Work in progress. This document, together with the governance rules, terms of use and code of conduct below, is a living draft open to community discussion. It takes full force on 1 January 2027. Until then the community is invited to challenge, refine and add to it; changes made before that date need no amendment procedure.

Tool-assisted speedrunning (TAS) is the art of playing games beyond human limits. This art combines innovation, creativity, ingenuity, and skills to exploit games in astonishing ways. This organization is dedicated to the advancement, production, and archival of TAS works.

Every provision below carries a number, so any part of this document can be cited exactly: section 1 states what this community believes, section 2 how it governs itself, section 3 the terms of using the site, section 4 how we treat each other. A citation looks like § 2.3.4.

This craft exists because its pioneers developed and embraced tools for us to enjoy games in a whole different way. This site promotes and encourages the use of new tools and technologies to advance our hobby.

Similar to arXiv.org, works are archived the instant they are submitted; there is no centralized bureau deciding what is worthy. Reproducing and verifying works are open acts of the community, rewarded and open to anyone; merit is evaluated by the larger gaming community. Once a work is archived, it stays archived: better runs may supersede it, but no editorial opinion can erase it. The only hands that can are its authors' own: when every author of a work asks for it to be erased, it is erased, permanently and irrevocably.

The organization and all its channels are dedicated to the topic of TAS, speedrunning and gaming in general. No off-topic discussions, especially of controversial topics, shall be conducted here. Gaming is fun; politics is not.

We welcome everybody interested in this hobby. We do not screen for personality, identity, or beliefs. Nobody is, nor is expected to be, perfect. Everybody is given the chance to prove themselves and to learn from past mistakes.

What people do outside this site is outside our jurisdiction. We do not stalk anyone's social media, we do not join pile-ons, and we do not practice cancel culture. No one is suppressed here for non-criminal acts performed outside the site, whether today or in their past. Standing in this community is earned and lost by what you do here.

Rules are few and enforced with restraint. Every moderation action is justified, temporary, redeemable, and logged in the open together with the rule it enforces. Nothing is punished automatically: a human decides, and every decision can be appealed. No one is ever sanctioned for what they think or believe.

The goal of this organization is to increase the amount of joy in the world. Malicious acts will be suppressed and, where warranted, legally pursued. These include discrimination (against or in favor of any group), hatred, abuse, bullying, and intentional acts that hurt the sustainability, technical integrity, legal status, or reputation of the organization.

Open source, open data, open verification. Anyone can clone the archive, re-run any movie, and rebuild the entire site. In addition, all code repositories should be public and offered with free licensing.

Every contribution is honestly attributed to every human who shaped it. Disclosing your tools and methods is a badge, never a confession, and never an obligation. The one unforgivable act is claiming work that is not yours.

This is a labor of love, not a business. No ads, no paywalls, no premium tiers, no data sold, no sponsorships steering content, and no commercial purpose of any kind. Everything here is free to use, free to copy, and free to build upon, and it will stay that way.

The principles in section 1 say what we believe. This says who decides what. It is written to guarantee, as far as any document can, that the community always steers this organization: power is granted openly, exercised in the open, and always answers to the people it serves.

2.1.1 A simple majority means more than half of the votes cast within a seven-day voting window. There is no quorum; absence counts as abstention.

2.1.2 A hard majority means at least two thirds (66%) of all sitting Committee members, not just those who voted.

2.2.1 The Founder carries the legal, technical, and financial responsibility for the site.

2.2.2 The Founder's role is permanent.

2.2.3 The Founder may veto a Committee decision: once per decision, in public, with reasons.

2.2.4 The Founder's veto never applies to moderation decisions.

2.2.5 A hard majority of the Committee overrides a Founder veto.

2.2.6 The site must be able to operate without the intervention of the Founder.

2.3.1 The Committee steers all strategic decisions: initiatives, appointments, and direction.

2.3.2 Every initiative is proposed publicly on the forum before it is voted, and anyone may discuss it there.

2.3.3 Ordinary decisions pass by simple majority.

2.3.4 Overriding a Founder veto requires a hard majority.

2.3.5 Removing a member from any role requires a hard majority.

2.3.6 Amending this document requires a hard majority, and only after a 14-day public comment period.

2.3.7 Committee votes are public and named.

2.3.8 Only votes concerning individual people may be held by secret ballot; the tally is always published.

2.3.9 Appointments are meritocratic: proven contribution to the TAS hobby, in any capacity, is the qualification.

2.3.10 The Committee has no fixed size, but stays commensurate with the size of the community it serves.

2.3.11 Members must abstain from votes in which they are personally involved.

2.3.12 In case of prolonged absence, infrastructural decay (domain or hosting lost), or manifest anti-community behavior from the Founder, the Steering Committee has the responsibility of migrating the site and archive to a new safe haven and designating a new Founder by hard majority.

2.3.13 Every role, and every grant and every removal of one, is recorded in public together with the decision that made it. That record is the only one, and nothing outside it grants a role.

2.4.1 Moderators are appointed by the Committee by simple majority.

2.4.2 Moderators enforce the rules on everyone: community, Experts, Committee, and Founder alike.

2.4.3 The Founder cannot veto a moderation decision.

2.4.4 The Committee can override a moderation decision by simple majority.

2.4.5 Moderators may admonish, but not remove, the Founder or Committee members.

2.4.6 Removing a Committee member requires the Committee's removal process first.

2.4.7 Every moderation act is justified in public, logged permanently, appealable, and never automatic.

2.5.1 Experts are the authorities on their games and game groups.

2.5.2 Experts decide categories and goals, verification criteria, game presentation, and disputes.

2.5.3 Any single Committee member may appoint an Expert at any time.

2.5.4 Any Expert appointment may be annulled by the Committee by simple majority vote.

2.5.5 Group Experts approve new games in their group.

2.5.6 Group Experts appoint game-specific Experts under them.

2.5.7 Experts curate the rules of the game and its goals. They do not evaluate quality; the community does, by liking, verifying, and reproducing.

2.5.8 A site-wide Expert may attest an identity: state on the record that a member is the author whose name is reserved for them, saying how they verified it. The attestation is public, appears in the moderation log, names the Expert, and may be challenged and undone. It is the one place this archive accepts a judgement in place of a proof, and it exists because proof cannot be demanded from somebody whose account at another site is inactive, restricted or banned.

2.6.1 Any member may appeal a moderation decision; the Committee decides appeals.

2.6.2 The community may propose initiatives to change any way in which the site operates, to remove anybody from the role defined above, or to modify this document.

2.6.3 An initiative voted postively by at least 10% of the published authors and contributor base must be evaluated and voted for by the steering committee.

2.6.4 An initiative voted positively by more than 50% of the published authors and contributor base is binding and cannot be vetoed.

2.6.4 The archive is open data and the site is open source, so the community holds the ultimate veto that no document can grant or remove: everything here can be forked.

2.7.1 No role (Founder, Committee, Moderator, or Expert) may rank or unrank a run by decree.

2.7.2 Nobody may alter the archive's history or erase a contribution. The one erasure this organization performs is the one 3.1 describes, at the unanimous request of a work's authors, and it is performed as a service to them rather than as an act of moderation.

2.7.3 Nobody may moderate outside the public log.

2.7.4 A run's status is derived from the community's recorded acts, always.

2.7.5 If a decision wasn't made in the open, it wasn't made.

3.1 Every archived work stays archived. Better runs supersede it; nothing is erased by us. A work is erased only when every author credited on it asks for that, and then it is erased permanently and irrevocably: the movie, the notes, the thumbnail and the record all go, and we do not keep a copy.

3.2 You keep authorship of what you submit, and you grant this archive the right to distribute it under CC BY 4.0. Works imported from TASVideos keep their original CC BY 2.0 terms.

3.3 Honest attribution of every human author is the one hard rule. Disclosing the tools you used to create the work is required for reproduction, disclosing the use of any other tools (e.g., bots, AI) is optional.

3.4 Never upload ROMs or any other copyrighted game data.

3.5 The minimum age to hold an account is 13.

3.6 The archive is open data and the site is open source: anyone may clone, verify and fork everything here.

3.7 A work already published elsewhere may be imported here by its author, and the automatic import accepts a work only when that author is its sole author. A collaborative work needs the authorization of every author credited on it. No mechanism for collecting that authorization exists yet, so for now a collaborative work cannot be imported at all, by anyone; the import lists such works and says so rather than pretending they are missing. Imports made before this rule were erased.

3.8 An identity is claimed by asking, and a site-wide Expert attests it (2.5.8). A ban, a restriction or years of inactivity at another site never blocks a claim and never follows anybody here: the works stay archived, the name stays held, and the person is welcome (1.4, 1.5).

3.9 An author may have their own name removed from the credits of a work they worked on, without giving a reason. The work stays, credited to the authors who remain. If they are the only author, the request is a request to erase the work, and 3.1 governs it.

4.1 Be here for the games. Discussion stays about TAS, the works and the craft.

4.2 Act in good faith, and assume it in others.

4.3 Criticize the work, never the person.

4.4 Everybody is welcome. Harassment and discrimination are not.

4.5 Moderation is restrained, justified in public, logged, and appealable.

What we ask of you, what we keep, and what we will never do with it. The short version: we want as little about you as possible, and we sell none of it.

5.1 Reading this archive requires nothing. No account, no sign-in, no tracking cookie, no consent banner, because there is nothing to consent to.

5.2 Taking part requires an account on our forum, and an account is three things: a username you choose, an email address, and a password. We never ask for your real name, your age beyond confirming you are at least 13, your location, your phone number, or anything else.

5.3 Your password is never stored. What is stored is a bcrypt hash of it, which is a one way transformation: it cannot be turned back into your password by us or by anyone who obtained it. If you lose your password nobody can recover it for you; it can only be reset.

5.4 Your email address is used to confirm your account, to let you reset your password, and to send you the notifications you asked for. It is never shown on the site, never given, sold, rented, traded or lent to anybody, and never used to advertise anything to you.

5.4.1 There is one exception, and it applies only to you, only while you ask for something, and only in part. If you file a claim to a name held for an author elsewhere, the Steering Committee sees an obfuscated form of the address on your account while that claim is open, so they can tell whether it is the address that author would have: sergiomartin86@gmail.com is shown to them as se********86@g****.com. The whole address is never shown to them. Neither form is ever written into the archive, published, or stored anywhere outside the forum's own account database; it is worked out at the moment they look and kept nowhere. Filing a claim is how you agree to that, and anybody who would rather not can ask on the forum instead.

5.5 We run no analytics. No Google Analytics, no tracking pixels, no fingerprinting, no advertising network, no profiling, and no third party measuring what you read here. The site sets no cookie at all until you log in, and the only cookie after that identifies your session.

5.6 The forum keeps ordinary web server records, including IP addresses, because refusing spam and abuse is impossible without them. They are kept while they are useful for that purpose and no longer, and they are never used to build a picture of you.

5.7 The archive itself holds no personal data. It holds the username you chose and what you contributed: your runs, your reproductions, your verifications, your console verifications, your stars, your notes. No email address, no IP address and no account data ever enters it. Your browser remembers your theme and your view preferences on your own device, and those never leave it.

5.8 Your contributions are public and permanent, by design and by 1.2. The archive is a git repository that anybody may clone, and many have. If you ask us to delete your account, we delete the account, the email address and the personal data behind it, and the archived work stays under the name it was credited to. Two rights go further than that, and they are yours: you may have your own name taken off a work's credits (3.8), and a work is erased outright when every author credited on it asks for that (3.1). What we cannot do is reach into the copies other people already cloned, which is the honest limit of any erasure from a public repository.

5.9 Some of what a page shows comes from somewhere else, and loading it means your browser talks to that somewhere else, which sees your IP address as any web server does. This is the honest list: the site and the archive files are served by GitHub; a run's video is embedded from the platform its author published it on (YouTube through its no cookie domain, Niconico, Bilibili, Vimeo, Dailymotion or the Internet Archive); our own posts on the front page come from Bluesky; and an author's notes may embed images they host elsewhere. None of them receives your email address, your password or anything from your account. Each is governed by its own privacy policy, not ours.

5.10 The forum and the archivist run on our own server in Geneva, Switzerland. The site and the archive are hosted by GitHub in the United States. Email we send you passes through Infomaniak's mail servers in Switzerland. Nobody else processes anything for us.

5.11 You may see what we hold about you, correct it, export it, or have it deleted. Two ways to ask, and neither needs a lawyer: write to the address published on the forum's about page, or send a private message to the administrators there. If you hold an account, the second is quickest. If you do not hold an account and want to be uncredited, or credited differently, in work someone else submitted, the first reaches us all the same. We answer as people, not as a ticketing system, and we ask nothing of you beyond enough to know the request is really yours.

5.12 If this policy ever changes, the change is a public commit in this repository with a date and an author, like everything else here. Nothing about your privacy is decided in private.