Terms of use

What is Shkola

An open catalog of retro consoles, handhelds, accessories, and games, plus collectible cards made from photos of your own items.

Who can use it

The service is for people aged 13 and over. Sign-in is through Telegram, Google or e-mail and password. One person - one account. You are responsible for access to your account (Telegram, Google or e-mail): everything done from your account is considered done by you.

Cards

The card is made from a photo of an item you own. Each card number is unique and never repeats.

New cards are public by default: they appear in the feed on the home page, in your public museum (retro.school/museum/your-nick) and via link, together with your nickname. You can hide any card on its page and turn off public visibility for new cards in Settings. Under 16, new cards are visible only to you by default.

Finish rarity is assigned once when the card is issued and never changes after that. You can’t edit an issued card, but you can delete it anytime.

Cards can’t be bought, sold, or exchanged for money inside the service. They’re not securities, digital assets, or NFTs. If such features are added, they’ll have their own separate terms.

Your photos and corrections

You keep the rights to your photos. By uploading a photo, you allow Shkola to store and process it for free and on a non-exclusive basis (to recognize the item, remove the background) and to display it in the service: on the card, in the item’s gallery, on the public card, in the feed, in the public museum, and in link previews for them - until the photo or card is deleted.

By submitting a catalog correction, you allow it to be used in the open catalog. Facts (dates, codes, units produced) don’t belong to anyone, so an accepted correction stays in the catalog even after you delete your account, just without your name.

Photos for the catalog: rules and licence

If you send a photo of an item to appear in the catalog (the “Your photo” button or “Suggest a correction” - “Photo”), you confirm that you took it yourself or have the right to use it, and you accept these rules. We store the version of the rules and the time of your consent together with the photo.

You keep the authorship. You give Shkola a free non-exclusive worldwide licence for as long as the photo is published: to show it on retro.school and in the Shkola app (including Telegram), in collectible cards and their previews, in search, in the feed and on the project’s social networks, and to store, resize, crop, remove the background and credit the photo with your nickname. We may pass these rights to services that Shkola cannot work without (hosting, search, the project’s social networks).

Send only photos of the item itself: no people, faces, documents, addresses or personal data, and no other people’s pictures, screenshots or advertising images. A photo enters the catalog after review. We may decline without giving a reason and remove a photo later if it does not fit.

You can ask us to remove your photo: via “Suggest a correction” or in Telegram @retro_school_bot. We will remove it from the site and the app. We cannot remove copies already saved by search engines or third parties, but we will ask them to refresh their data.

Any payments to authors for photos are a voluntary programme with no guarantees. If we launch it, we will describe the terms separately; these rules do not promise money.

Game hall

In the game hall some games can be launched right on the game page. To play, you need to sign in to Shkola.

We do not store commercial games and do not distribute their files. Such games open in the Internet Archive player (archive.org) and the files stay with them. Games under free licenses, for example homebrew with the author’s license, run in our player: the file is published unchanged and the page names the author, license and source.

The rights to the games belong to their rights holders. If you are a rights holder and want a game removed, write to egor.fermin@gmail.com and we will remove it within a reasonable time.

The game runs in your browser and the saves stay in it. Shkola is not responsible for how the emulator works or for the content of third-party players.

Forum

On the forum, you post messages under your name (username). The text stays yours; you allow Shkola to show it on the site for free as long as it’s published.

You can’t post insults, spam, other people’s personal data, links to download games and ROMs, or other content that violates someone’s rights or the law. Messages aren’t checked in advance: the admin reviews reports and removes messages that break the rules, and repeat offenders lose access to the forum.

The Buy & Sell section has listings from members. Shkola doesn’t sell items, accept payments, mediate deals, or take responsibility for them: check the item and seller yourself.

You can attach photos, PDF and TXT files, and links to messages. Photos are re-encoded and checked automatically; files and external links are checked with VirusTotal, and anything that fails is removed or hidden. Attachments must still follow the forum rules, and you keep the rights to your files.

You can leave a review and a rating from 1 to 5 under catalog items (one review per item, which you can edit or delete). Reviews are published right away, without links; the average rating is based only on members’ reviews. The rules are the same as on the forum: reviews that break them are removed if reported.

Rules

Only upload your own photos or ones you have rights to. Don’t pass off someone else’s item as yours, and don’t fake the verification code on paper.

Not allowed: insults, spam, illegal content, game ROMs, and links to pirated copies.

Likes and follows - only from real people: boosting with bots or multiple accounts isn’t allowed, and we remove these marks.

You can’t bypass the service’s limits and protections or collect data automatically in a way that disrupts its work.

Moderation

We may reject or remove photos, corrections, or cards that violate these rules, and restrict the offending account. The bot notifies you about decisions on photos and corrections.

Catalog, prices, and rarity

Catalog data is collected from open sources, and each entry lists its source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), Wikidata (CC0), Wikimedia Commons photos with authors and licenses, RAWG, retroplace, and others. AI-generated illustrations are marked.

Prices are medians of listings and sales on open marketplaces in Ukraine and Europe. This is a reference point, not a valuation of your item, an offer to buy, or investment advice.

Rarity is calculated using a formula based on the units produced (with source) and the number of listings, and it can be wrong. Found a mistake? Tap “Suggest a correction”.

Rights to the catalog and materials

The Shkola catalog is a database that took a lot of work: selecting, verifying, and linking entries, prices, and rarity. You’re free to view it, share links, and quote individual entries with a link to retro.school. Copying or scraping the entire catalog or a substantial part of it, including by programs and bots, without written permission is not allowed.

Card design, interface, and text on Shkola belong to the project. Members’ photos belong to their authors, and others may not use them without the author’s permission.

Photos from open sources (Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, and others) are shown under their free licenses, with the author and license listed for each, and you can use them under the terms of those licenses. If we edited a photo (for example, removed the background), the edited version is distributed under the same license with the note “edited: retro.school”. Illustrations marked “AI” are created from such photos and are distributed under the license of the original photo.

Some photos are shown from source websites (for example, Nookipedia): the credit under such an image names the author and the site with a link, and no license is given because they have no free license. The rights to these images belong to their owners. A rights holder can write to us via “Suggest a correction” or in Telegram @retro_school_bot, and we will remove the photo.

YouTube videos and game descriptions

Videos on the site are shown through YouTube API Services. By watching them, you agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms. Rights to the videos belong to their creators; the channel is listed under each video.

Game descriptions are taken from the IGDB database (igdb.com); Russian and Ukrainian translations are generated automatically.

Trademarks

Console and game names are trademarks of their owners. Shkola isn’t affiliated with Nintendo, Sony, Sega, Microsoft, or other manufacturers and isn’t their official service.

Responsibility

The service is provided “as is”. We try to keep it running smoothly and the data accurate, but we can’t guarantee it. Shkola isn’t responsible for deals between people outside the service.

Deletion

You can delete your cards or your whole account anytime in Settings. What exactly gets erased and when is covered in the Privacy Policy.

Changes to the terms

We publish new versions here with the update date. We’ll notify you in the app in advance about major changes.

Contacts

Owner of the Shkola project. Operator details will be provided before paid features launch. Questions: egor.fermin@gmail.com.