Terms of Entry

1. What you are buying

Your entry fee buys a product, not a chance. In exchange for the fee you receive:

The Ring Craft Consensus Report, delivered by email immediately before the relevant sale begins;
The Ring Craft Review, delivered by email after the sale concludes; and
Your personal report card, a personalised assessment of your twenty answers against the consensus and the official results.

Auction Ring Craft is in part also a competition of skill and judgment. There is no element of chance in scoring, no prize pool, no winnings, and no payout of any kind. Recognition for the highest-scoring entrants (the "Top 5") consists of a certificate, a digital badge, and publication as described in clause 7. Nothing in Auction Ring Craft constitutes betting, wagering, gaming, or a lottery

2. Eligibility and one entry per person

One entry per person per Edition. Entries by bots, scripts, or on behalf of another person are void.
By entering you confirm that you are old enough to consent to the processing of your personal data in your country of residence, or that you have the consent of a parent or guardian.

3. How entry works

Registration. You provide an email address, a name for publication, your country of residence, and optionally a business name and industry role.
Your entry link. We email you a personal link that verifies your address, opens your entry, saves your progress automatically, and - after payment - allows amendments. Your link is personal to you. Anyone else using your link accesses your entry; keep it private. We are not responsible for amendments made by someone you shared your link with.
Payment is lodgement. Your entry is not lodged, and does not count in the consensus, until payment succeeds. Unpaid draft answers are discarded at the seal and never enter the dataset.
Amendments. After payment you may amend any answer via your entry link until the seal.
The seal. At the published seal time for the Edition, all lodged entries lock permanently. No entries, amendments, or withdrawals are possible after the seal.

4. Fee, taxes, and refunds

The entry fee is the amount displayed at checkout in the currency determined by your country of residence. All prices are tax-inclusive.
Payment is processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card details.
Once lodged you can change your answers as you wish prior to seal but your fee is never refundable.

5. Questions, scoring, and results

Each Edition consists of the published question set and its Ground Rules, which form part of these Terms for that Edition. The Ground Rules state exactly which official published figures decide each question.
Scoring is mechanical: official figures are entered once and scoring runs as deterministic queries. One point per correct answer. No discretion, no interpretation, no appeals against the official figures themselves.
Entrants level on points are separated by lodgement time. The entry with the earliest successful payment ranks highest. If two successful payments have the same recorded time, the entry registered earliest ranks highest.
If the official source restates a figure after we publish results, our published results stand. If a question becomes impossible to decide from the official source, the Ground Rules' fallback applies; if none applies, all entrants score that point.
Our determination of scores and placings, applied per the Ground Rules, is final.
We decide the answers. Auction Ring Craft applies the sales company's published figures per the Edition Schedule; the determination is ours alone. The sales company conducting any sale is not connected with Auction Ring Craft: it has not authorised, does not sponsor, and does not participate in the competition, and its name and marks are used only to identify the sale and the published figures that settle the answers.

6. Changes and service notices

We may correct a question, band, or Ground Rule before the seal where necessary (for example, a change in the official sale schedule). Affected paid entrants will be notified by email and may amend their answers up to the seal. We may send paid entrants transactional and service-critical messages at any time; these are part of the product and are not marketing.

7. Publication, the Top 5, and your name

Your individual answers are never published in attributable form. They contribute only to aggregate consensus figures.
If you finish in the Top 5, you consent to us publishing your name (and business name, if you provided one) and your placing in The Ring Craft Review, on the season leaderboard, and in promotion of the competition to the industry press. This is the only circumstance in which your name is published, and it is part of the recognition you enter to win.
We never publish field size or entry numbers, and no inference about them may be drawn from our silence.

8. Certificate and badge licence

Top 5 entrants receive a certificate and digital badge recording a verifiable fact: their placing, the Edition and year, and their score. The certificate certifies the scoreboard result only. It is not a qualification and does not certify expertise, competence, or professional standing of any kind.
We grant each Top 5 entrant a revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use their certificate, badge, and the Auction Ring Craft mark as they appear on those items, in their own promotion, on condition that:
- the Edition and year are always stated;
- the result is not misrepresented, exaggerated, or presented as a general credential; and
- the use does not suggest Auction Ring Craft endorses the entrant's business, services, or judgment beyond the recorded result.
We may revoke the licence on notice if these conditions are breached. On revocation, use of the badge and Ringcraft mark must cease within 14 days.

9. Intellectual property

The question sets, reports, consensus data, aggregated dataset, brand names, and report formats are our property. Your reports and report card are for your personal and internal business use; they may be quoted with attribution but not republished in full or resold. Your answers remain your own opinions; you grant us a perpetual licence to use them in anonymised and aggregated form only to produce the consensus, the reports, and the longitudinal dataset.

10. Liability

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded in your territory.
The reports and consensus are the aggregated opinions of entrants. They are provided for interest and self-assessment. They are not advice - commercial, investment, bloodstock, or otherwise - and we accept no liability for decisions made in reliance on them.
Subject to clause 10.1, our total liability to you in connection with an Edition is limited to the entry fee you paid for that Edition.

11. General

We may update these Terms between Editions; the Terms you accept at checkout govern that entry. Material changes affecting a live Edition will be notified to paid entrants.
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Country in which you nominate as residing without affecting your mandatory consumer rights at home.