terms of service

accepting these terms

by creating an account you agree to these terms and to the privacy policy. the version you agreed to is recorded against your account.

who can use lecturemates

• you must be a usc student with a working usc email address, and you must verify it with a one-time code before you can do anything else. verification is the entire perimeter of the product.
• you must be 18 or older.
• one account per person. verify with your own address, not someone else's, and add only sections you are actually enrolled in.
• you are responsible for what happens under your account. do not share your sign-in.

acceptable use

these rules apply identically to named and anonymous content, in rooms, on the board, in dms, on events, and in greek rank. do not:

• harass, threaten, stalk or bully anyone, or organise others to do so. repeatedly contacting or posting about someone who does not want it is harassment whether or not any individual message looks bad on its own.
• dox. do not post anyone's phone number, home or dorm address, class schedule, workplace, email address, government id, or other private information about a real person — including your own classmates, and including information you could find elsewhere.
• abuse anonymity. using an anonymous post, an anonymous room message or an anonymous dm to say something you would be banned for saying under your name is a violation of these terms, not a loophole in them. so is using anonymity to evade a block, a removal or a ban.
• impersonate anyone — another student, a faculty member, a chapter, an organisation, or lecturemates itself. a pseudonymous handle is fine; pretending to be a specific real person is not.
• post sexual content involving minors, non-consensual intimate imagery, hate speech, or incitement to violence. these are removed on sight and reported where the law requires it.
• spam, scam or advertise, run bots, scrape the roster or the board, enumerate accounts, or automate access to the service.
• attack the service — probing for vulnerabilities, circumventing rate limits or verification, or attempting to unmask an anonymous author.

anonymity is a design property, not a warranty

we build anonymity seriously: anonymous content carries no author on the wire, anonymous dms use a fresh pseudonym for each side of each thread, and an automated check fails our build if any student-reachable query could join an anonymous post to an account. what that protects you from is other students.

it does not make you untraceable to us. an author id is stored so that you can delete your own posts and so that abuse can be acted on, and a person holding direct database access can resolve it. we may also be required to disclose it by valid legal process. we do not promise anonymity against ourselves, against law enforcement, or against a court — and we would rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise. the privacy policy sets out exactly where the line sits.

your content

you own what you post. to run the service, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, display and distribute your content for the purpose of operating lecturemates and showing it to the people it was meant for — and to make the technical copies that requires (caching, backups, resizing, moderation scanning). the licence exists to run the product and nothing else: we do not sell your content, license it onward, or use it in advertising.

the licence ends for a given piece of content when you delete it, subject to the copies described in the privacy policy — most relevantly, that deleting your account with the default setting removes your name from your messages while leaving the text in the thread, and that the alternative setting blanks the text as well. you choose which.

post only what you have the right to post. do not upload other people's copyrighted work, and do not post photographs of people who have asked you not to.

moderation, and what happens after a report

• report → review → action. anyone can report a message, a post, or a profile. reports enter a queue that moderators work. the queue never shows who filed a report, and reported messages and posts are shown to moderators with no author attached — a moderator judges the content, not the person.
• outcomes are: dismiss the report, hide the content, or restrict or ban the account. content that is heavily downvoted or repeatedly reported can be hidden automatically pending review.
• every moderator action is logged — who looked at what, when, and what they decided. those records are not editable afterwards by anyone, and they survive account deletion with the identifiers stripped out.
• false reporting has a cost. a reporter whose reports are repeatedly dismissed carries less weight, so that coordinated reporting cannot be used as a weapon. it never drops to zero: a real report from a bad reporter still lands.
• appeals: planned, not yet built. there is no appeals mechanism in the product today. until one exists, contact us at the address below and a human will look at it.
• images are scanned automatically before they are stored. an image that cannot be scanned is refused rather than published.

blocking

blocking someone is mutual and total for named content, and it permanently ends any connection between the two accounts — unblocking does not restore it. two limits are worth knowing: anonymous messages are not filtered by blocks, because filtering them would let you identify an anonymous author by elimination; and a block survives account deletion as an identifier-free record, so deleting and re-registering with the same address does not clear it.

events

• hosts are responsible for their events — the description, the venue, who is invited, what happens there, and compliance with any law, campus rule or venue policy that applies. lecturemates does not organise, inspect, insure or supervise events, and is not a party to them.
• a host sets capacity; when it is full, further rsvps are refused. hosts and co-hosts can remove a guest, and a removal persists — including across an account deletion and re-registration with the same address.
• invite links are opaque tokens. sharing one shares access to the event; treat it accordingly.
• attend at your own risk. use judgment about meeting people you have met online.

greek rank

greek rank is a running, user-submitted popularity vote. rankings, scores and vote counts are opinion content generated by campus votes — they are not statements of fact, are not affiliated with or endorsed by the organisations listed, and should not be read as claims about any chapter or any person. tag phrases shown on the board are generated by an automated summary of recent anonymous posts and are likewise opinion, not fact.

suspension and termination

we may restrict, suspend or terminate an account that breaks these terms, and may remove content that does. serious cases — threats, sexual content involving minors, coordinated harassment — can be actioned immediately and without notice. you can delete your account at any time from settings, and the privacy policy sets out exactly what that removes and the few things that deliberately survive it. losing access to your account does not entitle you to a refund, since the service is free.

not affiliated with usc

lecturemates is independently operated. it is not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with the university, and references to "usc" describe who the product is for, not a claim of institutional backing. course information is drawn from the university's public schedule of classes; enrollments are self-declared by students and are not institutional records.

disclaimers

TODO — for counsel. lecturemates is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. we do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that content posted by other users is accurate, or that anonymity will be preserved against every possible adversary. content on lecturemates is written by students; it is not advice, and it is not vetted by us before it appears.

limitation of liability

TODO — for counsel. to the maximum extent permitted by law, lecturemates is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for loss of data, goodwill or profits, arising out of your use of the service or your interactions with other users — including anything that happens at an event. some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions, in which case they apply only so far as the law permits.

governing law and disputes

TODO — for counsel. governing law, venue, and any dispute-resolution terms are not settled. no jurisdiction is named here because naming one before the operating entity is formed would be a placeholder pretending to be a commitment.

changes to these terms

the version you agreed to is recorded against your account, and material changes will be surfaced rather than silently reflowed. continuing to use lecturemates after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms.

contact

TODO — contact address not yet published. a monitored mailbox will be named here before signup opens.