Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how Grimdark Ladder collects, uses, stores, and shares information when you use the platform.

1. Information We Collect

Depending on how you use the platform, we may collect:

• Authentication and account information provided through Clerk, such as your account identifier, name, and email address. When you first sign in, we use this information to pre-fill a username suggestion on the setup page, which you confirm or change before your profile is created.
• Profile information you provide, including username, bio, avatar, and contact details. City, state, and country are optional and only collected if you choose to add them in Settings.
• Competitive activity data, such as match submissions, confirmations, rankings, tournaments, leagues, club participation, Circle activity, and challenge activity
• Looking For a Game and scheduling data, including availability slots, booked challenge-linked slots, scheduled times, and related coordination state
• Club, league, and tournament management data, including invite code use, owner or co-owner roles, approvals, registration status, standings, league-specific player setup choices (including army lock-in selections and Discord connection status required by the organizer), and related participation records
• User-generated content, including Club Feed posts, challenge chat messages, descriptions, and other content you submit through the platform
• Army list text you submit for pre-game exchange, Threat Detection, or tournament list submission
• Threat Detection outputs and your most recent saved Threat Detection run
• Technical and operational data needed to operate, secure, and improve the service

2. How We Use Information

We may use this information to:

• Provide account access, ranking, match tracking, clubs, leagues, tournaments, Circle, and related platform features
• Support player coordination through challenges, chat, scheduling, availability browsing, and pre-game exchange
• Display public profile information, leaderboard data, tournament standings, and competitive history
• Send service-related emails and notifications, including challenge emails, Circle emails, initialized match emails, club post emails, alerts, and reminders
• Send Discord DMs for platform activity — including challenge notifications, match result notifications, and a weekly activity summary — if you have connected your Discord account and have not opted out in Settings
• Share your Discord username with another player in the notification they receive when you challenge them, unless you have disabled this in Settings
• Operate Threat Detection and related pre-game workflows
• Prevent abuse, investigate misuse, enforce platform rules, and protect service integrity
• Maintain, troubleshoot, and improve the platform

3. Public Information

Certain information is public by design. This may include your username, rating, rank, match history, and other profile or competitive information shown through public profile and leaderboard pages. Location information (city, state, country) is optional and only shown publicly if you have chosen to add it in Settings. Club, league, and tournament participation or standings may also be visible within relevant areas of the platform. Availability posts may also display the location and timing information you chose to publish.

4. Third-Party Services

We use third-party service providers to operate the platform. These include:

• Clerk for authentication and account management
• Supabase for database and storage infrastructure
• Zoho ZeptoMail for email delivery
• Groq and related processing used by the Threat Detection workflow
• Discord, when you connect your Discord account (required by some leagues) — your Discord identity is read for verification and may be stored as confirmation of connection status. If you have connected Discord and have not opted out, your Discord user ID may be used to send you notifications via Discord DM. When you issue a challenge, your Discord username (if connected) is included by default in the notification sent to the challenged player so they can reach you — you can turn this off in Settings under “Show Discord username in challenges”

These providers may process information as part of delivering their services to us. Their handling of data is subject to their own terms, privacy notices, and contractual arrangements. We do not sell your personal information to third parties for their own marketing.

5. Threat Detection and Army Lists

If you use Threat Detection or related pre-game list exchange features, the army list text you submit may be processed to normalize, analyze, and return structured results. We may also retain the most recent saved Threat Detection run associated with your account so you can reopen it later.

6. Challenge Chat and Email Notifications

If you use challenge chat, message content is stored so it can be shown to the participants in that accepted challenge. Challenge-chat messages may also trigger transactional email notifications to the other participant, subject to platform-side rate limits.

7. Emails and Notifications

Grimdark Ladder may send transactional or service-related emails connected to your use of the platform. These may include gameplay notifications, club announcements, tournament-related notices, reminders, alerts, and administrative communications. You can manage which notification categories you receive from the Settings page. Opting out of a category stops non-essential emails in that category; administrative and account-related communications may still be sent regardless of your preferences.

If you have connected your Discord account, Grimdark Ladder may send you Discord DMs for platform activity. These include transactional notifications — such as when you receive a challenge, when an opponent submits a match result against you, or when your submitted match result is confirmed — as well as a weekly activity summary covering your recent match results, standing changes, pending challenges, and availability activity across your leagues and clubs. When you receive a challenge notification, it may include the challenger's Discord username if they have one connected, letting you reach them directly to coordinate. Challengers can disable this from Settings (“Show Discord username in challenges”). You can opt out of all Discord DMs at any time from the Settings page; opting out stops future DMs without affecting your Discord connection or league membership.

8. Data Retention

We retain information for as long as reasonably necessary to operate the platform, maintain competitive records, enforce rules, meet legal obligations, resolve disputes, and protect the service. Some information may remain in backups, logs, or historical records for a period of time after deletion requests.

9. Your Choices and Requests

You can manage optional location information and control email notification preferences at any time from the Settings page. You can also opt out of Discord DMs from Settings without disconnecting your account. You may disconnect your Discord account from Settings at any time; note that some leagues require Discord connection and disconnecting may affect your ability to remain in or join those leagues. Army lock-in choices made during league player setup are associated with your league membership and may be visible to the league organizer. Usernames are permanent once set and cannot be changed. You may request deletion of your account or data by contacting us. We may keep certain information where necessary for legal, security, abuse-prevention, or recordkeeping purposes.

10. Children

Grimdark Ladder is not intended for children under 13.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the effective date on this page.

12. Contact

For privacy questions or requests, contact: contact@grimdarkladder.com

Last updated: May 8, 2026