Plain-English terms for contributing to the equipment database. By submitting a contribution you agree to everything on this page.
The equipment database, including your contributions, is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0). In plain terms: anyone may use, copy, adapt, and build on the data — including commercially — as long as they (1) credit the Golf Equipment Database (golfequipmentdatabase.com) and (2) release any adapted version under this same open license. That “ShareAlike” condition is the point: it keeps the data — and everything built from it — permanently open, so no one can take the community's work and lock it away. By contributing, you irrevocably license your contribution to everyone under these terms. See the license page for the plain-English version.
The public database is free forever, funded by the fitting platform that GolferX operates — not by gating or reselling the data. Your contributions are licensed to everyone, including GolferX, under the same CC BY-SA terms: we take no special or proprietary rights beyond that public license. Like the source code (contributed under the Developer Certificate of Origin), the data stays genuinely open — no one, including us, can close it, gate it, hide it, or bias it. The charter forbids that, and it's the whole point.
Every contribution is publicly credited to the display name you choose — your email address is never shown and never appears in the public data. The contribution log is permanent and append-only: if you later delete your account, your email and sign-in are removed, but past contributions remain in the log attributed to your display name. Pick a pseudonym if you prefer.
Contribute facts you can cite: OEM spec pages and PDFs, or your own measurements (say so — measured data is welcome and labeled as such). Submissions publish immediately marked unreviewed; a verified badge requires the citation to be confirmed on review. Don't submit marketing copy as fact, other databases' compiled work, guesses presented as measurements, or vandalism — accounts that do are removed, and the append-only log means the evidence stays.
Contributions can be approved, reverted, or have their citations confirmed by the site's maintainers. Reverted contributions stay in the historical log but stop affecting displayed values. Moderation decisions are final, though you can always submit a better-sourced follow-up.
We store your email (for sign-in only), your display name, and your contributions. No passwords are ever stored — sign-in is by single-use email link. You can delete your account at any time from the contribute page; deletion removes your email and sessions immediately. See the privacy policy for the rest.
My Bag lets you record the clubs you play and how each is built. Unlike contributions, this is private data, not part of the public dataset: it is stored against your account, visible only to you, never published under CC BY-SA, and deleted when you delete your account.
So that the database can learn how equipment is actually built and played — which shafts are paired with which heads, real playing lengths, how far lofts get bent — you agree that we may use My Bag data in anonymized, aggregated form only. Before any such use it is stripped of your email, display name and account identifier, and combined with other golfers' data; the aggregated results are never shared in a way that identifies you. Aggregated or derived insights (not your individual bag records) may be published openly or used commercially by GolferX, Inc.. You can stop future use by deleting your bag or your account; aggregated figures already derived cannot be traced back to you and are not reversed.