Terms of Service

1. The agreement

These terms are an agreement between you and hiya (“we”, “us”), who operate hiya at hiya.page. They cover the website, the page editor, and every page published through it.

By signing in, redeeming an invite code or publishing a page, you accept these terms and our Privacy Policy. If you don't accept them, don't use the service.

2. Who can use hiya

• You must be at least 13 years old, and old enough in the country you live in to agree to terms like these without a parent's permission. If your country sets a higher minimum for online services, that age applies to you.
• You need a Discord account in good standing, because that is how signing in works.
• You need an invite code from an existing member. There is no other way in, and we don't sell them.
• You must not be someone we have previously banned, or someone acting on a banned person's behalf.

3. Your account

You sign in with Discord — we never see or store a password for you. Your Discord account is the key to your hiya account, so keeping it secure is on you.

• One account per person. Extra accounts made to collect invites, hoard usernames or get around a ban may all be removed.
• Don't share or hand over your account. You can't sell it, rent it or transfer it to someone else.
• You're responsible for what happens on it, including anything published from it.
• If we suspend or ban an account, existing sign-ins for it stop working immediately.

4. Invite codes

Members are given a number of invite codes to pass on. The number is set by us and can change at any time, for everyone or for one person.

• Codes are a courtesy, not property. They have no cash value, and selling, auctioning or trading them is not allowed — we'll revoke codes and may close accounts over it.
• Each code works once. We can revoke unused codes at any time, including when signups are closed.
• We keep a record of who invited whom. If you invite someone who then abuses the platform, that's taken into account — repeatedly inviting bad actors can cost you your own access.

5. Your username

Your username is your address: hiya.page/yourname. You're allocated the use of it — you don't own it, and it stays with the service.

• Names that match our own routes, brand names or staff titles are reserved and can't be claimed.
• You can change your username from your account settings. Your previous name is then held for about 30 days so that nobody can immediately take it and impersonate you.
• We can reclaim or change a username that impersonates someone, infringes a trade mark, is being squatted on, or that we're legally required to release. Where we can, we'll tell you first.

6. Your content and who owns it

You keep ownership

Everything you put on your page — your words, images, links and design choices — stays yours. We don't claim ownership of it and we don't sell it.

What you let us do with it

To run the service at all, we need your permission to store your content and show it to people. So you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, copy, resize, cache and publicly display your content, purely for the purpose of operating hiya. That licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies already made by others, by search engines or in ordinary server backups.

What you're promising us

• You have the right to publish everything you upload.
• It doesn't infringe anyone's copyright, trade mark, privacy or other rights.
• Images of other people are used with their permission where permission is needed.

Your page is public once published

A published page is an ordinary public web page. Anyone with the link can read it, search engines can index it, and third parties can archive or screenshot it. Unpublishing takes your page down from us but cannot claw back copies that already exist elsewhere. Don't publish anything you'd need to be able to take back.

7. What you may not do

Using hiya, you must not:

• Publish anything illegal where you are or where we operate, or anything that encourages a serious crime.
• Publish sexual content involving anyone under 18, or any content that sexualises a minor. This gets an immediate permanent ban and a report to the authorities, with no appeal.
• Publish pornography, graphic sexual content, or gratuitously violent or gory material. There is no age gate here, so it doesn't belong.
• Harass, threaten, bully, stalk or incite violence against anyone, or publish someone's private information without their permission (doxxing).
• Attack people on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation.
• Impersonate another person, a business, or hiya staff, or present yourself as endorsed by someone who hasn't endorsed you.
• Use your page for phishing, scams, fake giveaways, malware, cryptocurrency drainers, or any link intended to deceive or harm whoever clicks it.
• Sell or advertise anything unlawful, or run a storefront for stolen or pirated material.
• Infringe copyright or trade marks, including by hotlinking or re-hosting other people's work as your own.
• Attack, probe or overload the service: automated scraping, credential stuffing, denial-of-service, exploiting bugs rather than reporting them, or trying to reach data or accounts that aren't yours.
• Get around a suspension or ban, a rate limit, a storage quota or an invite limit.
• Use the uploader as general file storage or a CDN for things unrelated to your page.

8. Reports, moderation and enforcement

Anyone can report a page, signed in or not. We don't review pages before they go live, and we're not obliged to monitor everything published — but we do act on what's reported to us.

Depending on what we find, we may:

• Leave the page alone and dismiss the report;
• Edit or remove specific content;
• Unpublish a page so only its owner can see it;
• Suspend an account temporarily, which also signs it out everywhere;
• Ban an account permanently and delete its page and files;
• Reduce or remove someone's invite allowance;
• Pass information to law enforcement where we believe someone is at risk or a serious crime is involved.

We keep an internal record of moderation decisions and of the administrative actions staff take. If you think we got a decision wrong, email support@hiya.page and say so — we'll look again, though we can't promise a particular outcome or a deadline.

Reporting in bad faith — mass reports, reports as harassment, or reports you know to be false — is itself a breach of these terms.

9. Copyright complaints

If something on hiya infringes your copyright, email support@hiya.page with:

1. the page URL and which part of it you're complaining about;
2. what the work is, and where the original can be seen;
3. confirmation that you own the rights or are authorised to act for whoever does;
4. a statement that you believe in good faith the use isn't authorised by the rights holder or by law;
5. your name and contact details.

We'll look into it and usually remove or hide the content while we do. We tell the page's owner what was removed and who complained, and they can respond. If they show they had the right to use it, we may put it back. Accounts that keep infringing get closed.

10. Availability, limits and changes

• It's free, and there's no uptime promise. We run this on a single server and we don't guarantee the service will be available, uninterrupted, or free of faults.
• Maintenance happens. We may pause editing, publishing and signups — and occasionally take pages offline — while we work on things. Where it's planned, we'll say so on the site.
• There are limits. Uploads are capped per account (currently around 50MB by default), and we keep roughly the last 20 published versions of your page for rollback. Both are defaults we can change, up or down.
• Features change. We may add, alter or withdraw parts of the service. If we ever shut hiya down, we'll give reasonable notice so you can copy your content out.
• Keep your own copies. Version history is a convenience, not a backup service. Keep your images and text somewhere you control.

11. Ending the agreement

By you

Delete your account from your account settings, at any time, without asking us. That removes your account, your page and its drafts, your version history, your uploaded images from our server, and any invite codes you hadn't handed out. It can't be undone, and the record of which codes were already redeemed stays for the invite trail.

By us

We may suspend or close your account if you break these terms, if we're legally required to, or if keeping it open would put other people or the service at risk. For anything other than a serious or repeated breach we'll try to warn you first.

When the agreement ends, your right to use the service stops and your page comes down. Sections 6 (your promises to us), 12, 13 and 15 survive.

12. Disclaimers

The service is provided as is and as available. To the extent the law allows, we make no warranties about it — express or implied — including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement.

We don't control what members put on their pages and we don't endorse it. Pages may link to other sites we have nothing to do with; following those links is at your own risk.

Nothing here takes away rights you have as a consumer that can't legally be taken away — including under the Consumer Protection Act in South Africa, or equivalent law where you live.

13. Limits on liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, hiya is not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, for lost profits, lost opportunities, lost data or lost goodwill, arising out of your use of the service — even if we'd been told such loss was possible.

Where liability can't be excluded, it is limited to the greater of what you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim (for a free service, that is nothing) or ZAR 1,000.

We don't exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that can't lawfully be excluded.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top changes when we do. For changes that materially affect you we'll give notice on the site before they take effect. Carrying on using hiya after that means you accept the new version; if you don't, delete your account.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of South Africa, and the courts of South Africa have jurisdiction over any dispute. If you're a consumer somewhere else, this doesn't remove the protection of your local law or your right to bring a claim where you live.

16. Contact

Questions, complaints, appeals and legal notices: support@hiya.page.

How we handle your personal information is covered separately in our Privacy Policy.