Registration notice
Texas and Valour
Hello, future Valournaut. If Texas is your legal home, we cannot welcome you aboard right now.
We refuse to store your biometric data or hand it to third parties, so we will take the registration hit instead.
Texas has joined a growing push to make online services verify ages and identities at the gate. Its App Store Accountability Act created a new age-verification system for app stores and developers. In July 2026, the Texas Attorney General also secured an agreement with Discord requiring age assurance for Texans and new restrictions on how minors use the service.
This is not a defense of Discord
Discord has serious child-safety and predator problems. We are not denying them, excusing them, or suggesting that protecting children can wait. Calling those failures acceptable would be absurd.
What we reject is the idea that a huge platform failing to staff, moderate, and police itself turns identity checks for innocent people into a civil-liberties victory. Hold Discord accountable. Invest in competent safety teams. Find predators and prosecute them. Do not treat every person who wants to speak online as a suspect who must first prove their identity.
The Texas agreement targets Discord and Texans today. The precedent and the identity machinery will not politely stay there. Once platforms build an identity checkpoint for one government, it is remarkably convenient to put that checkpoint in front of Americans in every state and Valournauts around the world.
Congress is pushing in the same direction. The KIDS Act passed the House in June 2026 with another collection of age, parental-control, and messaging rules. It is not law yet, but the destination is not subtle.
Our answer
We are not going to turn every Valournaut's face or government ID into a login credential. We are not going to give an identity vendor a seat at every Planet. New registrations for legal residents of Texas are paused instead.
Valour does not collect your state of residence, so we are not retroactively interrogating existing Valournauts about which patch of Earth they call home. The checkbox on registration is a one-time statement. We do not save it to your account.
If Texas changes course, we will happily reconsider. Until then, we would rather close one launch gate than build an identity checkpoint in front of everyone.