Terms of service

The short version. Huddle is for enrolled students aged 16 and over, one account each, real information. Be decent to people. What you post stays yours and you can delete it. We are not your university and we are not part of any transaction you make with another student. Break the rules and you lose the account. The long version follows, and it is the one that binds.

1. The agreement

These terms are a contract between you and Voyager Technologies, the company that builds and runs Huddle. Making an account, or using Huddle at all, means you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use Huddle.

Our privacy policy, our community guidelines and our child safety standards are part of this agreement. Read them. Where the guidelines describe a rule in more detail than section 6 does, the guidelines are what we enforce.

2. Who can use Huddle

To hold an account you must:

• Be at least 16 years old. If you are 16 or 17, your parent or guardian must agree to you using Huddle, and you confirm that when you sign up.
• Be enrolled at, or employed by, a university or other higher education institution that Huddle has opened, or be admitted through a waitlist invitation or an invite code.
• Give accurate registration details, and where you supply a matric number or a staff ID, one that is genuinely yours.
• Not be someone we have previously removed from Huddle.

One person, one account. Creating a second account to get around a suspension, to inflate a vote, or to pretend to be more than one person is a breach of these terms on its own.

We may check enrolment at any point, and we may suspend an account while we do. If you leave your institution, you can keep the account, but we can ask you to verify again and we can move you out of spaces meant for current students.

3. We are not your university

Huddle is an independent product. It is not operated, endorsed, sponsored or approved by any university, faculty, department or students' union, and naming one in the app does not imply otherwise. University names and crests appear only to identify the campus a space belongs to.

Nothing on Huddle is an official communication from your institution, including posts marked as announcements and posts from accounts carrying a role badge. Timetables, deadlines, results, fees and anything else that affects your studies should be confirmed with the university through its own channels before you act on it. Do not rely on Huddle for that, and do not treat what a course rep posts here as the last word.

4. Your account

Keep your password to yourself and keep your email address current, because that is how you get back in. Everything done with your account is treated as done by you, so if you lend it out, what happens next is yours.

Tell us at support@huddle.ng as soon as you think somebody else is in your account. We will help you shut it down.

We can require a username change where a name impersonates someone, squats on an institution or an official title, or is chosen to abuse a particular person.

5. Verification

A verified badge means a person on our team has looked at a document you submitted and accepted that you are enrolled where you say you are. It is not a character reference and it says nothing about whether the account is trustworthy.

Verification is a check of your name. The person reviewing your document compares the name on it with the name on your profile, so once you are verified your first and last name are locked. If yours genuinely changes, write to us and we will update it.

Some things need a verified account: starting a space, posting anonymously, selling on the marketplace and creating events. Everything else, including posting and commenting under your own name, is open to every student.

Submitting a document that has been altered, or that belongs to someone else, ends the account. Only the people who review verifications can open your document, and it is deleted once it has been reviewed. The privacy policy has the detail.

6. The rules

The community guidelines go through this properly, with examples. Here is the binding version. Do not post, send, upload or arrange any of the following, anywhere on Huddle, including in direct messages.

People

• Harassment, bullying, stalking, or piling on to a person. Repeatedly contacting someone who has asked you to stop counts.
• Threats of violence, and encouraging anyone else to commit it.
• Hate directed at people for their ethnicity, state or region of origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or any comparable characteristic.
• Posting someone's private information without their agreement: phone number, home or hostel address, matric number, results, medical information, or any document containing them.
• Sexual images of a person shared without their consent, and threats to share them.
• Impersonating another student, a lecturer, a university office, a students' union, Huddle staff, or anyone else.

Content

• Pornography and sexually explicit material.
• Nudity posted to shock, humiliate or arouse. Art, medicine and breastfeeding are not what this is about.
• Gore and graphic violence posted for its own sake.
• Content encouraging suicide, self-harm or disordered eating. If you are the one struggling, ask for help here; the rule is aimed at people who push others towards it.
• Anything promoting a terrorist organisation, a cult, or organised violence, including campus cultism.
• Deliberate falsehoods about health, safety or an emergency where believing them could get someone hurt.

Conduct

• Spam, bulk unsolicited messages, engagement farming, and vote manipulation of any kind.
• Scams. Fake sales, fake scholarships, fake job offers, fake giveaways, investment and betting schemes, anything asking for an advance fee.
• Phishing, malware, and links that misrepresent where they lead.
• Selling, renting or giving away your account, your username, or a space.
• Scraping Huddle, hitting our systems with automated traffic, reverse engineering the app, or trying to reach data that is not yours.
• Using Huddle to advertise a business, a service or an event without a connection to campus life. Student ventures are welcome; broadcast advertising is not.

Academic integrity

• Do not post live examination questions, leaked papers, or anything intended to help people cheat in an assessment.
• Do not offer to sit an exam or write an assignment for somebody, and do not ask for it.
• Past questions, lecture notes, study guides and worked examples are exactly what the resources section is for. The line is between studying and cheating, and you know where it is.

The law

Do not use Huddle for anything illegal under Nigerian law or under the law where you are. That includes drugs, weapons, stolen goods, forged documents, gambling operations, and any dealing in material involving children. Section 15 deals with the last of those separately, because it is not a rule we weigh against anything else.

7. Anonymous posting

Only verified students can post anonymously. Where Huddle lets you, the anonymity is from other students. Your account is still attached to the post on our side, moderators reviewing a report can see it, and these terms apply to an anonymous post exactly as they do to a signed one.

An anonymous account that breaks the rules loses the whole account, not just the post. The privacy policy explains the mechanics.

8. Spaces and the people who run them

Any verified student can create a space, and whoever creates it runs it. Owners and moderators can set a topic, pin things, remove posts and remove members, and they may enforce rules of their own on top of these terms. They cannot go under them: a space rule that permits something section 6 forbids is void.

We can rename, restrict, hand over or close a space that is abandoned, that impersonates an institution, or that exists to break these terms. If you delete your account while you own a space with other people in it, the space passes to its most senior remaining member so that the people in it are not stranded.

Moderators are students, not our employees. What they do in their space is their own, and we do not guarantee that any space is well run.

9. Announcements and roles

Some accounts carry a role: course rep, faculty rep, students' union lead, department or university admin, lecturer. A role is a description of a position on campus that we or a space owner have accepted. It is not a warrant that everything said under it is correct, and section 3 still applies.

If you hold a role, you post under your own name. Roles cannot post anonymously, and using a role to push a private interest, a business or a political campaign will cost you the role.

10. The marketplace

The marketplace is a noticeboard. You list an item, somebody reaches you through the contact route you chose, and everything after that happens between the two of you, off Huddle.

No money moves through Huddle. We take no payment, hold no funds, process no cards, charge no commission and offer no escrow, refunds, guarantees, insurance or dispute resolution. We are not a party to your transaction and we are not an agent for either side of it. If a deal goes wrong, it is between you and the other person.

Listing something means you actually own it, you may lawfully sell it, and your description is honest. Do not list:

• Drugs, alcohol to anyone under age, tobacco, vapes, prescription medicines.
• Weapons, ammunition, and anything designed to injure.
• Stolen goods, counterfeits, and anything you cannot prove is yours.
• Academic services: ghostwritten assignments, exam sitting, fake certificates or transcripts.
• Accounts, login details, subscriptions you are not entitled to resell.
• Live animals, human tissue, and anything else a sensible person would expect to be on this list.
• Loans, investments, betting tips, and anything promising a return.
• Sexual services, and any adult material.

Meet in daylight, in a public place on campus, and take somebody with you if the amount is worth taking somebody for. Check the item before money changes hands. Nobody legitimate needs a deposit before you have seen what you are buying.

11. Resources and copyright

Upload a resource only if you have the right to share it. Your own notes and past questions in general circulation are fine. A textbook PDF, a publisher's slide deck, or a lecturer's material they asked you not to circulate is not, however common it is to see them shared.

If something on Huddle infringes your copyright, email support@huddle.ng with "Copyright" in the subject and tell us what the work is, where it is on Huddle, why you hold the rights, and how to reach you. We remove infringing material and we take the account off people who keep posting it. If your upload is removed and you believe we got it wrong, reply and say why.

12. Your content

What you post stays yours. We claim no ownership of it and we will not sell it, licence it to anyone else, or put it in an advertisement.

To show it to the people you posted it for, we need your permission to handle it, so by posting you give Voyager Technologies a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, copy, resize, format and display your content, for the purpose of operating and promoting Huddle itself. Promoting means things like a screenshot of the product; it does not mean handing your work to a third party.

The licence ends when you delete the content, subject to two ordinary limits: copies may persist briefly in caches and in backups until they age out, and it does not reach back into a screenshot somebody already took. Where you posted something into a shared place, such as a comment under somebody else's post, deleting yours does not delete theirs.

You are responsible for what you post, and you confirm you have the rights to post it. If you send us feedback or a suggestion, we can use it without owing you anything for it.

13. Reporting, blocking and moderation

Every post, comment and profile on Huddle has a report option in its menu, and every profile can be blocked or muted. Blocking takes that person's posts out of your feed and stops them reaching you.

• Reporting. Open the menu, choose Report, pick a reason. Or email support@huddle.ng with a link.
• How fast. We act on reports of objectionable content within 24 hours of receiving them. That means removing the content and removing the account that posted it, or deciding the report does not stand and telling you so. Child safety reports jump the queue and are handled first, every time.
• What we do not do. We do not pre-screen posts. Huddle is not reviewed before it appears, and an item being visible does not mean anyone approved it.
• Legal notices. Courts, the police, regulators and lawyers can send takedown notices and other legal requests to support@huddle.ng with "Legal" in the subject. We acknowledge each one and act on a lawful notice within 24 hours.
• Abusing the report button by mass-reporting somebody you dislike is itself a breach of section 6.

We can remove content, restrict an account or close it, at our discretion, where we judge that these terms, the guidelines or the law have been broken, or where something poses a real risk to someone. We can do it without notice when waiting would make things worse.

14. Enforcement and appeals

What we do depends on what happened and whether it has happened before. It runs from removing a single post, through a warning, a temporary restriction, and removal from a space, up to closing the account permanently. Serious cases skip the middle.

Where we act on your account we tell you what rule was broken, unless telling you would put somebody at risk or we are barred from it. To appeal, reply to that message or write to support@huddle.ng with "Appeal" in the subject. A person who was not the one who made the original decision looks at it again, and we aim to answer within seven days.

Accounts closed for child sexual abuse material, for sexual content involving a minor, or for credible threats of violence are not reinstated.

15. Child safety

Child sexual abuse material, sexual content involving anyone under 18, grooming, sextortion and trafficking are forbidden absolutely and are not weighed against anything else. We remove them, close the account permanently, and report to the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, the Nigeria Police Force and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Our child safety standards set this out in full, including how to report it and what happens next. If a child is in immediate danger, call 112 first and tell us afterwards.

16. Our intellectual property

Huddle, the name, the mark, the app, the website, the design and the code belong to Voyager Technologies and are protected by copyright and trade mark law. Using Huddle gives you a personal, limited, revocable, non-transferable licence to use the app for its intended purpose, and nothing more.

Do not copy the app, take it apart, build a competing product from it, or use our name and marks in a way that suggests we are involved in something we are not. Our brand page covers the legitimate uses.

17. Availability of the service

Huddle is a young product and we are still building it. Features appear, change and occasionally go away, and some of what you see is marked as coming soon because it is not finished. We do not promise uptime, and we can suspend the service for maintenance or because something upstream of us has fallen over.

We can stop offering Huddle, or stop offering it at a particular institution. If we do, we will give reasonable notice through the app or by email, and time enough to get your data out.

18. Ending your account

You can leave whenever you like, from Settings in the app or on the account deletion page without installing anything. Deletion is immediate and permanent. The data deletion page is there if you only want some of it gone.

We can suspend or close your account for breaking these terms, for conduct that harms other people, or where we are required to. Where it is fair to do so, we will tell you first.

Sections 12, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22 and 25 survive the end of your account, as does anything else that by its nature ought to.

19. Disclaimers

Huddle is provided as it is and as it happens to be available. To the extent the law allows, we make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that Huddle will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, that defects will be fixed, or that anything posted by another user is accurate, lawful or safe to rely on. Content on Huddle comes from students. Treat it that way.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Where local law gives you rights as a consumer that cannot be waived, those rights stand.

20. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Voyager Technologies is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, lost opportunity or damage to reputation, arising out of your use of Huddle.

We are also not liable for what another user does: what they post, what they promise, what they sell you, or what they do when you meet them. Our total liability to you for any claim connected with Huddle is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim, which for almost everyone is nothing, or fifty thousand naira.

21. Indemnity

If somebody brings a claim against us because of what you posted, what you did on Huddle, or your breach of these terms or of the law, you agree to cover our reasonable costs and any damages arising from it. We will tell you about the claim and let you take it on, and we will not settle it in a way that binds you without asking.

22. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and the courts of Nigeria have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

Before going to court, write to support@huddle.ng and set out the problem. Most things can be fixed by someone reading the complaint properly, and we would rather spend the time on that than on lawyers. If we cannot settle it within 30 days, either of us is free to proceed.

23. Changes to these terms

We can change these terms as Huddle changes. Material changes are announced in the app or by email at least seven days before they take effect, so you have time to read them and decide. Corrections and clarifications take effect when posted, with the date at the top updated.

Continuing to use Huddle after a change means you accept the new version. If you do not, delete the account.

24. Apple and Google

If you downloaded Huddle from the App Store, the following applies, and Apple requires us to say it.

• This agreement is between you and Voyager Technologies. It is not with Apple, and Apple is not responsible for Huddle or its content.
• Your licence to use Huddle on an Apple device is the one described in Apple's own terms, limited to devices you own or control.
• Apple has no obligation to provide maintenance or support for Huddle. Any support questions come to us.
• If Huddle fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may tell Apple and Apple may refund the purchase price. Beyond that refund, Apple has no warranty obligation whatsoever, and everything else about warranties, claims, liability and remedies is ours.
• We, not Apple, are responsible for handling any claim you or a third party makes about Huddle, including product liability, any failure to meet a legal requirement, and any claim under consumer protection or privacy law.
• We, not Apple, are responsible for investigating and resolving any claim that Huddle infringes somebody's intellectual property.
• You confirm you are not in a country subject to a United States embargo or designated as supporting terrorism, and that you are not on any United States list of prohibited or restricted parties.
• Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms and may enforce them against you.

If you downloaded Huddle from Google Play, Google's terms govern the download, these terms govern the app, and Google is not responsible for Huddle or its content either.

25. General

• Whole agreement. These terms, the privacy policy, the community guidelines and the child safety standards are the entire agreement between us about Huddle, and they replace anything said before.
• Severability. If a court finds part of this unenforceable, the rest stands.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a rule once does not mean we have given it up.
• Assignment. You cannot transfer your rights under these terms. We can, to a company that takes over Huddle, and we will tell you if that happens.
• Notices. We reach you through the app or the email address on your account. You reach us at support@huddle.ng.
• No partnership. Nothing here makes either of us the other's agent, employee or partner.

26. Contact

Voyager Technologies, Lagos and Ilorin, Nigeria. Questions about these terms go to support@huddle.ng.