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 must be 16 or over. Villages is for people aged 16 and above. Age is self-declared: sign-up asks for your date of birth and we take your answer at face value. There is no document check and no identity check. If you are under 16 you cannot register, and there is no route for a parent or guardian to consent on your behalf.

Sixteen is higher than the age at which UK data protection law lets a child agree to an online service on their own, which is 13. We set it higher on purpose. Villages sends people to physical venues to meet adults they have not met before. That is not something we are willing to put a 13-year-old into, whatever the law would permit.

How the check works. Sign-up asks you to pick your date of birth. If that date puts you under 16, the app tells you so and will not create an account for you. The date itself stays on your phone: what we keep is a record that you confirmed you were 16 or over, and when — not your date of birth. The Privacy Policy sets that out under Age.

Accounts created before the question existed carry no such record, because the rule is older than the field. The rule applies to them all the same. If you are under 16 and already have an account, write to support@villages.mobile and we will remove it.

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.

If you are hosting

Everything above is what we do not do. This is what we ask of you, and it is the standard a gathering on Villages is expected to meet.

• Say where it really is. A real address or a place a person can find without asking. Not a rough area, not a landmark you happen to know, and never a private home you cannot lawfully invite strangers into.
• Say what it really is. If there is a cost, say the cost. If there is alcohol, say so. If it is physically demanding, or outdoors in the dark, or unsuitable for children, say that too. People decide whether to come from what you wrote.
• Say how to get in. Steps, lifts, doors that lock, whether a dog is welcome. The gathering form has a place for this and it is not decoration.
• Be the person who is there. If you cancel, cancel in the app so nobody travels. If you cannot be there, cancel it — do not hand it to somebody who did not agree to host.
• Do not gather people to sell to them. Recruiting, pitching and multi-level marketing dressed as a meetup are not gatherings, and we will remove them.
• Comply with the law where it happens. Licences, insurance, permissions, and anything a venue requires of you are yours to hold.

If something goes wrong at a gathering

If anyone is in danger, call the emergency services first. Do that before you open this app. Nothing here reaches anyone quickly, and nothing here can send help.

Once everyone is safe:

• Report the person from their profile, or the gathering from its page. That reaches a human on the 48-hour clock in section 7.
• Write to support@villages.mobile and tell us what happened in your own words. Put Gathering in the subject line. Tell us which gathering, when, and who was involved.
• Block the person if you do not want to be reachable by them. A block is immediate and does not wait for us.

What we will do. We will acknowledge and review it within 48 hours, as with any report. Where a report concerns someone's safety at a real gathering we will treat it ahead of ordinary content reports, and we can remove the gathering, restrict or suspend the account, and remove the person from the village. We will preserve what we hold if you tell us the police are involved. We will not tell you what action we took against another person's account beyond confirming that we acted, because that is their data.

What we cannot do. We cannot mediate a dispute, establish what happened between people we did not see, recover money, or act as a witness. We are not an emergency service and we are not an investigator.

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.

If someone has posted your work

Tell us and we will take it down. If something on Villages infringes your copyright, or any other right you hold, write to support@villages.mobile with the subject line Copyright. That address is the point of contact for copyright complaints, and a person reads it.

What to put in the notice. So that we can act on it rather than write back asking:

• What the work is, and enough about it that we can identify it.
• Where it is on Villages — the gathering, the post, the profile, or the person who posted it. A screenshot is fine.
• Your name and an address we can reply to.
• A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by you, your agent, or the law.
• A statement that the information in your notice is accurate, and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them.
• Your signature, typed or otherwise.

What happens then. A copyright notice is treated on the same clock as any other report: acknowledged and reviewed within 48 hours. If the complaint is well-founded we remove or restrict the content, and we tell the person who posted it what was removed and why.

If you think we got it wrong. If your content was removed and you believe it should not have been, reply to us saying so, why you have the right to post it, and how we can reach you. We will look again. If we restore it, we will tell the person who complained.

Repeat infringement. An account that repeatedly posts other people's work can be restricted, suspended, or terminated under section 7.

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.

How quickly. A report is acknowledged and reviewed within 48 hours. That is the commitment we publish, and the Community Guidelines say the same. A complicated case can take longer to resolve after that first review; if yours is one of them, we will tell you.

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.

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 it and you get one written outcome. This is deliberately a simple process for beta, and it will be formalised as Villages grows.

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. Village stewardship is £4.99 per month, charged monthly through the App Store. The price is confirmed in the app at the point of purchase.

There is no free trial. Where we give someone a founding or complimentary arrangement, we do it with a promotional code or a comped subscription — not with a trial that turns into a charge.

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, and we do not offer a separate refund of our own. 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.

What happens if a subscription lapses

A village never dies because a card failed. This is deliberate, and it is the part of this section worth reading twice.

If stewardship ends — a failed payment, a cancellation, or a refund granted by Apple — the village follows the same path:

1. Fourteen days of grace. The village carries on exactly as it was. We prompt the Chief to fix the payment, and we offer to transfer the Chief role to any member who holds an active stewardship subscription, so the village can change hands rather than stall.
2. After the grace period, the village goes dormant. Dormant means read-only: everything already there stays, and stays readable by its members, but no new posts, letters or gatherings can be made.
3. A dormant village is not deleted. It waits. As soon as stewardship resumes — the Chief renewing, or a member with an active subscription taking the Chief role — the village wakes up and works normally again.

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

These terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of them or out of your use of Villages, are governed by the law of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction.

Write to us first. Before starting any formal proceedings, please email support@villages.mobile, set out what has gone wrong, and give us a fair chance to put it right. Most things end there.

12. Changes to these terms

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

Material changes are announced in advance. We will tell you in the app and by email at least 14 days before a material change takes effect. If you keep using Villages after that date, that is your acceptance of the change. If you would rather not accept it, stop using Villages and delete your account. We keep an archive of previous versions — ask at support@villages.mobile if you want to see one.

13. Contact

support@villages.mobile
Villages Ltd (registration in progress), operated by founder Ibrahim Chaudry

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