Privacy Policy
This policy explains what Debate Tournament collects, why, and who sees it. It is written to be read: what matters most is that we collect only what running a debate tournament needs, we do not sell anything, and the sensitive material — ballots, results, feedback — is visible only to the people it concerns.
1. Who we are
“Debate Tournament” is an online platform for running competitive debating tournaments. Sign-in, debate rooms and voice are provided through Discord; the tab room (draws, motions, results, feedback) runs here. In this policy, “we” means the operators of this platform, and “the tab room” means the administrators of a particular tournament who enter and publish its data.
2. Information we collect
2.1 From your Discord account
Signing in is done through Discord OAuth, and only with the scopes needed to run a tournament. We receive and store:
Your Discord user id, username and display name
Your email address, where Discord reports it as verified
That you joined the tournament’s Discord server
A short-lived sign-in token, kept in your browser and never shown to other users
We never see and never store your Discord password. Your Discord avatar is not copied: the site instead offers a generated cartoon avatar you control (see 2.3).
2.2 Your profile and tournament data
To put you in a draw and report your results, we store:
The profile you choose to give: name, alias, and optionally gender or pronouns
Your team, its members, its seeding and its results at each tournament
Check-ins, room assignments and the debates you were allocated to
Ballots and adjudication feedback that name you as a judge or participant
Rooms and venues you prefer, if you choose to record them
If a tournament is run with anonymised team names, the anonymised name is what the public sees; your account stays visible only to the tab room. You may also mark your account anonymous, which hides your name from public pages entirely.
2.3 Generated avatars
The site offers a cartoon avatar drawn in your browser from a small recipe of numbers. The drawing code never leaves your browser; only the finished image, and only if you choose to save it, is stored with your account. If you never make one, the site invents a temporary one locally — nothing about it is transmitted.
2.4 Messages and recordings
Text chat inside the platform is stored so a debate’s history can be shown. Where a tournament records debates, audio is stored by the recording service and attached to the debate it belongs to; who may play a recording is decided by the tab room, and a recording is never public by default.
2.5 Payments
Where a tournament charges entry, payments are handled by a payment processor (currently Stripe). We never receive or store your card details — only the payment reference and the credit it produced on your account.
2.6 Technical data
Like any web service, our servers log requests: IP addresses, browser type and error traces, kept for troubleshooting and abuse prevention.
3. How we use it
We use the information above to:
Sign you in and link your account to your Discord presence
Build the draw, allocate rooms and adjudicators, and run the rounds
Move you into your debate’s Discord room when the round starts
Collect ballots and feedback, and publish results and breaks
Show you your own schedule, results and feedback
Send tournament announcements — draw released, round started, and the like
Keep the service secure and the tab room honest about who did what
We do not use tournament data for advertising, we do not profile you, and we do not sell or rent any of it.
4. Who sees your information
Sharing is limited to what a tournament needs to work:
The tab room of your tournament sees your roster entry, results and feedback. They entered you, and they run your competition.
Other participants see what a paper tournament would publish: the draw, the motion, your team name, who judged, and results and standings where the tab room has published them.
Discord is a separate service with its own privacy policy. Your use of it — the servers, the voice rooms, its messages — is governed by Discord, not by us.
Processors — cloud hosting, the payment processor, the recording storage — act on our instructions to run the service.
Private ballot and feedback links contain a secret key that stands in for your login on those pages. The key is yours; anyone you give it to can submit a ballot as you, so it is never published and is only ever shown to you and the tab room.
5. Security
Sign-in tokens are short-lived signed credentials held only in your browser, and are delivered in a way that keeps them out of server logs. Administrator passwords are stored only as salted hashes. Access to tournament data is checked against your role in that tournament on every request, not assumed. No web service can promise perfect security, and we do not promise it either — but the design keeps the most sensitive data (ballots, feedback, results before publication) behind the smallest door we can build.
6. How long we keep it
Tournament data is kept while the tournament exists and for a reasonable archival period afterwards, because standings, breaks and feedback are worth returning to. Your account and profile last until you or the platform administrator deletes them. Requesting deletion of your account removes your profile and sign-in; results already published to a completed tournament are part of that tournament’s record and may be retained, with your name removed on request.
7. Your choices and rights
You can, without contacting anyone:
Edit your name, alias, gender and pronouns on your profile page
Create, change or remove your generated avatar
Mark your account anonymous to hide your name from public pages
Sign out at any time, which clears your session from the browser
Beyond that, depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, export or delete your personal information, and to object to or restrict its processing. To exercise them, contact the platform administrator through the contact link on this site. You can also disconnect this site from your Discord account at any time from your Discord settings; your sign-in here ends with it.
8. Children
Tournaments on this platform are typically run for schools and universities, and some participants are minors. We collect the minimum the tab room needs — a name and a Discord link — and nothing is published publicly without the tab room choosing to publish it. If you are a parent or guardian and want information about a minor removed, contact the tournament’s tab room or the platform administrator.
9. Changes to this policy
If this policy changes materially, the updated version will be posted on this page. Continued use of the platform after a change means the updated policy applies to you.
10. Contact
Questions, requests and complaints can go to the platform administrator through the contact link on this site. For anything about a specific tournament — your entry, a result, a recording — the fastest answer usually comes from that tournament’s tab room.