The fine print, in plain English.

The Oregon Trail Archive is a free, non-commercial educational reference about the historic Oregon Trail (1841–1869). It is provided by independent editors as a public-interest archive. Using the site implies you have read and accepted these terms and the privacy policy.

The reading surface — encyclopedia, glossary, map, quiz, game pages, leaderboard, reviews — is open to everyone, including classroom audiences under 13. Reading or taking the quiz does not create any record about you beyond anonymous analytics described in the privacy policy.

Accounts are 13+ only. To create either a Google-backed account or a local profile you must be at least 13 years old, in line with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The sign-up flow asks for a year of birth — a neutral age screen, not a yes/no prompt — and an answer indicating under-13 will refuse the account. Visitors under 13 may continue to use every read-only page on the site without creating an account. Quiz scores can be submitted under a chosen display name without an account.

Posting a game review needs a Google sign-in. Reviewing is the one feature on the site that is gated behind authentication — for spam protection. The sign-in itself goes through the same 13+ age screen, so a child under 13 is never offered the option to submit a review here. Reading reviews, like everything else, is open.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe an account or submission was made by a child under 13, see the COPPA section of the privacy policy for how to have it removed.

• Read, link to, and quote any page on this site for classroom, research, journalism, or personal use.
• Reproduce short excerpts in classroom materials with attribution back to the page URL.
• Embed the static images we publish (illustrations, maps, photographs we hold rights to) in non-commercial educational contexts with attribution.
• Submit a review of a catalogued game from a signed-in account, using the pseudonym set in your dashboard (not your real full name).

• Republishing entire articles or large excerpts on commercial sites or behind paywalls without permission.
• Scraping the site at a rate that interferes with other users, or ignoring our robots.txt.
• Using the archive's name, logo, or design to imply endorsement of a product, party, or campaign.
• Submitting other people's personal information through any form on the site (events, contact, account creation, reviews, leaderboard names). This includes real full names of minors, email addresses, phone numbers, and school identifiers.
• Attempting to bypass the age-gate on account creation, or creating an account on behalf of a child under 13.

The Oregon Trail (1990). The playable build and screenshots reproduced on game pages are from the 1990 MS-DOS release. The Oregon Trail is © MECC / The Learning Company; trademarks belong to their respective owners. We reproduce those materials under fair use for educational and historical commentary, with no commercial intent and no claim of ownership.

Takedown. If you are a rights holder and believe a specific item exceeds fair use, email contact@oregontrail.ws with the URL and the basis for your claim. We respond within five business days and will remove or restrict access while we review.

Accounts are optional. You can read the whole archive, take the quiz, post a review, and appear on the leaderboard without one. An account is useful only if you want your quiz history and your review attribution to follow you across devices.

Two account paths are offered:

• Google sign-in — we receive your email and your Google display name (the latter is used by admins only; the public-facing site only ever shows the pseudonym you choose). This account syncs across devices.
• Local profile — a username and password you make up, encrypted on your own device and stored in your browser'slocalStorage. Nothing about a local profile is transmitted to or stored on our servers. It does not sync across devices, and we cannot recover a forgotten local password.

Any content you submit (event listings, reviews, leaderboard names) you keep the copyright of, but you grant the archive a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to display it on the site and in archived snapshots. We may remove or moderate content that violates these terms, exposes personal information about a third party, or is reported by a parent under the children's privacy flow in the privacy policy.

The archive is provided as is, without warranty. We make a real effort to be historically accurate and we cite our sources, but we cannot guarantee that every fact is correct, current, or fit for a particular use. Teachers and researchers should verify key details against primary sources before relying on them.

We will update the Effective date at the top of this page if we change anything material. Continued use of the site after a change counts as acceptance of the new terms, except where the law (COPPA, CCPA, GDPR) requires explicit re-consent.

Questions about these terms: contact@oregontrail.ws.