Terms of Service
The short version. Be 18 or over. Be decent to people. Do not use this place to harm anyone. We can remove content and accounts when those things are broken, and you can appeal. We do not own what you write, and we do not sell it.
1. Who can use Queer Town
You must be 18 or over. You confirm this when you join.
One account per person, unless we have agreed otherwise. Do not use somebody else's account, and do not let anyone else use yours.
2. Your account
Signing in is a one-time link sent to your email. You can also add a password or connect a Google account as extra ways back in. Anyone who can read that inbox can get into your account, so keep it secure, and turn on two-step sign-in in Settings if other people can reach your email. Temporary "throwaway" email addresses cannot be used to join.
Tell us at hello@queertown.in if you think someone else has got in.
3. What you write stays yours
You keep ownership of everything you post. By posting, you give us permission to store it and show it to the people your chosen visibility allows — which is simply what is needed to run the app. Nothing more. We do not licence your content to anyone else, we do not sell it, and we do not use it in advertising.
Delete something and it goes from everywhere it appeared, because there is only ever one copy of it.
4. What is not allowed
The short list, in plain words:
- Harassment, bullying, stalking, or repeated unwanted contact.
- Hate directed at people for who they are — including transphobia, homophobia, racism, casteism, and religious hatred. This applies inside the community as much as outside it.
- Threats of violence, encouragement of self-harm, or content that puts someone in danger.
- Outing someone. Do not publish anyone's identity, transition status, HIV status, legal name or location without their agreement. On this platform that is a serious harm, not a rudeness.
- Sexual content involving minors, in any form. This is reported to the authorities.
- Sharing intimate images of someone without their consent, or screenshotting and redistributing what was sent to you privately.
- Scams, fraud, spam, or pretending to be someone you are not.
- Posting someone else's photos, art, music, video or writing against their copyright. Sharing with credit is part of community life; passing off or reposting somebody's work against their wishes is not.
- Posting realistic images, video or audio made with AI without marking it Made with AI. Obvious art and cartoons do not need it.
- Tagging people to harass them, or tagging someone into something they would not want their name on.
- Selling anything illegal, or using Marketplace to solicit sex work in jurisdictions where that endangers the seller.
- Scraping, bulk-collecting member data, or trying to work out who anonymous posters are.
- Breaking the app on purpose, or trying to get at data that is not yours.
Bodies, nudity and sex
These are welcome, and we are naming them because a rule that does not name them gets enforced against them: post-surgery photos and healing, binders and packers and how things fit, body changes on hormones, breastfeeding, health and sexual-health and HIV information, sex education, and art about bodies. Trans people are entitled to show their own changes.
Not allowed: sexually explicit photo and video — material made to arouse — and advertising sexual services.
The line is what a post is for, not how much skin is in it. A blunt "no nudity" rule would ban somebody asking whether their healing looks normal, and there is very often nowhere else safe to ask that.
We do not scan images. Every image classifier gets trans bodies wrong, and a false positive here is not an inconvenience — it is telling somebody their body is obscene. So we only see what somebody reports to us, and where a post is fine but simply should not arrive unbidden, a moderator can put a cover over the photos rather than remove it.
5. Meeting people, and money
We do not vet anyone. Not meetup hosts, not sellers, not people you match with. We do not verify that an event will happen as described or that an item is as advertised.
Meetups are in public venues, in groups, and the exact venue is released only to approved attendees. That reduces risk; it does not remove it. Meet in public. Tell someone where you are going.
Marketplace is classified adverts. We never handle payment — there is no escrow, no refunds and no chargebacks, and we cannot get your money back. Do not send money in advance.
To sell on Marketplace you need a verification tick, so that a real person is behind every listing. A tick does not make anybody honest — see section 7.
Glow
Glow is for photos of you. Putting a photo there means strangers can see it, and screenshots cannot be stopped. If a photo plainly does not belong there, a person at Queer Town may take it out of Glow; it stays on your My Day and it is never counted against you.
Private chats
Either person in a chat can put it on the record. From then on, messages either of you sends cannot be deleted or edited by either of you, and switching it off later does not release what was already sent. Anything sent before it was switched on is unaffected. You can always leave or block.
6. Adverts
Queer Town carries paid advertising. It is how this is funded — there is no investor behind it. Every advert is marked Sponsored and carries the advertiser's name.
An advert is not a recommendation. A person here reads every advert before it can appear, and we turn down the ones that are not right for this community — but reading an advert is not the same as checking a business. We do not verify that a shop is good, that a service works, that a price is real, or that a claim is true. If you deal with an advertiser, that is between you and them, and the ordinary advice applies: it is a stranger on the internet.
No advertiser is told anything about you. Not who you are, not what you looked at, not that you tapped their advert. They are told how many times an advert was shown and tapped in total, and nothing else. Adverts are chosen by the city on your profile and by nothing else about you — there is no targeting by identity, interests, rooms, boards, or anything you have written. The Privacy Policy sets this out in full.
Adverts never appear inside a room or a conversation, in your inbox, in Dating, in The Bubble, or anywhere in the Support Hub or the crisis pages.
If you advertise with us: we review what you submit, we may ask you to change it or decline it, and we say why. Your advert starts once payment has arrived and stops at the end of the period you bought. Payment happens directly between us — Queer Town takes no payment inside the app and holds no card details. We do not guarantee a number of views; what you buy is a place in the app for a length of time, and how often your advert comes up relative to other adverts is what the price levels describe.
Promoting your own post or profile. Members can pay to have one of their own public posts, or their profile, shown to more people. The price is worked out from how many people it will actually reach — a rate per thousand people per day — so a promotion to one town costs a fraction of one to the whole app, and you are told the real number before you decide rather than an estimate. Rates differ by country, because reaching a thousand people in one place is not the same product as reaching a thousand in another; where a promotion spans several, the price is the mix. The total is shown before you pay and is fixed when you send the request, so waiting for review can never raise it. The days start when we mark the payment received, not when you ask; a request nobody has answered within 14 days lapses on its own and you are not charged. It only ever reaches people who could already have seen the post, and never anybody who has blocked you. Anything paid for is marked Promoted.
If we remove a promoted post. The promotion stops at that moment and we tell you which rule it broke. If the removal stands, nothing comes back — you paid to show people something that broke a rule. If the removal is overturned, whether on appeal or because we changed our minds, your post goes back up for the days it had left; if you would rather have the money, stop it once it is back up and the days it has not run come back. Every other case — cancelling before it starts, stopping it part-way, a fault on our side — is on our Refunds and Cancellations page.
7. Verification ticks
A tick means we checked something specific and nothing more. Blue means a real person is behind the account. Gold means the account genuinely belongs to the person named. Grey means the account speaks for a real organisation.
A tick is not an endorsement. It does not mean someone is safe, honest, or good at what they do, and it is not a status. We may remove one if it turns out to have been given wrongly.
8. Moderation and enforcement
We act in proportion to what happened. In rough order: a warning, removing content, restricting a feature, suspending an account, and permanent removal. Serious harm can go straight to the end of that list.
Room and board moderators act within their own space. Platform-wide decisions are ours. A board moderator who removes your post has to say why — that is required of them, not optional — and you can ask the board's moderators about it in the app. Any of them may answer, and you are never told which one decided; they are volunteers in a community they also live in. If they agree with you, they can put the post back.
Anything Queer Town itself took down, only Queer Town can put back.
Sometimes many posts come down at once. If a word or phrase is being used to attack people, or something is being spread that should not be — a leak, somebody's address — we can remove everything containing it in one action. Every author is told, exactly as they would be for a single removal, and the whole thing can be undone in one action too. We will not tell you which word triggered it: saying so would hand a list of what to avoid to whoever is doing the attacking. If this ever catches you unfairly, report it and a person will look.
You can appeal any decision that affects your account, in the app. An appeal is read by a person. It does not guarantee a reversal, but it guarantees reconsideration.
We will explain a decision unless doing so would expose who reported you, compromise an investigation, or help someone evade enforcement.
Automated help, never automated decisions. The system shows staff warning signs — patterns that spam and targeting usually leave — and limits how quickly anyone can post, message or follow, so a script cannot flood the town. A warning sign never removes, restricts or bans anybody by itself; a person decides. See the Privacy Policy for exactly what is counted.
Content can be unavailable in some countries. If the law of a country requires it, or members there would be put at risk, something may be hidden for people in that country only, usually for a set time. You will see a notice saying it is not available where you are rather than it silently vanishing, and if it is yours, you are told. We use the narrowest block that answers the requirement.
9. The AI Helper
If the AI Helper is switched on, it can make mistakes, misunderstand, or be incomplete. It is for finding your way around the app and locating resources. It is not a source of medical, legal or rights advice, and it is not a crisis service. Use your own judgement and check anything important.
10. Leaving
Close your account whenever you like, in Settings. You have 30 days to change your mind. Or take a break instead — for 1 to 30 days, or until you come back — and everything returns when it ends. See the Privacy Policy for what happens to your data, including the parts we have not automated yet.
11. What we cannot promise
Queer Town is provided as it is. We are a very small operation. We cannot promise the service will always be available, that nothing will ever be lost, or that every member will behave well.
We are responsible for our own serious failures. We are not responsible for what other members do, on or off the platform — though we will act on it when it is reported to us. Nothing here removes any right you have under the law of your own country that cannot be signed away.
12. Complaints
If you have a complaint about content, about an account, or about how we have handled your data, write to hello@queertown.in. We will acknowledge it within 24 hours and aim to resolve it within 15 days. If someone has posted a sexual or intimate image of you, or a picture made to look like you, tell us and we will act on it within 24 hours.
Someone posted my work. If something on Queer Town uses work you own (or act for the owner of) without permission, write to hello@queertown.in with "Copyright" in the subject and: what the work is, where it appears on Queer Town (a link or a clear description), that you own it or are allowed to act for whoever does, and how to reach you. A person reads every notice. If it holds up, we take the post down and tell the person who posted it what was claimed and by whom, because a claim of ownership cannot be anonymous. If they believe it is a mistake, or that they had the right to share it, they can reply to us, and we look again and may put it back. An account that keeps posting other people's work is looked at by a person and may be closed. Sending a false notice to get something taken down breaks these terms.
Grievance Officer: the person who runs Queer Town, reachable at hello@queertown.in. We do not publish a personal name here: on an app like this one, a named person is a target. The name is given to any court or government authority that asks for it.
13. Changes
If we change these terms in a way that matters, we will say so in the app rather than quietly editing this page.
14. Contact
hello@queertown.in — a person reads it.