Terms of Service

The short version

• You need to be at least 13 to use Thespiary. Under-13s may not have an account.
• Your inbox is your key. Look after it.
• Facts you add to the shared archive become part of a public, openly licensed database. That is the whole point.
• Your attendance log and your reviews stay yours. They are never published in the data dumps.
• Upload only playbills you legitimately hold. Do not upload things you were told to take down.
• Be decent to people. Do not vandalize the archive.
• This is one person's hobby project. It comes with no warranty and could go away.

1. What Thespiary is

Thespiary is two things sharing a database:

1. A public archive of live performances - which shows ran, where, when, and who was in them. It is built by its users and published openly.
2. A private diary of what you personally attended, what you thought of it, and what you want to see next.

The line between the two matters, and it runs through everything below. The first is community property. The second is yours.

These terms are offered by Ryan Brooks, an individual in Missouri, United States. By creating an account you agree to them and to the Privacy Policy.

2. Who may use it

You must be at least 13 years old. If you are under 13 you may not have a Thespiary account.

We do not ask your age when you sign up, so this is a promise you make rather than a check we run: by creating an account you confirm you are at least 13. If we find out an account belongs to someone under 13, we close it and delete the data. The privacy policy says the same.

Separately, some archive images are flagged sensitive and are blurred until you tap them, unless you choose to always show them in your account settings. That setting is not an age check and is not the same thing as the minimum age above.

If a previous account of yours was banned, you may not open a new one.

3. Your account

There are no passwords. You sign in by asking for a link, which arrives in your email and works once, for 15 minutes.

That has a consequence worth stating plainly: anyone who can read your email can get into your Thespiary account. Securing your inbox is securing your account. We cannot add a second factor for you - two-factor sign-in and passkeys are not available yet.

So:

• Do not forward or share a sign-in link. It is a key, not a notification.
• Sign out on shared devices. A session lasts up to 30 days on its own.
• If you think someone else has been in your account, tell us at support@thespiary.com and change the email address on the account.

One account per email address. Do not open extra accounts to get around a sanction, to vote for your own reviews, or to make a contribution look independently corroborated.

Changing your email requires confirming from the old address first. If you have lost access to the old inbox, that is a manual support conversation - there is deliberately no automatic way around it.

You are responsible for what happens under your account.

4. What you contribute, and the license you give

4.1 Two kinds of thing

When you use Thespiary you produce two different kinds of content, and they are treated completely differently.

Archive data - shows, productions, venues, performances, people, and cast and crew credits. These are shared facts about the world. Once accepted they belong to the archive, not to you, and other people's records depend on them.

Your own material - your attendance log, ratings, reviews, tags, private notes, wishlist, seat and ticket details, and the playbill scans you upload.

4.2 The license you grant on archive data

Thespiary publishes its archive under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

So when you contribute archive data, you license it to us and to everyone else under CC BY-SA 4.0, and you confirm you are able to do that - that you are supplying facts you have compiled yourself or read off a source, not copying someone else's copyrighted description.

You keep whatever rights you had. This is a license, not a transfer. But it is irrevocable in the practical sense: once a contribution is in a published data dump we cannot recall the copies people have downloaded.

Your name is not attached. Contributions are attributed to "the Thespiary community" collectively. We record internally who added what, for moderation purposes, but no display name is ever published through the API or in a dump.

If you delete your account, your contributions stay in the archive and the internal link back to you is erased.

4.3 Your own material stays yours

You keep every right you have in your reviews, notes and log. We do not license them to anyone. We ask only for the permission we need to run the site: to store your material and show it to exactly the people your visibility settings say it should go to.

Your log and reviews are never included in the open data dumps, at any visibility setting, and are not available through the public API.

Everything starts private. Making something public is a choice you make per entry.

Note what a public review reveals: your display name, the venue, and the exact date and time of the performance.

4.4 Contributions are reviewed

New archive data may sit in a moderation queue before it goes live, and there is a cap on how many submissions you can have pending at once.

Credits extracted automatically from a playbill are marked as unreviewed, and are kept out of the public API and the data dumps until a human has checked them.

5. Playbill uploads

You may upload playbills, programs, cast-change slips and similar production material. You do not have to have attended the performance yourself.

Only upload material you hold lawfully. Do not upload:

• material you obtained unlawfully;
• material a rights holder or a court has told you not to share;
• material that has already been removed from Thespiary after a takedown request.

A playbill is somebody else's copyrighted work. Uploading it transfers nothing to us and grants you nothing you did not already have. What we take from it is the facts printed in it - who performed, in what, where, when - and those facts, not the scan, are what goes into the public archive.

Your scan stays private to your account and is never published. The full details are in the copyright and takedown policy and the upload notice.

If you hold rights in something on Thespiary, email copyright@thespiary.com. We remove or disable access to the material while we look at it, rather than after, and we tell the uploader what went and why.

Accounts that repeatedly upload infringing material may be restricted or closed.

6. Acceptable use

Thespiary is a small community around a shared archive. The rules follow from that.

Do not harass anyone. No abuse, threats, slurs, sexual harassment, or sustained unwanted attention toward another user or a performer. A review of a performance is fair game; an attack on a person is not.

Do not vandalize the archive. Do not enter data you know to be false, delete or corrupt correct records, invent credits, or claim a performer profile that is not yours. The archive's value is that people can trust it.

Do not spam. No promotional content dressed as a review, no bulk automated submissions, no manipulation of ratings through extra accounts or coordinated voting.

Do not impersonate. Do not use a display name designed to pass you off as someone else, and do not claim a performer's profile unless you are that performer or represent them.

Do not attack the service. No scraping around the rate limits, no probing for vulnerabilities without asking first, no attempts to reach other users' private data. If you find a security problem, tell us at support@thespiary.com before you tell anyone else.

Do not post other people's private information. This includes tagging a companion with details they would not want visible.

Pornographic images are not allowed and are removed. An image that is racy but a legitimate part of the archive (a burlesque poster, say) should be marked sensitive when you upload it; do not leave it unmarked to avoid the blur.

7. Moderation

7.1 What can happen to content

A moderator can approve or reject a pending contribution, remove content that is already live, restore something removed in error, rule on a disputed credit, or lock a discussion thread. Removal is soft: content comes out of public view but is kept, so it can be restored or reviewed, until the account that wrote it is erased.

Where content is rejected or removed, you are told why. A reason is required for a rejection.

7.2 What can happen to your account

Three sanctions exist:

• Warning - a formal note on your account. Three within 180 days flags you for a moderator to consider escalating.
• Suspension - a temporary restriction with a set duration. You cannot sign in, and existing sessions end. It lifts automatically when it expires, and a moderator can lift it early.
• Ban - indefinite, and admin-only. You cannot sign in, and you may not create a new account on the same email address.

You are notified of a sanction, with the reason and, for a suspension, the duration.

In serious cases - typically a pattern of malicious edits - a moderator can remove a batch of your contributions in one action. That action is logged in full.

7.3 Appeals

You can appeal a warning, a suspension or a ban. Two limits, both enforced by the software rather than by goodwill:

• You have 30 days from when the sanction was issued.
• A decision made by an admin cannot be appealed inside Thespiary. An admin decision is final here.

Send a written statement explaining why you think the decision was wrong. A moderator who did not make the original decision, or an admin, reviews it and either upholds, reduces, or overturns it. If it is overturned, content removed because of it can be restored. You are told the outcome either way, and every outcome is recorded.

Every moderation action is written to an append-only audit log, including actions by admins.

8. The public API and the open data

Anyone can register for a free API key. Doing so means agreeing to this section.

8.1 What you give us to register

An email address and a short description of what you intend to build. The description helps us spot abusive registrations.

We email that address once, with a link that works once and for one hour; opening it makes your key and shows it to you. We keep your address, encrypted, so we can tell you about breaking changes to the API and look into abuse. Section 2.6 of the Privacy Policy says how it is used and when it is deleted.

8.2 Rules for using the API

• Read-only. There is no write access through the API, by design. All contributions go through the application so they pass validation and moderation.
• Keep your key secret. It is shown once, when you open the emailed link, and we store only a hash of it. Lose it and you rotate it; there is no recovery.
• Stay inside your rate limit. Standard keys get 1,000 requests an hour. Higher tiers exist in the design; the tooling to grant them is not built yet, so in practice everyone is on standard today.
• Over the limit you get an HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header. Respect it.
• Do not route around the limits with multiple keys or multiple addresses. If you need more, ask. If you need bulk data, take a dump - that is what it is for and it costs you nothing and us less.
• Attribute the data. See 8.4.
• Do not try to get at user data. The public API exposes none, and attempting to extract it is a breach of these terms as well as a bug worth reporting.
• Respect hidden performers. A person who has hidden their profile is absent from the API and the dumps entirely. Do not reconstruct them from older dumps and re-publish them.

We can revoke a key at any time for breach of these rules. You can revoke or rotate your own at any time.

8.3 What the data contains

Shows, productions, production venue stops, venues, performances, people, and cast and crew credits - active, human-reviewed records only. The people records carry the public profile details we hold for performers and crew: biography, official statement, website and Actors' Equity status.

It never contains user accounts, attendance, reviews, ratings, playbill images, raw extraction output, or storage keys.

8.4 The license, and the attribution you must give

The data is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. You may use it for anything, including commercially. You must credit it, and you must release anything you build from it under the same license.

The required attribution:

Data sourced from Thespiary (https://thespiary.com),
licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
Data contributors: the Thespiary community.

The ShareAlike condition is deliberate. It stops a well-funded actor from taking a community-built database, enriching it, and closing it off.

The license covers the data. It does not cover the Thespiary source code, which has its own license, and it does not cover playbill scans or the artwork and text printed in them - which are not ours to license and are never published anyway.

9. Ending things

You can leave whenever you like. Ask for deletion from your account settings. Your account is hidden immediately and erased permanently after 30 days, during which you can change your mind. Your archive contributions stay, without your name on them. The details are in the Privacy Policy.

We can suspend or close your account for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, following section 7. Where we can tell you first, we will.

Thespiary itself might end. It is one person's project. If it is going to shut down, we will give as much notice as we can and make sure you have a way to export your data first. The archive is openly licensed and dumps are public precisely so that it can outlive the site.

10. What we do and do not promise

Thespiary is provided as is, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied.

Concretely:

• The archive is crowd-sourced, and some of it is machine-read. It will contain errors. Do not rely on it for anything that matters - a legal claim, a contract, a broadcast, a CV - without checking a primary source.
• There is no uptime guarantee. No SLA, no support commitment, no promised response time. One person maintains this in their spare time.
• Data can be lost. We take backups and test them, but this is a hobby deployment, not a bank. Export anything you would be upset to lose.
• We protect your data as well as we reasonably can, but cannot guarantee it. We take the security measures described in the Privacy Policy, but no system is perfectly secure. We cannot promise that your data will never be lost, exposed or reached by someone who should not have it.
• Features described in the specifications may not exist. The public specifications are a design, not an inventory. Where the two differ, what the running software actually does is what you get.
• We are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss arising from your use of Thespiary, to the extent the law allows. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
• Other users' content is theirs. A review expresses its author's opinion, not ours. Reports go to support@thespiary.com.

11. Changes to these terms

These terms are versioned; the current version is at the top.

For a material change - anything affecting your rights, the license you grant, or what we may do with your material - we ask you to agree again before you carry on. The next time you use the site after the new version goes live, a short screen appears with links to the current terms and privacy policy and a box to tick; accepting returns you to what you were doing.

Until you accept, ordinary use pauses; your account settings, data export and account deletion keep working, so declining never locks you out of leaving.

Clarifications and typo fixes are not material and will not interrupt you.

Continuing to use Thespiary after a change means you accept it. If you do not, delete your account - and take your export first.

12. Law, and getting in touch

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Missouri, United States, and any dispute about them is to be brought in the state or federal courts located in Missouri. Nothing in them removes consumer rights you have that cannot be waived.

• Accounts, moderation, appeals, bugs: support@thespiary.com
• Privacy, exports, deletion: privacy@thespiary.com
• Copyright and takedown: copyright@thespiary.com

Thespiary is run by an individual. A postal address is available on request where one is genuinely needed.

The license

Thespiary's archive data is published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

You may:

• use the data for any purpose, including commercially;
• copy, redistribute, remix and build on it.

You must:

• attribute Thespiary, using the string below;
• share alike - license any derived database or dataset under CC BY-SA 4.0 as well;
• not add restrictions that stop anyone else doing the same.

The ShareAlike condition is deliberate. It means a well-funded actor cannot take a community-built database, enrich it, and close it off.

The attribution to use

Data sourced from Thespiary (https://thespiary.com),
licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
Data contributors: the Thespiary community.

Individual contributors are not named, and there is no per-record attribution to give. The community is credited collectively, by design.

What the license covers

The data. Not the Thespiary source code, which carries its own separate license.

And not playbill scans or the artwork, photographs and text printed in them. Those belong to their publishers. They are never in a dump, and we do not purport to license anyone else's work.

What is in a dump

Eight collections of shared archive records:

Only records that are active and human-reviewed are included. Credits that were read automatically off a playbill and never checked by a person are excluded, and so are pending, rejected, merged and deleted records.

Explicit-rated shows are included, as they are in the API. Every show record carries a content_rating field as an informational label; you can filter on it yourself.

What is never in a dump

No data from user accounts or logs. The dump does hold personal data about performers and crew - see above - but nothing about the people who use Thespiary. Specifically:

• No attendance records. Who saw what, and when, is never published - at any visibility setting, including "public".
• No reviews, ratings, tags or private notes. A review a user chose to show on a production page is visible on that page; it is not in the dump and is not in the API.
• No user accounts, display names, email addresses, locations or social connections.
• No contributor attribution. Credits are in the dump; who added them is not.
• No playbill scans, no raw extraction output, no media storage keys, and no signed URLs.

Performers who have hidden their profile are absent entirely - from the person records and from every credit that would have referenced them. This cannot be overridden by any parameter, key tier, or authentication level. If you are building on this data, please do not reconstruct hidden people from older dumps and republish them.

Two limits worth knowing

Dumps we have already published cannot be recalled. If someone deletes their account, or a performer hides their profile, they disappear from every future dump immediately - but a dated dump already downloaded is out of our hands. We ask consumers of this data to honor later removals rather than treat an old dump as permanent license.

The archive is crowd-sourced and partly machine-read. Credits extracted from a playbill are reviewed by a human before they reach a dump, but review is not proof. Expect errors, and check a primary source before relying on any record for something that matters.

Getting the data

Fetch it from https://thespiary.com/v1/open-data/dumps/latest.json. No API key is needed, and there is no charge.

If you need the whole dataset, take the dump rather than paging the API. It is one request instead of thousands, it is what the dump is for, and it costs us far less to serve.

Currently the dump is served as a single JSON document built on request. The nightly tarball with CSV files, checksums and CDN mirrors we plan is not available yet, so there are no dated archive URLs to link to either.