Community Guidelines

Effective: 2026-09-22 · Last revised: 2026-10-07

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1. What Reserve Leaf & Pour is

Reserve Leaf & Pour 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 Reserve Leaf & Pour.

These Guidelines are both the spirit and the letter. §§1-8 and §§15-17 explain how the platform works and how we expect Members to behave inside it. §§9-14 are the binding rules — eligibility, prohibited content and behaviour, enforcement, appeals, copyright, and how we moderate. Those sections are incorporated by reference into the Member Terms of Service, and breaching them is grounds for the enforcement actions in §10.

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2. 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:

1. Treat every interaction as if you’d run into the other Member in person at a venue tomorrow. Because you might.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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3. Age requirement

You must be 21 or older to be a Member of Reserve Leaf & Pour 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. The full detail is in the Age Policy.

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 binding rules in §9.1 and §9.3.

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4. How conversations work here

Posts

• 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 is not a marketplace. A venue’s own Hold feature, where the venue has turned it on, is the only product-pickup request the platform supports. Using posts or DMs to sell or broker products is a breach of §9.2.2.
• Be honest about ratings. Don’t astroturf for a venue you’re affiliated with (that’s the violation §9.2.4 calls “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.
• Disagree about a post without personal attacks. 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 breaks the rules in §9. Our trust & safety team reviews reports within 24 hours. §14 has the full list of reporting routes.
• Reports are confidential. The Member you report does not see your identity.
• False or malicious reports (sustained pattern) are themselves a violation of §9.2.4.

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5. Venues: public vs private

Reserve Leaf & Pour 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.

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6. 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 Taste 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 Profile → Privacy → Year in Taste recap consent. Consent is year-specific — a fresh choice each November — and is stored per (member, year) in our records.

You can delete any post from the Posts tab of your profile, and any room post from the room where you posted it, at any time — it disappears immediately and is permanently deleted 30 days after you delete it, unless a legal hold, an open report or a moderation appeal applies; deleting a post also removes any rating recorded on it. Venue staff may also remove a post in a room their venue runs: you are notified in your inbox, the post is permanently deleted 30 days after removal on the same schedule, the removal is a venue action that cannot be appealed to Reserve Leaf & Pour, and reports you or others file still go to Reserve Leaf & Pour moderation, unchanged. You can also delete a Visit you’ve logged. You can delete your account at Profile → Privacy → Delete account: you confirm by signing in again, and your account is deleted 7 days later unless you cancel. If we need to review your request — for example, an active legal hold or an open safety investigation — deletion waits until the review is done, and we email you the outcome. You can also delete your account by emailing [email protected]; an email request is handled by our team, not automatically, within 45 days. Data access requests start at Profile → Privacy → Request my data, which opens an email to [email protected]; we respond within 45 days. Information corrections for non-editable fields (legal name, email, date of birth) route the same way via Profile → Privacy → Correct my information. Members may also opt out of automated decision-making (ADMT) at Profile → Privacy → Automated decision-making (ADMT); once recorded, Sterlon (the concierge) short-circuits at every turn and stops generating recommendations until the opt-out is reversed by emailing [email protected]. Opt-out reversal is by email only for now. The ADMT kill-switch pauses the concierge, whether shown as Sterlon or Aurelle, only; it has no effect on content moderation, because moderation is currently a human-reviewed process with no automated decision-making for the kill-switch to pause.

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7. The concierge (Sterlon or Aurelle)

Reserve Leaf & Pour’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 Profile → Overview → Preferences → Concierge persona.

The concierge knows your palate across every venue you belong to. On your Tonight row specifically, its picks weigh:

• How recently you’ve tasted similar items, and how you rated them
• Your wish-list saves
• How well an item fits your palate profile’s top categories

Your Tonight picks weigh how recently you’ve tasted similar items, how you rated them, your wish-list saves, and your palate profile — never whether a venue paid us, and never who you follow. Among the top-ranked candidates, the concierge chooses one “new to you” pick; one slot on Tonight deliberately surfaces something you haven’t had in a while, which rewards the opposite of recent tasting. This list of signals isn’t exhaustive, but nothing it omits is a paid-placement or follow-graph signal. Your Tonight row may also carry one separately labeled, unpaid promotion card from a venue you’ve already joined (for example, “Promotion · Featured at {venue}”) — it is never something a venue paid for and never a ranking input. 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 Reserve Leaf & Pour’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 (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. We aim to review a report that the concierge said something wrong within 72 hours, with a hard cap of 7 days.

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8. 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 §12 and §9.1 for the full disclaimer.

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9. The rules (binding)

This section and §§10-14 define the conduct expected of all Reserve Leaf & Pour members (consumers paying subscription tiers), venue subscribers (B2B), and any other party using the Reserve Leaf & Pour platform (collectively, “Members”). They are a binding contract supplemental to the Member Terms of Service and the Venue DPA Template. Violations are enforced under the procedures in §10 and §11.

9.1 Eligibility requirements

To use the Reserve Leaf & Pour platform, you must:

• Be at least 21 years of age (verified at signup via Token of Trust).
• Reside in the United States (verified via IP geofence at signup).
• Have a valid email address you control.
• Provide accurate identity information during Token of Trust verification. Providing false identity information is a material breach.
• Not be subject to any prior account suspension or ban from Reserve Leaf & Pour.

9.2 Prohibited content

The following categories of content are prohibited on the Reserve Leaf & Pour platform — in posts, comments, ratings, direct messages (DMs), images, profile photos, venue listings, event descriptions, or any other surface where members or venues can publish content:

Editorial discretion. Member Content reflects the views of the Member who posted it, not those of Reserve Leaf & Pour. Our decisions to host, rank, label, remove, or decline content are our own editorial judgments and do not make any Member Content our speech.

9.2.1 Illegal content

• Content that violates federal, state, or local U.S. law.
• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — zero tolerance; reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
• Content that infringes copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property rights. Copyright claims are handled via our DMCA designated agent under §12; members who are the subject of repeated validated infringement notices are subject to the repeat-infringer policy in §12.2.
• Content that facilitates illegal sale or distribution of controlled substances, including unlawful tobacco or alcohol sales.

9.2.2 Restricted-substance commerce

• No solicitation of tobacco or alcohol product sales through Reserve Leaf & Pour Per BUSINESS_MODEL.md §0.1, the platform does not ship tobacco or alcohol and does not let members sell to each other. A member can ask a venue to hold items for pickup through the venue’s Hold feature, and the venue is the seller. Members posting offers to sell, trade, or ship tobacco/alcohol products are in breach of these Guidelines regardless of medium (posts, DMs, venue listings).
• This does NOT prohibit content about tobacco or alcohol products (reviews, tasting notes, photos of consumption) — those are the core of the platform. Only commerce solicitation is prohibited.
• No health, therapeutic, or reduced-risk claims about tobacco, nicotine, or alcohol products. Members may not post health, therapeutic, medical, safety, cessation, or comparative-risk claims about tobacco, nicotine, or alcohol products (for example, that a product is safer, healthier, lower-risk, or has medical or wellness benefit). Subjective discussion of taste, aroma, draw, and experience is permitted; claims of physiological benefit or reduced risk are not. This reinforces BUSINESS_MODEL.md §0.1 — member UGC may not assert what the platform itself is barred from claiming.

9.2.3 Harassment and abuse

• Targeted harassment, threats of violence, or intimidation directed at any Member.
• Hate speech based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability.
• Doxxing — publishing another Member’s private information without consent.
• Stalking patterns — repeated unwanted contact after a Member has declined or blocked.

9.2.4 Spam and abuse of platform features

• Bulk messaging, mass DM solicitations, or use of the DM Requests inbox to bypass tier-graduated rate limits.
• Coordinated inauthentic behavior — coordinated networks of accounts artificially inflating engagement on any content, venue, or member.
• Scraping, automated harvesting, or other unauthorized programmatic access to Reserve Leaf & Pour data.
• Impersonation of another Member, Venue, public figure, or Reserve Leaf & Pour itself.

9.2.5 Sexually explicit content

• Nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit imagery is prohibited regardless of the member’s age verification. (Cigar and spirits photography that depicts consumption in tasteful, lifestyle contexts is permitted; explicit sexual content is not.)

9.2.6 Violent or graphic content

• Depictions of real-world violence, self-harm, or graphic injury.
• Glorification or promotion of violence, terrorism, or organized criminal activity.

9.2.7 Misleading content

• False or misleading content presented as factual (deepfakes of real people without consent; falsified reviews; impersonation of Reserve Leaf & Pour staff or venue representatives).
• Content that falsely suggests endorsement by Reserve Leaf & Pour or a venue.

9.2.8 User-report categories (in-app surface)

The in-app Report affordance (every post, comment, DM, profile, and venue page) exposes the following seven categories. These are the exact strings the report API accepts (POST /api/me/reports); the moderation queue stores them as the category enum verbatim. Drift between this enumeration and the code is caught by the schema-test regression guard in packages/db/test/schema.test.ts.

1. Harassment / Bullying (harassment_bullying) — surfaces §9.2.3 (Harassment and abuse).
2. Spam (spam) — surfaces §9.2.4 (Spam and abuse of platform features).
3. Off-topic (off_topic) — surfaces §9.2.4 (Spam and abuse of platform features), narrow cut-out for category-mismatch reports that aren’t full-spam.
4. Illegal content (illegal_content) — surfaces §9.2.1 (Illegal content).
5. Impersonation (impersonation) — surfaces §9.2.4 (Spam and abuse of platform features, impersonation sub-clause) + §9.2.7 (Misleading content).
6. Hate speech (hate_speech) — surfaces §9.2.3 (Harassment and abuse, hate speech sub-clause).
7. Other (other) — required free-text reason; routed to the same triage queue with the explanation attached.

Sexually-explicit (§9.2.5), violent / graphic (§9.2.6), and other content categories not present above are caught by the Hive auto-classifier (post-N6) and the founder-triage flow routes any “Other” report claiming such content into our emergency response path described in §10 (4-hour first response, 24-hour cap).

9.3 Prohibited member behavior

In addition to the prohibited content categories above:

• Age-verification fraud. Providing false identity, attempting to bypass the Token of Trust verification, or sharing your verified account with a person under 21. This is treated as a material breach with no warning.
• Subscription fraud. Chargebacks without legitimate cause, payment method fraud, multi-account creation to evade tier limits, or any other attempt to abuse subscription billing.
• Reverse engineering. Reverse engineering, decompiling, or attempting to extract source code or proprietary algorithms from the Reserve Leaf & Pour apps, including the concierge’s prompt content or ranking signals.
• Circumvention of moderation. Creating new accounts to evade a suspension or ban; using VPNs or proxies to evade the US-only geofence.
• Misuse of venue access. Misrepresenting affiliation with a venue you do not work at; impersonating venue staff; misusing private-venue access granted via approval.

9.4 Venue-level enforcement (B2B subscribers)

Venues that subscribe to Reserve Leaf & Pour (Free Claimed, Pro, or Estate tiers) are bound by these Guidelines as they apply to:

• Content the venue publishes (venue page, event listings, catalog descriptions).
• Conduct by accounts associated with the venue (owner, staff).
• Content moderation within their workspace — venues are expected to flag clear violations they encounter (e.g., a member posting CSAM in their venue’s feed). Venues are NOT expected to do platform-level moderation; that remains Reserve Leaf & Pour’s responsibility.

Venue-level breaches are escalated through the venue admin contact and may result in:

• Removal of violating venue content.
• Suspension of venue subscription (no refund pro-ration past the breach date).
• Termination of the venue’s claimed status (page reverts to auto-stub).
• Removal of the venue from Reserve Leaf & Pour entirely in severe cases (per the DPA termination clause).

Member-vs-member violations (DM harassment, post-vs-post harassment, profile reports) are handled by our central trust & safety team; venues do not moderate Members directly. A venue-context violation may be communicated to the venue admin, who can escalate to us or handle it in-venue — for a private venue, that can include revoking your approved membership. A sustained pattern of misconduct at one venue can cost you that venue’s membership while your account stays active elsewhere. Venues never see DM content or DM metadata, even between two Members of the same venue.

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10. How we enforce these Guidelines

When these Guidelines are violated, Reserve Leaf & Pour (acting through its trust & safety team) may take any of the following actions, in any order or combination, based on severity:

Reserve Leaf & Pour determines severity using:

1. The nature of the content/behavior (zero-tolerance categories vs subjective categories).
2. The Member’s history (first-time vs repeat offender).
3. The impact on other Members (private breach vs viral harm).
4. Context (intent, surrounding posts, response to warnings).
5. Subscription tier — Cellar Club Members are held to a slightly higher standard, given the connoisseur’s-network expectation in §2.

What that looks like in practice. Reviewers work from a default action per violation category and record the reason whenever they depart from it. In plain terms:

• Heated tone that isn’t harassment draws a warning before anything comes down, and removal if it continues.
• Insults toward another Member draw removal plus a warning, and removal plus a suspension of up to 7 days on repeat.
• Sexually explicit content draws removal plus a warning, then removal plus a suspension of up to 14 days on repeat, and a ban if it continues.
• Tobacco or alcohol commerce solicitation draws removal plus a warning, then removal plus a suspension of up to 7 days, and a permanent ban if it continues.
• Bulk-DM spam draws a rate-limit reset plus a warning, then a DM suspension of up to 7 days, and a permanent ban if it continues.
• Hate speech draws removal plus a suspension of up to 30 days, and a permanent ban on repeat.
• Impersonation draws removal plus a suspension of up to 14 days, and a permanent ban on repeat.
• CSAM, credible threats of violence, age-verification fraud, reverse engineering, and subscription or payment fraud sit at the top of the scale — up to permanent termination on the first offense, with no warning.

How fast we respond. 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. The central team is responsible for both; reports are not offloaded to venue admins.

If we miss a window. The status tracker shown to the Member who filed the report is updated to acknowledge the delay rather than leaving the report looking unread. For emergency safety categories, if the review is still unresolved 12 hours before the hard cap, we conservatively hide the reported content while the review finishes. Both backstops are automated and ship with our next milestone; until then the founder team applies them by hand on the same timings.

When we act on your account. If your account is suspended or banned, we send you that notice by email within one hour of the action, including what you can still do: appeal, cancel, download or delete your data.

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11. Appeals

A Member who receives an enforcement action taken through the moderation queue may appeal within 180 days via the in-app appeals form (or by emailing [email protected] if the form is inaccessible). Appeals go to a queue separate from the initial-review queue and are reviewed by a trust & safety reviewer who was NOT involved in the original action; this reviewer-separation rule is enforced in code at the appeals decision endpoint, not just documented here. Restrictions applied outside the moderation queue (an administrative account action, not tied to a specific enforcement action) are not appealable in-app; contact [email protected].

Appeals must include:

• The account email.
• The specific action being appealed.
• The Member’s account of what happened.
• Any relevant context (screenshots, links, witness Members).

You may have one open appeal at a time. If your first appeal on an action is upheld, you may file one reconsideration of that same action: it needs new information, and it can only be filed starting 30 days after the denial and within 180 days of it. If your account is permanently banned and your appeal of the ban is denied, you may request one reinstatement starting 12 months after that denial. Knowingly false appeals can pause your ability to appeal: a second appeal we find manifestly unfounded within a 12-month period pauses new appeals for 90 days from that decision (the first such finding is a warning only).

Appeals are resolved within a 14-day target from submission, and the decision is communicated to you by email. The reviewer’s decision is final and not subject to further appeal within the platform (does not affect the Member’s external legal rights). Sign in to see your appeal’s status at any time: the lock screen shows where it stands (submitted, in review, decided) without needing to email in and ask.

See Member Terms of Service §4.7 for how billing works while your account is restricted.

What the reviewer is looking for. The reviewer’s default posture is to uphold the original action. The burden is on you to provide clear new evidence — additional context, a clarification of intent, a retraction from the person affected, evidence of identity confusion, or evidence that the original review missed material context. An appeal is overturned only when that evidence materially undermines the basis for the original action.

If the action followed a report from another Member, that Member’s identity stays hidden throughout the appeal. The reviewer can see it; you cannot, in any form. The reporter protections in §14 apply at every stage.

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12. Copyright (DMCA)

12.1 Takedown procedure

Reserve Leaf & Pour will register a DMCA designated agent with the U.S. Copyright Office DMCA Directory per Section 512 before any member-uploaded content is accepted; once registered, the agent’s name, address, and [email protected] contact are published at /dmca.

The designated-agent registration auto-expires and must be renewed with the Copyright Office every 3 years; a named owner on our team holds a calendar reminder to re-file before expiry, since a lapsed registration forfeits the §512 safe harbor.

Takedown notices follow the statutory process:

1. Notice received via DMCA agent (form letter or email to [email protected]). The intake acknowledgment advises notice-senders that, under 17 U.S.C. §512(f), knowingly materially misrepresenting that material is infringing creates liability for damages.
2. Verify notice contains the six statutory elements (identification of work, identification of infringing material, statement of good faith belief, accuracy + perjury statement, contact info, signature).
3. If valid, remove or disable access to the identified material within expeditious standard (target: 24 hours from validated notice).
4. Notify the alleged-infringer Member with copy of notice + counter-notice procedure. The counter-notice procedure advises counter-notice-senders that, under 17 U.S.C. §512(f), knowingly materially misrepresenting that material was removed by mistake or misidentification creates liability for damages.
5. If counter-notice received (also six statutory elements), wait 10–14 business days; if the complainant has not filed a court action within that statutory window, restore the material.
6. Audit log entry for the takedown + restoration if applicable.

Counsel involvement is required for any takedown notice involving content that is clearly transformative or non-infringing on its face, or for any pattern suggesting abuse of the DMCA system.

12.2 Repeat infringers

In accordance with 17 U.S.C. § 512(i), Reserve Leaf & Pour maintains and reasonably implements a policy for the termination of members who are repeat copyright infringers. Members who are the subject of repeated validated copyright-infringement notices will have their accounts terminated. Three (3) validated DMCA takedown notices within a rolling 12-month period, where no successful counter-notice is filed, will result in permanent account termination. Reserve Leaf & Pour does not reinstate terminated repeat infringers.

A strike counts against you only when a takedown notice is validated and the content is removed or disabled — an unvalidated or withdrawn notice does not. If you file a successful counter-notice and your content is restored, the related strike is removed and no longer counts toward this threshold.

Each validated takedown increments an audit-logged per-account copyright-strike counter, and the strike lifecycle is:

• (a) Strike attaches. A strike attaches to the account when a takedown notice is validated (six statutory elements confirmed) AND the identified content is removed or disabled. A notice that fails validation, or that is withdrawn before the content is disabled, does not attach a strike.
• (b) Strike voids. A strike is voided and removed from the counter if a successful counter-notice results in the content being restored, or if the notice on which it rested is later found invalid. A voided strike does not count toward the rolling-12-month termination threshold.
• (c) Account-level tracking across aliases. Strikes are tracked at the account level. Where Reserve Leaf & Pour identifies that known aliases or re-registrations belong to the same person, the policy applies across those accounts — a repeat infringer cannot reset the counter by re-registering.
• (d) Pre-termination review. Before termination, a documented review confirms the current strike count and the absence of any successful counter-notice against the strikes being counted. The review and its outcome are recorded in the moderation audit log.

Copyright takedown notices and counter-notices are submitted to our DMCA designated agent at [email protected].

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13. How we moderate (Section 230 and editorial discretion)

Reserve Leaf & Pour is a “provider of an interactive computer service” under 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1). What that protection covers, and what it does not, is worth stating plainly, because not everything on the platform is member speech.

• Member content we host. Member-authored posts, reviews, photos, and messages are third-party content. Hosting, storing, and transmitting them is immunized under §230(c)(1) — we are not the author of that material.
• How we order member content. §230(c)(1) also covers the ranking, display, and citing of member-authored content — posts, ratings, and tasting notes ordered in feeds. Algorithmic ordering of that member content on the main surface uses transparent, content-neutral signals; it is curation of someone else’s content, not our own speech.
• Curation as our own expression. Separately, and independently of §230, the editorial choices we make in ordering member content are expressive activity protected by the First Amendment. That is a different protection from §230: the First Amendment shield protects the act of curating as our own expression, while §230 protects us from liability for the member content itself. We treat them as two separate protections, not one blurred claim.
• What is ours, not yours. Three things are our own first-party product output, not member content, and therefore fall outside §230 entirely: (1) the concierge’s recommendations of venues, products, and pairings; (2) the concierge’s generated prose (a synthesized recommendation sentence the AI writes, as distinct from the member content it ranks or cites); and (3) the Featured Venues shelf. None of these is defended by §230 — they stand on the no-warranty, “advisor, not authority”, informational-only, content-neutrality-and-labeling framing in Member Terms of Service §8.5.

To keep that posture sound where it applies, and to document good faith across all of it:

• Good-faith moderation under a documented policy. These Guidelines, paired with the Terms, are that documented policy.
• Notice-and-takedown for DMCA and for clear violations of §9 demonstrates good-faith effort to remove violating content.
• An audit trail of moderation decisions is the evidentiary record behind every action we take.

Where §230 does not reach. §230 immunity is not absolute, and two exceptions are worth naming:

• Sex trafficking (FOSTA-SESTA). §230(e)(5) withdraws immunity for conduct violating federal sex-trafficking statutes (18 U.S.C. §1591 / §2421A). Our 21+ verified, moderated, single-vertical posture does not exempt us from this; trafficking-adjacent content routes to the emergency-safety path in §10 and to law-enforcement referral.
• Intellectual property. §230(e)(2) excludes IP claims; copyright is governed instead by the DMCA §512 safe harbor described in §12.

Ranking vs paid placement. Ranking on the main flow excludes paid placement entirely — no venue buys rank on the main surface. The separately-labeled “Featured Venues” shelf IS paid placement and IS our own commercial speech, disclosed as such and held outside the content-neutral main flow (see §7).

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14. Reporting violations

To report content or behavior that breaks these Guidelines:

• Member-side: in-app report buttons on every post, comment, DM, and member profile. Reports are routed to the moderation queue with a 24-hour SLA (§10).
• Venue-side: venue admins can flag violations within their workspace via the admin console; flagged items escalate to the central moderation queue.
• External: email [email protected] for reports that don’t fit an in-app surface (e.g., off-platform harassment by a Reserve Leaf & Pour member toward another).
• DMCA copyright claims: see the designated-agent process in §12.

Protecting the person who reports. Reports are confidential. An enforcement notice sent to a reported Member states the rule that was violated and the action taken — never the reporter’s name, and nothing else that identifies who submitted the report. A reported Member is not shown an aggregate count of how many people reported them either: in a small venue that count can be enough to work out who reported. The same protection holds through an appeal (§11).

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15. Privacy expectations

• What other Members see about you. Other Members see your display name and profile photo. They don’t see your plan, your standing at any venue, your bio, your location, or which venues you’ve joined. Your posts reach the audience you choose for each post, under your name and photo; your check-in posts are visible only to you. Staff at a venue you’ve joined can see your standing at that venue, and the venue’s owners and staff see your name and photo when you join, RSVP or check in there. Members of a venue can see the names and photos of that venue’s other members; anyone else sees only the member count. Profile → Privacy → Discoverability records your choices for surfaces that aren’t built yet (member search, suggested follows, palate-similarity matches, “here tonight” presence). Each choice applies from the day that surface launches.
• Default content visibility depends on the venue (public → platform-wide; private → venue-only); you can override per-post. Check-in posts are always visible only to you; the venue where you check in still sees that you checked in.
• DMs are between Members only. Venues don’t see DM content or metadata, even DMs between two Members of the same venue.
• Sub-processors. Reserve Leaf & Pour uses Token of Trust (age verification), Anthropic (concierge AI), Deepgram (concierge voice-input transcription — raw audio not retained), Stripe (subscription billing), Cloudinary (image/video transformation + CDN delivery), 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.

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16. 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.

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17. What we promise you

• Honest recommendations. The concierge’s main flow will never be tilted by paid placement.
• Real moderation. We review reports on the response times set out in §10, and we say so when we miss one. 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 Reserve Leaf & Pour. 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.

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18. Changes

Reserve Leaf & Pour may revise these Guidelines as the platform grows. Material revisions will be announced via in-app notification + email at least 30 days before they take effect. Continued use of the platform after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the revised Guidelines. Where a revision affects venue-level enforcement, venue subscribers are notified as well.

For non-material revisions (clarifications, typo fixes, formatting), the revised Guidelines take effect immediately with notice in the revision history below.

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19. Revision history

Earlier revisions of the former Acceptable Use Policy (v1 to v1.4) are available on request from [email protected].

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20. Questions and contact

• General inquiries: [email protected]
• Trust & safety: [email protected]
• Appeals: [email protected]
• DMCA designated agent: see Copyright Office registry entry for Reserve Leaf & Pour (registration pre-launch)
• Legal: [email protected]