluded under Hong Kong's Control of Exemption Clauses Ordinance (Cap. 71), Singapore's Unfair Contract Terms Act, or the law of certain US states;
• We are not liable for disruption caused by force majeure or third parties — network and power failures, government action, outages at model or cloud providers, or cyber-attacks — but will make reasonable efforts to restore service promptly and explain what happened.

• The Service is designed for adults. Users under 18 must use it with the consent, guidance and supervision of a parent or guardian;
• We do not offer the Service to children under 13 and do not knowingly collect their personal information (US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA). In Mainland China, processing the personal information of minors under 14 requires the separate consent of a parent or guardian (Article 31 of the Personal Information Protection Law; Regulations on the Protection of Minors in Cyberspace). In Singapore, 13 is generally treated in practice as the age at which a person can give valid consent;
• We do not target minors with purchase inducements. A guardian may seek a refund for purchases a minor made without their consent;
• If we learn that we have collected information from a user who does not meet the age requirement, we will delete the data and close the account promptly. Guardians may also contact us to review, correct or delete such information.

To deliver full functionality the Service integrates third parties: identity providers (Auth0, Casdoor, Google Sign-In), payments (Stripe), content delivery and object storage (Cloudflare), AI model inference, web analytics and advertising. Each is operated independently and handles your information under its own terms and privacy policy; the full list is in our Privacy Policy.

The platform may link to third-party websites. We do not endorse and are not responsible for their content, products or privacy practices; assess them yourself before visiting.

• We may add, modify, suspend or discontinue all or part of the Service for business, technical or compliance reasons. Where a change materially affects your rights, we will give reasonable advance notice by site announcement, in-product notice or email;
• You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time. After closure we handle your personal information as described in the Privacy Policy; some records are retained where the law requires;
• If we terminate your access because you breached these Terms, fees already paid but not yet consumed are not refunded unless the law provides otherwise.

We serve users across several jurisdictions and undertake to comply with the following laws and regulatory requirements to the extent each applies to us. You in turn must comply with the law that applies to you. The list is illustrative rather than exhaustive, and is not legal advice.

Conflicts of law: where a mandatory rule of a given jurisdiction conflicts with these Terms, that mandatory rule prevails for users in that jurisdiction, and the remainder of these Terms continues to apply so far as it does not contravene it.

Disputes arising from these Terms or the Service should first be resolved amicably. If no resolution is reached within 60 days of a written request, the following routes are available:

• Mainland China: The law of Mainland China applies, and proceedings may be brought before the competent People's Court where our operating entity is located. This does not affect your right under the Consumer Rights Protection Law to complain to a consumer association or market regulator, or to sue in the court where you reside.
• Hong Kong SAR: You may bring proceedings before the competent Hong Kong courts under Hong Kong law, or seek mediation through the Hong Kong Consumer Council.
• Singapore: You may bring proceedings before the competent Singapore courts under Singapore law, or use mediation through CASE or the Small Claims Tribunals.
• United States: You may bring proceedings before a court of competent jurisdiction under the law of your state. These Terms contain no mandatory arbitration clause and no class-action waiver unless the parties expressly agree otherwise in writing.

Nothing in this section excludes or limits any right of action, complaint or remedy available to you under mandatory local consumer-protection law.

• We may revise these Terms from time to time; the revised version is published on this page with its version number and effective date;
• Where a change materially affects your rights, we give reasonable advance notice by site announcement, in-product notice or email before it takes effect;
• Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect constitutes acceptance. If you disagree, stop using the Service and close your account. Previous versions are available on request.

• Severability: If any provision is held invalid or unenforceable, the remainder stays in force and that provision is construed as closely as possible to its original intent within legal limits.
• No waiver: Failure or delay in exercising a right under these Terms is not a waiver of that right.
• Entire agreement: These Terms, the Privacy Policy and any feature-specific rules constitute the entire agreement between us regarding the Service.
• Assignment: You may not assign your rights or obligations without our written consent. We may assign these Terms in a reorganisation, merger or transfer of assets, with prior notice to you.
• Notices: Notices we send by in-product message, site announcement or to the email address you provided are deemed delivered on the day they are sent.