Villages Ltd — Legal
Community Guidelines
What Villages is for
Villages is for constructive local community — a small group of neighbours who share one village, one Town Hall, and the ordinary business of living near each other. It is not a broadcast network and it is not somewhere to build an audience.
Most of what follows is what you would expect from anyone sharing a room with you. It is written down because the app sends people to real places to meet each other, and that raises the stakes.
What is not allowed
Illegal material. Anything unlawful, and anything that facilitates something unlawful.
Threats and violence. Threatening someone, encouraging violence against them, or glorifying it.
Targeted harassment. Repeatedly going after a person, pile-ons, and content designed to humiliate or intimidate someone in particular. A village is small. Harassment here is felt.
Hate. Attacking or demeaning people for who they are — race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
Sexual exploitation. Any sexual content involving minors, any non-consensual sexual content, and any sexual content involving someone who cannot consent. This is reported to the authorities, not just removed.
Other people's personal information. Do not post someone's address, phone number, workplace, location or any other identifying detail without their consent. This applies to people who are not on Villages as much as to people who are.
Spam and scams. Bulk or repetitive posting, commercial spam, phishing, fraud, and anything engineered to extract money or credentials from your neighbours.
Unsafe directions. Do not send people to a place that is dangerous, that you have no right to invite them into, or that you have misrepresented. Gathering details should be true.
Using Villages to track someone. Do not use the app, or anything you learn through it, to monitor another person's movements or to work out where they live or will be. The product is built so that it cannot help you do this. Do not attempt it anyway.
Impersonation. Do not pretend to be someone else, or to hold a role in a village that you do not hold.
Meeting in person
Villages deliberately sends you to real places. Take the same care you would with any stranger: tell someone where you are going, meet somewhere public the first time, and leave if it does not feel right.
In an emergency, call the emergency services. Reporting something in Villages sends it to a queue that a human reads. It is not an emergency service, it is not watched around the clock, and it cannot bring help to you. If someone is in danger, contact the emergency services in your country directly.
Villages does not vet venues and does not verify who turns up. That is set out in more detail in the Terms of Service.
How to report something
Every post, comment, gathering and profile has a Report action. Use it. A report asks you to pick a reason — abuse, harassment, hate, sexual content, spam, or other — and lets you add details if that helps. It goes straight to the moderation queue, where a human reviews it.
Reports are not visible to the person you reported. You can see the reports you have made; you cannot see anyone else's.
Letters are a special case, and we would rather be straight with you about it. A letter's text is deliberately readable only by the person it was written to, once they collect it at the Town Hall. Our moderators cannot read it either — the database does not give them access. That is a privacy decision we stand behind, but it means a harmful letter cannot be reviewed the way a post can. If you receive a letter that breaks these guidelines, report the sender's profile and write to support@villages.mobile, and tell us what happened in your own words.
Open decision
There is no in-app report route attached to a letter itself, and moderators cannot see letter content. How a letter complaint is handled — what evidence is asked for, what action can be taken on the strength of a recipient's account alone — must be decided by the founder and counsel and then written into this section.
How to block someone
Blocking is available on another member's account. Blocking stops that account's new Town Hall items appearing in your feed. It is for you, and it does not notify them.
Blocking is not the same as reporting. If someone has broken these guidelines, please report them as well — blocking protects you, reporting protects everyone else.
What we do about it
Before content appears. Posts, comments and gatherings are screened automatically. Text the automated screen judges safe is published; images are always held for a person to look at rather than approved automatically. That means an image may take longer to appear. We think that is the right trade.
Automated screening is imperfect in both directions — it will occasionally hold something harmless and occasionally miss something it should have caught. That is why reporting matters.
After a report. A human reads it. Depending on what they find, moderators may remove or hide content, restrict what an account can do, suspend or terminate an account, preserve relevant records, and cooperate with lawful requests from authorities.
How quickly.
Open decision — stated plainly rather than papered over
Villages has an internal triage target, but has not yet decided the response time it is willing to publish, and we are not going to print a number we cannot yet stand behind. The founder and counsel must set the published response time before launch, and it must then be stated here — how quickly a report is acknowledged, and how quickly a decision is made.
Appeals.
Open decision
There is no appeals process yet for a removal, restriction or termination. One must be decided and described here.
If you disagree with a decision
Write to support@villages.mobile and tell us what happened. Until the appeals process above is settled, that is the route.
Changes
These guidelines will change as Villages grows. When they do, we will update this document and the revision date at the top.
Contact
support@villages.mobile
Villages Ltd, registration in progress