SQUIDS101 / SQUIDS Community Policy

Squads are the communities built on SQUIDS101 and SQUIDS ("SQUIDS101", "we", "us" or "our"). This Community Policy explains how a Squad works, who answers for what inside it, and what we expect of anyone who joins one. It is to be read together with our Content Policy, which sets out what may and may not be posted anywhere on the platform, including inside every Squad.

Our policies are the law of the platform. A Squad's own rules sit beneath them, not alongside them, and never above them. Where a Squad rule says or implies anything that conflicts with, waters down, or contradicts this Policy, our Content Policy, our User Agreement, or any other SQUIDS101 policy, that Squad rule counts for nothing to the extent of the conflict, and the relevant SQUIDS101 policy applies instead. This is so regardless of how the Squad rule is described, whether as a rule, a guideline, a code of conduct or anything else, and regardless of how long it has stood or how prominently it has been posted. No owner or moderator has the authority to contract out of, waive, or override a SQUIDS101 policy on behalf of their Squad or its members.

Any account holder may create a Squad, subject to our User Agreement and this Policy. Squads may be public, restricted, or private, and their owners decide who may join, post, and comment within the bounds this Policy allows. You are free to leave a Squad at any time.

• Owner — created the Squad and has full control over its settings, house rules, and its list of moderators
• Moderator — appointed by an owner to help enforce the Squad's house rules and this Policy within that Squad.
• Member — has joined the Squad and may participate according to its settings.

An owner may configure a Squad's visibility, who may post or comment, whether NSFW content is permitted, and whether chat is switched on, and may publish house rules for members to follow. Any house rule is subject to section 2 above: it may add detail on top of our policies, but it can never carve out an exception to them.

Owners and moderators may generate invite links to their Squad, which may carry a usage limit or an expiry date. We may disable an invite link at any time, including where we believe it is being used to get around a ban or a Squad's membership rules.

Inside every Squad, members are expected to engage with one another respectfully, even where they disagree; to follow both this Policy and the Squad's house rules; to steer clear of harassment, brigading, spam, or attempts to manipulate a Squad's votes, views, or membership; and to respect the Squad's stated purpose along with the reasonable decisions of its moderators. What counts as harassment, hate speech, or other prohibited conduct is set out in full in our Content Policy, and that Policy is not narrowed or softened by anything in this one.

A Squad's owners or moderators may ban a member from that particular Squad, which does not affect the member's SQUIDS101 account or their ability to use the rest of the Service. Separately, and independently of anything a Squad has done, we may suspend or permanently ban an account platform-wide under our Appeals and Ban Policy, which removes access to every Squad at once.

SQUIDS101 is an English-language platform, and English is the governing language of this Policy and every other SQUIDS101 policy. Squads and their members are welcome to communicate in whichever language suits them. Where we or a Squad make available a translated or machine-translated version of a rule or policy as a courtesy, the English version prevails if there is any inconsistency between the two.

You may report a Squad, its content, or one of its members directly from the Service, giving your reason for doing so. We review reports and may act on a Squad ourselves, in addition to whatever its own moderators choose to do.

We may restrict, hide, suspend, or permanently ban a Squad, including one whose individual posts are otherwise compliant but whose owners repeatedly fail to enforce this Policy, as set out in our Appeals and Ban Policy. This is separate from the removal of a Squad's verified badge, which our Verified Badge Policy governs on its own terms.

We may amend this Policy at any given time, and will reflect that by updating the date above. Where you keep using the Service after such a change takes effect, we treat that as your acceptance of the amended Policy.

Questions about this Policy, or reports about a Squad, can be sent to [email protected].