Terms of Service

Learn In Public (the service) is operated by Niranjan V S (we, us). These Terms of Service (terms) are a binding agreement between us and you.

You accept these terms by ticking the box at sign-up, and again every time you use the service. If you do not accept them, do not create an account and do not use the service. Our Privacy Policy is part of this agreement and describes how we handle your personal data.

• You must be at least 16 years old. The service is not directed at children under 16 and we do not knowingly allow them to hold accounts. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16 we will delete it.
• You must be legally able to enter into a contract, and you must not be barred from using the service under any law that applies to you.
• If we have previously banned you, you may not create a new account — not under a different email address, and not through a different login provider.
• One account per person. Accounts are for humans, not bots or automated agents.

• Verification gates writing. You can browse and read without an account. To post, comment, react or follow, you must be signed in and have a verified email address. Until you verify, your account is read-only.
• Keep your credentials safe. You are responsible for everything that happens under your account. Tell us immediately at mail.niranjanvs@gmail.com if you believe someone else has access to it.
• Give us accurate information. A working email address in particular — it is how we verify you, reset your password and reach you about your account.
• Usernames. Some names are reserved (for example words that suggest you are staff, and words that collide with the app’s own pages). We may reclaim or change a username that impersonates a person or organisation, that squats a name, or that is offensive. If you delete your account, your username is released and someone else may take it.
• Accounts are personal to you. You may not sell, rent or transfer your account to anyone else.

Your content stays yours. We claim no ownership of the posts, comments, topic names and descriptions, profile text and images you submit (your content).

To be able to run the service, we need your permission to show your content to other people. So, for as long as your content is on the service, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub-licensable licence to host, store, cache, reproduce, adapt for display (for example resizing an avatar or generating a preview), publish, publicly display and distribute your content, solely for the purpose of operating, securing and promoting the service. Promotion is limited to showing your public content as it appears on the service — for example a public post in a screenshot of the product.

You promise that you have the right to post it — that your content is yours or you are permitted to share it, that it does not infringe anyone else’s copyright, trademark, privacy or other rights, that it does not disclose someone else’s confidential information or your employer’s trade secrets, and that it does not break any law.

The licence ends when the content is removed from the service, except that copies may persist in backups for a limited period, and except where content survives your account deletion in anonymized form as described in section 16.

Learn In Public is a public accountability tool. That is the entire point of it, and it has consequences worth stating bluntly:

• Your username, display name, bio, avatar, topics, posts, comments, reactions, streaks, follower and following lists are visible to anyone on the internet, including people who are not signed in, and including search engines and other crawlers that may copy, cache and index them.
• Deleting content does not un-publish it. Once something has been public, other people may have seen, copied, screenshotted or archived it. We can remove it from our service; we cannot remove it from theirs.
• Your email address and password are never shown publicly.

Do not post anything you need to keep private, anything covered by an NDA, anything confidential to your employer or client, or anyone else’s personal data.

You agree not to use the service to:

• post content that is unlawful, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, hateful, or that harasses, bullies, threatens or incites violence against anyone;
• impersonate any person or organisation, or misrepresent your affiliation with one;
• post spam, chain content, unsolicited advertising, affiliate-link farming, engagement bait, or repetitive content designed to inflate a streak;
• infringe anyone’s copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, privacy, publicity or other rights;
• publish another person’s private or identifying information without their consent (doxxing), or share non-consensual intimate imagery;
• upload malware, or post content that deceives or misleads about its origin;
• scrape, crawl or harvest the service beyond what a normal browser does, or use bots or scripts to create accounts, post, follow or react;
• probe, scan, overload or circumvent the service’s security or rate limits, or attempt to access data that is not yours;
• resell, sub-licence or commercially exploit the service or the data in it;
• do anything that violates a law applicable to you, or that helps someone else do any of the above.

Automated limits. The service applies per-action rate limits and an automated filter that blocks obvious spam and profanity at submission. Deliberately working around either is itself a breach of these terms.

• Reporting. Any signed-in user can report a post, a comment or a profile, with a reason. Reports are not shown to the person being reported. Do not abuse the report system — mass or malicious reporting is itself a breach.
• What we may do. If we consider that content or an account breaches these terms, or that we are required to act by law, we may remove or hide the content, restrict features, suspend the account, or ban it — with or without prior notice, at our reasonable discretion.
• Suspended vs banned. A suspension is temporary: while it is in effect your posts, comments and profile are hidden from the public, and they are restored if the suspension is lifted. A ban is permanent: your content stays hidden for good. In both cases the data is retained internally for audit and safety purposes, and is no longer served publicly.
• Appeals. If you think we got it wrong, write to the Grievance Officer (section 19). We will look again.
• No duty to monitor. We do not pre-screen content and we are not obliged to monitor it. Acting on some content does not oblige us to act on all of it, and choosing not to act in one case does not waive our right to act in another.
• Legal orders. We will remove or disable access to information within 36 hours of receiving a valid court order or a lawful order from a government agency, and we will preserve records associated with it as required by law.
• Intimate imagery. On a complaint that content shows a person in a state of nudity or in a sexual act, or is an artificial impersonation of that person, we will take it down within 24 hours.

If you believe content on the service infringes your copyright or other intellectual property, email mail.niranjanvs@gmail.com with:

• a link to the content;
• a description of the work you say it infringes;
• proof, or a clear basis, for your ownership of or authority over that work;
• your name, address and contact details;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised, and that the information you have given is accurate.

We may remove the content and notify the person who posted it, who may respond. Knowingly false claims may make you liable for the resulting damage. Accounts that repeatedly infringe will be terminated.

Streaks, counts and heatmaps are computed from your posts against your selected timezone. They are a motivational feature, not a record of account. Bugs, downtime, timezone changes, moderation actions and content deletions can change or reset them, and we do not guarantee their accuracy or their preservation. Losing a streak is not a loss we compensate.

The service itself — the software, design, name, logo and everything in it other than user content — belongs to us or our licensors. These terms grant you a limited, personal, non-transferable, revocable right to use the service as it is offered, and nothing more. You may not copy our branding or present the service as your own.

Feedback you send us (ideas, suggestions, bug reports) may be used freely, without obligation or payment to you.

You may sign in with Google or GitHub. When you do, your use of that provider is governed by their terms, not ours, and they may receive information about your sign-in. Avatars you upload are stored with our image provider, and emails we send you go through our email provider — see the Privacy Policy for the full list.

Content on the service may link out to other sites. We do not control them, do not endorse them, and are not responsible for them. Follow a link at your own risk.

• The service is provided free of charge and is under active development. Features may change, break or disappear.
• We do not guarantee any level of uptime, availability, or data durability, and we may modify, suspend or discontinue the service — in whole or in part — at any time.
• If we discontinue the service entirely, we will give you reasonable advance notice by email where practicable so that you can copy your content out.
• We may impose limits (post length, rate limits, storage) and change them.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory — including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, that defects will be corrected, that your data will never be lost, or that content posted by other users is accurate, lawful or fit to rely on. Nothing on the service is professional advice.

Some laws do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is the case, this section applies to you only as far as that law permits, and your mandatory statutory rights are unaffected.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, nor for any loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, opportunity, data or content — including loss of your posts, comments or streaks — however caused, and even if we have been advised that such loss might occur.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the service or these terms, for all claims combined, is limited to the greater of (a) the total amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim (which, for a free service, is zero) and (b) INR 5,000.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited — including liability for fraud, for wilful misconduct, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. If you are a consumer, your mandatory rights under consumer-protection law are unaffected.

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from any claim, demand, loss, liability, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) brought by a third party and arising out of your content, your use of the service, or your breach of these terms or of any law or third-party right. We will tell you about any such claim and you may take over its defence with counsel we reasonably approve; you may not settle it in a way that imposes any obligation on us without our written consent.

• You can leave at any time. Delete your account from Settings.
• What deletion actually does. Deleting your account anonymizes it — it does not erase your writing. Your email, display name, bio, avatar and linked login accounts are scrubbed, your password is destroyed, your username is released, and your account is marked deleted. Your posts and comments remain on the service, attributed to a deleted user and no longer linked to you. This is deliberate: removing them would gut the conversations other people took part in. If you need something you wrote taken down, delete that post or comment before you delete your account, or write to us.
• We can terminate too. We may suspend or terminate your account if you breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we discontinue the service.
• What survives. Sections 4 (the licence, to the extent content remains), 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18 and 20 survive termination, along with any other clause that by its nature should.

We may update these terms. When we do, we will change the “last updated” date at the top of this page. If a change is material we will give you notice — by email or an in-app notice — before it takes effect, where practicable.

Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms. If you do not accept them, delete your account.

These terms are governed by the laws of India, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. The courts at Kochi, India have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the service.

If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory laws of your country of residence.

Before starting proceedings, please write to us — most disputes can be resolved by email in a week.

In accordance with the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the rules made under it, the Grievance Officer for the service is:

• Niranjan V S
• mail.niranjanvs@gmail.com
• Kochi, Kerala, India

The Grievance Officer will acknowledge your complaint within 24 hours and resolve it within 15 days of receipt. Please include your username, links to the content or account concerned, and what you would like done. Complaints about a moderation decision, a privacy request, or unlawful content all go to the same address.

• Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the service, and replace anything said before.
• Severability. If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, that part is narrowed to the minimum extent needed, and the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a right, we have not given it up.
• Assignment. You may not assign these terms. We may assign them to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of the service, on notice to you.
• No third-party beneficiaries. These terms create rights only between you and us.
• Force majeure. We are not liable for failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control.