Community Guidelines

Last updated: 2026-05-17 (draft v1 — pre-launch counsel review pending)

Community Guidelines — Lounge & Co.

🚧 DRAFT — Pre-launch counsel review required. This document is a working draft authored 2026-05-17. Counsel review paired with ACCEPTABLE_USE_POLICY.md and MODERATION_POLICY.md. Member-facing tone; meant to read as the “spirit” of the platform.

Effective: [PENDING LAUNCH DATE] · Last revised: 2026-09-16 (draft v2; added the Hospitality, not supervision section moved from the retired house contract)

What Lounge & Co. is

Lounge & Co. is a network for connoisseurs of premium tobacco and spirits. It’s the digital extension of the lounges and bars you already belong to (or want to belong to). The room you’re in is a venue; the network you’re part of is Lounge & Co.

These Community Guidelines describe how we expect Members to behave inside that network. They are paired with the binding Acceptable Use Policy (the legally enforceable rules) — these Guidelines are the spirit, the AUP is the letter.

The spirit of the platform

This is a connoisseur’s network, not a social-media free-for-all. Members here pay to be here. Venues here pay to participate. The expectation on both sides is a higher-than-average bar for conduct — closer to the standards of a private members’ club than to the standards of Twitter or Reddit.

Three principles we try to live by:

Treat every interaction as if you’d run into the other Member in person at a venue tomorrow. Because you might.
Talk about what you love. Cigars, spirits, pairings, venues, events, the rituals of the experience. This is a network for people who love this stuff; share that love.
Respect the privacy of every venue you visit. Public venue content can be shared platform-wide; private venue content stays in the venue unless explicitly shared by the Member who posted it.

Age requirement

You must be 21 or older to be a Member of Lounge & Co. Every Member completes Token of Trust identity + age verification at signup. This is non-negotiable — both because U.S. federal law requires it for tobacco platforms, and because the entire culture of the platform depends on it.

Do not share your account with anyone under 21. Do not post content that appears to depict consumption of tobacco or alcohol by someone under 21 (e.g., misleadingly-staged photos). Doing either is a material breach of the AUP.

How conversations work here

Posts and comments

Post about what you actually experienced. Reviews, tasting notes, pairings, venue impressions, event recaps.
No commerce solicitation. You can talk about products; you can’t sell or broker products. The platform doesn’t have a marketplace, and using posts or DMs as one is a breach of the AUP.
Be honest about ratings. Don’t astroturf for a venue you’re affiliated with (that’s an AUP violation called “coordinated inauthentic behavior”).
Talk about taste, not health. Tell us how a cigar draws, how a pour finishes, what an aroma reminds you of — that’s the whole point. But please don’t claim that any tobacco, nicotine, or alcohol product is healthier, safer, lower-risk, or good for you in some medical or wellness way. Those products carry real risks, and no post should suggest otherwise.
Comment to engage, not to harass. Disagreement is fine. Personal attacks are not.

Direct messages (DMs)

Followed-Member DMs land in your main inbox. Treat these like any normal conversation between people who’ve chosen to connect.
Stranger DMs (from Members you don’t follow) land in your silent Requests inbox. You won’t get a notification; check Requests when you want to. You can accept, decline, or block.
Rate limits apply. Free Members can send 5 stranger DM requests per day; Connoisseur tier 25/day; Cellar Club tier 100/day. DMs to Members you already follow are unlimited at every tier. The limits exist to prevent spam, not to penalize legitimate use.
Don’t use DMs to evade content rules. Anything prohibited in public posts is also prohibited in DMs.

Blocking

Blocking is platform-wide for direct contact. Blocked Members can’t DM you, can’t see your profile, can’t appear in your discovery surfaces.
Blocking does NOT prevent you from being in the same venue as someone you’ve blocked. You may still see them in the room. The platform doesn’t pretend physical co-presence away — it just removes direct contact via the app.
Inside shared venues, blocked Members’ activity is suppressed in your notifications (“Quiet Mode”). You won’t see their posts; their posts also don’t reach you via the venue’s feed.

Reporting

Use the in-app report buttons (on posts, comments, DMs, profiles) when something violates the AUP. Our trust & safety team reviews reports within 24 hours.
Reports are confidential. The Member you report does not see your identity.
False or malicious reports (sustained pattern) are themselves an AUP violation.

Venues — public vs private

Lounge & Co. venues come in two flavors:

Public venues are open for any Member to join. Their content defaults to platform-wide visibility (visible to your follow graph + concierge recommendations).
Private venues require approval before you can join. Their content defaults to venue-only visibility (only Members of that venue see it).

You can override the default visibility of any of your posts (set it venue-only or platform-wide regardless of the venue type). The default is just the starting point.

The concierge does not recommend private venues to Members who haven’t been approved. Private venues are discovered through the venue directory (browseable with a “Request Access” badge), word-of-mouth, referral codes, or invitations from existing Members. This is a deliberate friction — private means private.

Activity, Visits, and what gets logged

Activity feed is your platform-wide journal of everything you’ve done across the network — posts, ratings, Visit summaries, check-ins, event RSVPs, follows.
Visits are your in-venue sessions. You check in when you arrive; you can log items consumed (a cigar, a pour, food) to your Visit; you end the Visit when you leave (manually, or auto-closed via geofence if you opt in, or after an inactivity timeout).
Visit history retention varies by tier: Free Members get 30 days; Connoisseur tier gets 1 year; Cellar Club tier gets lifetime history.
Year-in-Drinks/Smokes annual recaps are opt-in per year. Each November, paid-tier Members receive an in-app prompt + email asking whether to generate the upcoming year’s recap; the recap is created only for Members who affirmatively consent. You can also enable your next recap proactively from Settings → Privacy → Year-in-Drinks recap. Consent is year-specific — a fresh choice each November — and is stored per (member, year) in our records.

You can delete any post, comment, rating, or Visit you’ve created at any time. Account-level data deletion is available via Settings → Privacy → Delete Account, which during the POC phase opens an email to [email protected] for manual processing within 30 days. Data subject access requests follow the same pattern at Settings → Privacy → Request My Data with a 45-day SLA. Information corrections for non-editable fields (legal name, email, date of birth) route the same way via Settings → Privacy → Correct My Information. Members may also opt out of automated decision-making (ADMT) at Settings → Privacy → ADMT opt-out; once recorded, Sterlon (the concierge) short-circuits at every turn and stops generating recommendations until the opt-out is reversed by emailing [email protected]. During the POC phase, opt-out reversal is email-only — the self-service opt-back-in control ships with our next milestone. Hive automated-moderation auto-action suppression for opted-out members also ships with our next milestone; until then, the ADMT kill-switch pauses the concierge, whether shown as Sterlon or Aurelle, only.

The concierge (Sterlon or Aurelle)

Lounge & Co.’s in-house AI concierge is one personality presented through two display options you pick at onboarding: Sterlon (masculine) or Aurelle (feminine). Same Anthropic Claude model under enterprise contract, same voice and tone, same recommendation logic — only the avatar and display name change. You can swap your concierge display any time at Settings → Personalization → Concierge Display.

The concierge knows your palate across every venue you belong to, and serves recommendations based on:

Your taste similarity to items in the venue’s offerings
Recency of the venue’s catalog
Your explicit preferences (saves, ratings, follows)

The concierge ranks on content-neutral signals only. No venue can pay to rank higher in the concierge’s main recommendation flow. Verification badges and richer venue pages are presentation features for paid venues — they are not ranking signals. The ranking principle is identical regardless of which concierge display (Sterlon or Aurelle) you’ve chosen.

A separate “Featured Venues” shelf may appear elsewhere in the app, always clearly labeled. Here’s exactly what it is, so there’s no confusion:

It’s paid promotional placement — venues pay to appear there. That makes it Lounge & Co.’s own advertising content, not a concierge recommendation and not a member’s post.
It’s keyed to venue identity only. Nothing about you — your palate, your Visits, your follows — feeds into who shows up on that shelf.
We never take payment from tobacco or alcohol product makers or suppliers to feature a venue. A venue’s own subscription is the only thing that can put it on the shelf; product brands cannot buy their way in. The concierge’s main recommendations stay free of paid placement either way.

The concierge is rate-limited at the Free tier (10–15 conversation turns per day). Connoisseur tier gets 50/day; Cellar Club tier is unlimited. Daily and monthly limits are counted per member, not per persona — swapping display options does not reset your counter.

You can give feedback on any concierge response (👍, 👎, “this was wrong”). Feedback feeds our internal AI safety review process per MODERATION_POLICY.md.

Hospitality, not supervision

We look after the room, but we’re a guest book and a concierge, not a chaperone. We don’t supervise or police your drinking or smoking. Your Activity is yours to log, and we don’t judge it. The concierge’s suggestions are never a verdict on you. If you want help with tobacco or alcohol, talk to a professional.

Where a venue is involved, the house’s own rules apply on top of ours, never instead of them. Staff decisions about service, seating, and conduct are final in their own house. See MEMBER_TERMS_OF_SERVICE.md sections 12 and 9.1 for the full disclaimer.

Privacy expectations

Member profile visibility depends on your subscription tier. Free Members are discoverable within venues they’ve joined; paid-tier Members are discoverable platform-wide. Settings → Privacy → Discoverability offers six independent opt-out toggles — member search, suggested-follows, palate-similarity, leaderboards, “here tonight” presence, and profile visibility to non-followers — so you can control where you appear surface by surface. The toggles save your preferences today; per-surface enforcement activates when the platform-wide visibility layer (P4) ships in our next milestone. Until then, the founder team honors a disabled-surface preference manually if you request it via [email protected].
Default content visibility depends on the venue (public → platform-wide; private → venue-only); you can override per-post.
DMs are between Members only. Venues don’t see DM content or metadata, even DMs between two Members of the same venue.
Sub-processors. Lounge & Co. uses Token of Trust (age verification), Anthropic (concierge AI), Deepgram (concierge voice-input transcription — raw audio not retained), Stripe (subscription billing), Hive (content moderation), and Better Stack (monitoring + status pages). Each is bound by data-processing terms that prohibit them from using your data for purposes beyond providing their service to us. See the Platform Privacy Policy for the complete list.

What we ask of you

Be present. This is a network for people who genuinely engage with venues and other Members. Posting once a year doesn’t break any rules, but the platform’s value compounds with participation.
Speak as yourself. Anonymous accounts aren’t permitted — your account is tied to your verified identity. Choose a display name you’d be comfortable being recognized by at any venue you visit.
Respect the room. Different venues have different vibes. A cigar lounge that’s been around for 80 years has different conversational norms than a craft cocktail speakeasy that opened last month. Read the room.
Tell us when something’s wrong. Use the report flows. Email [email protected] if something doesn’t fit an in-app surface.

What we promise you

Honest recommendations. The concierge’s main flow will never be tilted by paid placement.
Real moderation. Best-effort 24-hour review on user reports, with a hard cap of 72 hours; emergency safety reports (CSAM, immediate threats, active-harm illegal content) are reviewed within 4 hours, hard cap 24 hours. Central team responsible; reports are not offloaded to venue admins.
Real privacy. Sub-processors disclosed. No selling member data. No advertising in the main feed.
Real members. Every Member is age-verified at signup. Bots and inauthentic accounts are removed.
Real venues. Verified venues are claimed by the actual venue owners; venue compliance attestation is required for paid tiers.
Honest about whose words are whose. A post reflects the Member who wrote it, not Lounge & Co. And the choices we make about what to show, how to rank it, how to label it, or what to remove are our own editorial judgment.

Changes

These Guidelines may evolve as the platform grows. Material changes are announced at least 30 days in advance via in-app notification + email. The binding rules are in the AUP.

Questions?

General: [email protected]
Trust & safety: [email protected]
Appeals: [email protected]