Support

Emergencies come first

In an emergency, call the emergency services. Reporting something in Villages sends it to a moderation 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 you or anyone else is in danger, in need of medical help, or a crime is happening, contact the emergency services in your country directly. Do not rely on any feature of this app, or on this email address, to do that for you.

How to write to us

Email support@villages.mobile. It is the right address for all of the following:

• an account problem — sign-in trouble, or the belief that someone else is using your account;
• a moderation decision you disagree with — see Appeals below;
• a privacy request, or a question about the Privacy Policy;
• a billing question about village stewardship — noting that App Store refunds and cancellations are handled by Apple, not by us;
• a letter that broke the Community Guidelines, which cannot be reported in the app for the reason set out below;
• a copyright complaint — put Copyright in the subject line, and see section 5 of the Terms for what to include;
• anything else you cannot resolve inside the app.

Tell us what happened, and include your handle and the name of your village. If it is about a specific post, comment, gathering or profile, please report it in the app as well — that puts it in the moderation queue directly.

Reporting content or an account

Do this from inside the app, where it reaches a moderator fastest.

Every post, comment, gathering and profile has a Report action. 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.

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.

Letters are a special case

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, and there is no in-app report route attached to a letter itself.

We still act on it. A letter complaint is worked on the metadata we do hold, on patterns in the sender's wider behaviour, and on your own written account of what the letter said — which we treat as evidence. A complaint is not dismissed because we cannot read the letter. Action up to termination of the sender's account can follow.

What to do. Report the sender's profile in the app, and write to support@villages.mobile telling us what happened in your own words.

Intended, not yet built. We intend to let a recipient voluntarily attach the text of a collected letter to a complaint, as their own evidence. That feature does not exist in the app today. Until it does, your written account is the route.

Blocking someone

Blocking is available on another member's account. It 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 the Guidelines, please report them as well — blocking protects you, reporting protects everyone else.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from within the app. Deleting removes the files you own — your avatar and images you posted — and your authentication record, and the rows that depend on your account follow it.

There is one exception. If you are a Village Chief and your village has other members, you must transfer the Chief role to someone else first. The app will refuse the deletion and tell you so. This exists so a village is never left without anyone responsible for it. A Chief transfer requires the incoming Chief to hold their own active stewardship subscription.

If you are stuck — you cannot sign in, or the transfer will not go through — write to support@villages.mobile.

Billing and subscriptions

Members never pay. Using Villages as a member of a village is free. Only a Village Chief holds the paid village stewardship subscription.

It costs £4.99 per month, and there is no free trial. Stewardship is bought through the Apple App Store and charged monthly.

Apple handles the money, not us. Payment is taken by Apple through your App Store account, and the subscription renews automatically until you cancel it. Cancelling, changing or requesting a refund is done through your App Store subscription settings — we cannot process an App Store refund ourselves, and we do not offer a separate refund of our own. We never see your payment details.

If a subscription lapses, the village does not die. There are 14 days of grace, during which we prompt the Chief and offer to transfer the Chief role to any member who holds an active subscription. After that the village goes dormant — read-only, not deleted — and wakes up as soon as someone takes on stewardship. The full wording is in section 8 of the Terms.

If something about your stewardship looks wrong inside the app after you have changed it with Apple, write to us and we will look at what our records show.

Privacy requests

Villages is subject to the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. You have rights to see the information we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to some uses of it, and to have it provided in a portable form.

Write to support@villages.mobile and we will answer within one month. There is no self-serve export in the app yet, so we put these together by hand — a self-serve route is work we intend to do after beta.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority, at any time.

The Privacy Policy sets out what we collect and — just as importantly — what we deliberately do not.

How quickly we reply

A report is acknowledged and reviewed within 48 hours. Within that window a person has looked at it. A complicated case can take longer to resolve after that first review, and if yours is one of them we will tell you rather than leave you waiting.

Email to this address is answered by a person too. A privacy request is answered within one month, as set out above.

Appeals

If we remove your content, restrict your account, suspend it or terminate it, you can appeal:

• email support@villages.mobile with Appeal in the subject line;
• within 30 days of the action;
• say what was done and why you think it was wrong.

The moderation owner reviews the appeal and you get one written outcome. This is deliberately a simple process for beta, and it will be formalised as Villages grows.

Who we are

Villages Ltd (registration in progress), operated by founder Ibrahim Chaudry provides the Villages app.

support@villages.mobile

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