Terms, privacy and takedown
What this is
Three Lengths is practice, not a ruling. Every scenario, gloss, verdict and piece of reasoning on this site is originally authored. We cite rule numbers; we never reproduce the text of the Racing Rules of Sailing, which is published by World Sailing and whose digital rights are reserved. The same goes for the Case Book, the Call Books for match and team racing, and anyone else’s published scenarios. Three Lengths is not affiliated with, licensed by or endorsed by World Sailing, US Sailing or any national authority; we name them only to say whose rules we are talking about. If you believe something here reproduces protected text or a protected diagram, tell us and we will remove it.
Your data is yours
Your attempts and any scenarios you write belong to you. We will never paywall, degrade, or hold hostage your own data. You do not have to ask us for a copy or a deletion: both are buttons on your account page, and the copy is the whole of it as one file. Playing requires no account; if you never sign in, all we hold is an anonymous session id and the hearings you played. Anonymous sessions older than thirty days are deleted automatically.
If you close your account
Everything of yours goes: your decisions, your drafts, your comments and your sittings. Two things do not, and we would rather say so here than surprise you. Incidents you published stay up, because other sailors have decided them and their own records are built on those decisions — but your byline is removed and they read as set by a sailor. And because replies live under the comment they answer, deleting your comments deletes the replies other people wrote to them.
If you set an incident
You keep ownership and you get a byline. You are asserting that the incident, the facts and any reasoning are your own words, and you grant us permission to host and display them. We may hide anything reported by several people while we look at it.
Where our answers come from
Be clear about what this site is. No judge has reviewed anything here. Some incidents are written by us with an answer we stand behind; that is an editorial position, not a ruling. Most answers come from a weighted consensus of sailors who answered the question, and a consensus can be confidently wrong. Every answer says on its face which of those it is. Only an incident marked Ruled has actually been decided by a qualified official, and we will never use the word “reviewed” for anything else.
Reporting something, and disputing an answer
These are two different things and the buttons are separate. Every community hearing has a report button, for content that should not be here — copied rule text, abuse, anything aimed at a person. Three people reporting the same incident hides it straight away, pending a look from us. Disputing an answer is the other one, and it sits on every incident including our own. It says the answer is wrong rather than that the incident should go, so it hides nothing, no matter how many people file one; it puts the incident in front of a ruling official instead. Saying we got it wrong should never be a way to make something disappear. For copyright, privacy or anything that needs a person rather than a form, email hello@threelengths.com. We aim to answer within a few days, and we act faster on anything involving protected text or a named individual.
Corrections
We get things wrong, and so does the room. When an answer changes — because later opinion moved it, or because an official ruled the other way — every decision ever given on that incident is re-marked against the new answer, and any streak broken by our mistake is repaired. Nothing about your record is frozen against an answer we no longer believe. We would rather be publicly corrected than quietly wrong.