Terms of Service

1. What Villages is, and what these terms cover

Villages is an app for a small group of neighbours who share one village. Some of what it asks you to do happens in the real world: you walk to your village's Town Hall to post, to drop a letter off and to collect one, and you meet people at gatherings that other members host.

These terms are the agreement between you and Villages Ltd for your use of the app. By creating an account you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use Villages.

Two other documents sit alongside these terms and form part of the agreement:

• the Community Guidelines, which say what is and is not allowed in the app;
• the Privacy Policy, which says what we do with your information.

2. Who can use Villages

You need an account, and the details you give when you create it should be accurate. You are responsible for what happens under your account, and for keeping access to it secure. Tell us at support@villages.mobile if you think someone else is using it.

One account per person. Do not impersonate someone else, and do not create an account on behalf of a person who is not you.

3. Villages, Chiefs and members

Every village has a Chief — the person who founded it, or the person the role has since been transferred to — and its other members.

A Chief is responsible for their village. That includes deciding who is invited or admitted, placing the village's Town Hall, and dealing with what happens in it. A Chief holds the paid stewardship subscription described in section 8.

A Chief cannot simply walk away. If a Chief wants to delete their account while their village still has other members, they must transfer the Chief role to someone else first. The app will refuse the deletion until they do. This exists so a village is never left without anyone responsible for it.

Members join a village by invitation, gift link or an approved join request, depending on how that village is set up. Members never pay.

4. Meeting people in the real world — read this part

This section matters more here than it would in most apps, because Villages deliberately sends you to real places to meet real people. Please read it properly.

We do not vet venues. A Town Hall is a real building or place chosen by a village. A gathering happens at a venue typed in by whoever is hosting it. We do not inspect, visit, licence, insure or approve any of these places. We do not know whether a venue is safe, accessible, open, legal to be in, or whether it exists at all. We make no promise about any of it.

We do not verify who turns up. We do not run identity checks, background checks or criminal record checks on anyone. A profile is what its owner typed. Membership of a village tells you that someone was invited or admitted by that village — nothing more. It is not a vouch, an endorsement, or a safety assurance from us.

Meeting your neighbours is at your own risk. You decide whether to go, where to go, who to meet and what to share. Use your judgement as you would with any stranger. Tell someone where you are going. Meet in public first. Leave if something feels wrong.

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 monitored around the clock, and it will not 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 to do that for you.

Checking in is not a safety feature. A Town Hall check-in confirms you were near the Hall when you took an action in the app. It does not tell anyone where you are, it does not track you, and it does not summon anyone. It expires after 30 minutes.

If you host a gathering, it is yours. You are responsible for it — for having the right to use the venue, for whatever you charge or ask of people, and for complying with the law where it happens. Villages is not a party to it, does not organise it, and takes no responsibility for it.

We are not responsible for what happens between members offline. Nothing in these terms makes us responsible for the conduct of any member, at a gathering or anywhere else.

5. Your content

You keep what is yours. You own the posts, comments, gatherings, letters, images and answers you create. We do not claim ownership of them.

You give us permission to run the product. So that Villages can work, you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, display and transmit your content — but only for the purpose of operating, moderating and improving Villages, and only to the people the product is designed to show it to. That licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except where we must keep something for a legal or safety reason.

You must have the right to post it. Do not post content that belongs to someone else, or that you do not have permission to share. Do not post other people's personal information.

Letters. A letter is a private typed page between two members of the same village. It is released to its recipient when they collect it in person at the Town Hall — before then, its text is not readable by anyone using the app. A letter dropped off between 23:00 and 06:00 in the village's local time surfaces at 06:00. Write letters you are willing to stand behind; once a letter has been collected, it is in someone else's hands.

We may remove content. We can remove or restrict content that breaks these terms or the Community Guidelines, and we can act on our own initiative as well as on a report.

6. Acceptable use

The Community Guidelines are the full list. In short: no illegal material, no threats, no targeted harassment, no hate, no sexual exploitation, no posting other people's personal information without their consent, no spam, no scams, and no unsafe directions to a place.

Beyond that, do not use Villages to surveil or track another person, do not try to defeat the location checks or the letter mechanic, do not attempt to access data you have not been given, do not scrape the service, and do not use it to break the law.

7. Moderation, suspension and termination

Screening. Posts, comments and gatherings are screened automatically before they appear. Text that the automated screen judges safe is approved; images are held for a human to review rather than approved automatically. Screening is imperfect in both directions.

Reports and blocks. Anyone can report a post, comment, gathering or profile, and anyone can block another account. Reports go to a human review queue.

What we can do. Where something breaks these terms or the Guidelines, we can remove or hide content, restrict what an account can do, suspend it, or terminate it. We can preserve records where we need to, and we cooperate with lawful requests from authorities.

Ending your account. You can delete your account from within the app at any time — subject to the Chief-transfer rule in section 3. We may terminate or suspend an account for a serious or repeated breach, or where we reasonably believe it is necessary to protect other people.

8. Village stewardship — the paid part

Members never pay. Using Villages as a member of a village is free.

A Chief pays for their village. Stewarding a village is a paid auto-renewing subscription called village stewardship. It is bought through the Apple App Store and is managed by Apple. Price and term are shown in the app at the point of purchase.

How billing works. Payment is taken by Apple through your App Store account. 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. Apple's terms govern the transaction; we never see your payment details. Our record of your subscription comes from RevenueCat, which is what the app uses to decide whether stewardship is active.

Transferring the Chief role. A Chief transfer requires the incoming Chief to hold their own active stewardship subscription.

9. Availability, and what we do not promise

Villages is early software. Features change, and some of them are still being built. We do not promise that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or available in any particular place. We may change, suspend or withdraw features.

We provide Villages "as is". In particular, and without repeating section 4 at length: we make no promise about the safety of any venue, the identity or conduct of any member, or the accuracy of anything a member posts.

10. Liability

11. Governing law and disputes

12. Changes to these terms

If we change these terms we will update this document and the revision date at the top.

13. Contact

support@villages.mobile
Villages Ltd, registration in progress

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