Terms of service

1. Who and what these terms are about

These terms apply between you and Lilly Schramm (Schramm Software, c/o Online-Impressum.de #5241, Europaring 90, 53757 Sankt Augustin, Germany; “we”) for using dns.lgbt. Our privacy policy explains how we handle your data.

2. What dns.lgbt offers

dns.lgbt hosts DNS for your domains, free of charge: records, DNSSEC, statistics, an API, certbot, a key directory (WKD) and, for accounts whose limits allow it, proxied names and onion services. Our onion nodes also run as Tor relays, some as exits; this doesn’t use your account or your domains. We may change or remove features for a valid reason (such as security or the law) if the change is reasonable for you; hosting DNS for your domains, managing their records and DNSSEC stay. We tell you at least four weeks ahead about changes that noticeably affect you, unless security or the law requires them sooner.

3. Your account

• You sign up with an invite and must be at least 16 years old. Before you first use your account, we ask you to agree to these terms.
• Keep your password, recovery codes, passkeys, API tokens and certbot key to yourself: what is done with them counts as done by you. If you lose your password and every recovery code and passkey, we can’t give you your account back. Without an email address, we only tell you things in the app’s inbox.
• Support tickets are answered as soon as we can, without a promised time; write only about dns.lgbt and send nothing illegal or hurtful.

4. Your domains

• Only add domains you are entitled to manage. We don’t check this; if the holder tells us you aren’t entitled, we may remove the domain.
• Until a domain’s nameservers point to dns.lgbt, our nameservers answer for it with only its SOA and NS records. If they don’t point to us within 24 hours, or stop pointing to us and don’t come back within 24 hours, the domain is removed (10 minutes if you add it again within 7 days).
• Limits of an account, unless we agreed other ones with you: 100 domains, 1,000 records per domain, 60 changes a minute, one propagation check every 5 minutes, 100 WKD keys per domain, no proxied names and no onion services. Where we allow proxied names or onion services: 10 Mbit/s in each direction and 10 GB a month, then 128 kbit/s until the next month. We may adjust limits where this is reasonable for you.
• Records are public. You are responsible for what you put into them. With DNSSEC on, delete the DS record at your registrar before you move or delete a domain. Keep your own copy of records you can’t do without (your account page has a download).

5. What you must not use dns.lgbt for

dns.lgbt is made by and for the queer community, and it is antifascist. You must not use it for:

• anything illegal, or anything that infringes other people’s rights,
• phishing, malware, botnets, spam, fraud or impersonation,
• harassing, threatening, stalking, doxxing or outing people, or sharing private images of them without their consent,
• inciting hatred against people or demeaning them, for example because of their gender identity, sexual orientation, sex characteristics, sex, origin, skin colour, religion or disability,
• promoting fascism, Nazism or other far-right ideologies, denying or trivialising the Holocaust or other genocides, or glorifying violence or terror,
• attacking us or others, or probing our servers for weaknesses without our permission,
• getting around our limits or security measures.

6. Reporting illegal use

Anyone can report a domain or record they believe is illegal or breaks these terms, without an account: with our report form or by email to kontakt@schramm.software. Include the domain and, if possible, the records, why you believe they are illegal, and a statement that you believe in good faith that your report is accurate and complete. Name and email address are optional; with an email address, we confirm the report and tell you our decision. Never send us images of child sexual abuse. A person reads every report. We run nameservers, proxies and onion nodes, not websites: we can stop serving records, domains, proxied names or onion services, but we can’t delete content from other servers.

7. What we do about violations

If you break these terms or the law, we may ask you to fix it, remove or block records or domains, or close your account, choosing the mildest measure that works; in urgent cases we act at once. We tell you what we did and why, unless the law forbids it; reply to that email to have the decision looked at again. People make these decisions; the only automatic measures are rate limits, slowing traffic down once the monthly limit is used up, and removing domains not set up in time.

8. Availability

dns.lgbt is free, so we can’t promise it is always available. If we end the service, we tell you at least four weeks in advance, unless there is an important reason not to.

9. Liability

We are liable without limitation for intent and gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under the German Product Liability Act, for defects we fraudulently concealed and where we gave a guarantee. For slight negligence we are liable only for breaching an essential duty (one you may regularly rely on, such as serving your records as described), limited to the damage typical and foreseeable for this kind of agreement. These limits also apply to the people who work for us. If others make claims against us because of domains or records you are responsible for, you indemnify us against them, unless you are not at fault.

10. Ending the agreement

You can end it at any time by deleting your account on your account page. We can end it with four weeks’ notice by email, and either side without notice for good cause. When it ends, your domains and records are deleted.

11. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. The current version is always on this page, with its date at the top. If you don’t agree with a change, you can end the agreement by deleting your account.

12. Final provisions

German law applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods; if you are a consumer, the mandatory law of the country you live in still protects you. If you are a merchant, the place of jurisdiction is our place of business. We don’t take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.