Community Guidelines

Version 2026-08-25. In force from 25 August 2026.

Older versions are kept and we will send you any of them if you ask at support@ya-habibi.co.uk. There is no archive inside the app yet, and saying there was one would be the kind of promise this document is trying not to make.

These are the rules of the Ummah in Ya Habibi. They say what you can post, what you cannot, what happens when somebody breaks a rule, what you are told when a decision is made about you, and how to argue with it. They are written for the people who use Ya Habibi rather than for a regulator, but they are also the place where we set out how moderation works, so nothing here is vague on purpose. Read them once and you will know how this house is run.

This document was prepared for review. It is not legal advice and it has not been reviewed by a qualified solicitor. The last section lists what a qualified person must sign off, and two of those items are operational rather than editorial.

Before the rules

Ya Habibi is a Muslim space. That is not decoration. The Prophet, peace be upon him, described a Muslim as one from whose tongue and hand other Muslims are safe, and that is the standard here: your tongue is your keyboard.

So a short list of things the rules cannot make you do, and we are asking anyway.

• Assume the best of the person you are reading. Most of what looks like an insult is a badly worded sentence.
• If you would not say it to somebody's face in the masjid, do not post it.
• Correct with knowledge or stay quiet. Confidence is not evidence.
• Disagreement between people of knowledge is old, wide and normal. It is not a scandal and it is not a reason to report somebody.
• Protect what people did not choose to make public. That includes their family, their past, their sins and their address.
• Remember that a lot of what you read here has been translated by a machine. Tone does not survive translation, and irony survives it worst of all. Before you take offence at a sentence, consider that it may not be the sentence the person wrote.

You will not be suspended for failing to be gracious. You will be suspended for the things below.

What these guidelines cover

Everything a person can see or receive from another person in Ya Habibi: posts, comments, replies, images, video, voice notes, hashtags, profile names, handles, bios and avatars, circles, private messages, restaurant reviews, and what you write to staff.

Three other documents sit beside this one. The Terms of Use cover your account and your relationship with Ya Habibi. The Privacy Policy covers what data we hold and who else receives any of it. Law enforcement and disclosure covers what happens when the police or a court ask for something. Where this document describes what we do with a report, the Privacy Policy describes the same thing as data handling.

Who can be here

The Ummah is for people aged 18 and over.

Signing up asks for your date of birth. The rule is applied by the server rather than by a screen, so it is not something an app can be persuaded to skip. An account that is not an adult cannot post, reply, react, follow, join a circle, send a message, or read the feed, a profile or a search result. It can still use the prayer times, the qibla, the Quran, the study library, the tracker, the tasbih and the halal food listings, and it can still report somebody, read why an account was suspended, and delete itself. Those last three are deliberate: a rule that made it harder for a young person to report abuse or to leave would be worse than no rule.

Two gaps, stated rather than hidden. Accounts that existed before the date of birth question was added were never asked for one, and an account with no date of birth is treated as an adult. New accounts are asked at the first step of signing up, in the app and in the web version, with no way to skip the question and no way past it until the server confirms the answer was saved. And somebody who backs out of the signup questions on the phone rather than answering them is not put back to that question, and ends up where the older accounts are: no date of birth, treated as an adult. An account in either group can answer the question at any time from the age row in the profile menu, which is shown to exactly the accounts that were never asked.

If you know of an account held by somebody under 18, report it, and staff will act on it.

The rules

There are nine rules. There are nine reasons in the report sheet, and they are the same nine, in the same order. When you report something, you are pointing at the rule you think was broken. Each rule below ends with the words you will see on the screen.

1. Disagreement is not a rule

You are allowed to be wrong. You are allowed to hold an unpopular view, follow a school somebody else does not, prefer a scholar somebody else criticises, or post something dull. None of that is a breach, and nothing is removed here for being unpopular.

There is still a place to say you did not like it, because sometimes that is the honest answer and burying it would push people into filing something more serious than they meant. Choosing it tells us what people are running into. It does not accuse anybody, the other person is never told, and on its own it does not lead to any action.

Before you report, the smaller tools are usually the right ones: unfollow, block, decline a message request, or turn off messages from the opposite gender.

Report it as: I just don't like it.

2. Do not make this place unsafe for a person

Aimed at a person, including you. Do not do any of this:

• Insult or humiliate somebody, and do not join a pile-on. Ten people repeating one insult is ten breaches, not one.
• Threaten anybody.
• Sexually harass anybody. That includes comments about a person's body, unwanted advances, and sexual messages to somebody who did not invite them. A voice note is a message: an unwanted one is unwanted whether it is typed or spoken.
• Publish somebody's private information: their address, their phone number, their workplace, their family, a photograph taken privately, or a screenshot of a private message. Photographs you upload are stripped of their hidden data first. Video is not and cannot be, so a video can carry the place it was filmed. The composer warns you.
• Keep contacting somebody after they have asked you to stop, in messages or in replies.
• Pretend to be somebody. See the section on scholars and institutions below, because that is the version of this we see most.

Report it as: Bullying or unwanted contact.

3. Do not push anybody towards harming themselves

Someone may be in danger. This is one of the two reasons that jumps a queue.

Do not encourage, instruct or pressure anybody towards suicide, self-injury or an eating disorder. Do not romanticise it, do not post methods, and do not share content that presents starvation or self-harm as discipline, piety or beauty. Encouraging or assisting somebody to end their life is a criminal offence in the United Kingdom, and so is encouraging serious self-harm.

Saying that you are struggling is not a breach and never will be. Nobody is suspended for admitting they are in a dark place, and asking the community to make du'a for you is exactly what this place is for. If you are in danger now, please do not wait for a moderator: speak to somebody you trust, and contact a doctor or your local emergency service.

If you see somebody who looks like they are in danger, report it and, if you can, reply to them like a human being.

Report it as: Suicide, self-injury or eating disorders.

4. No violence, no hatred, no exploitation

Aimed at a person or a group of people. Do not do any of this:

• Threaten violence, call for it, or celebrate it.
• Post hate speech or hate symbols. Attacking people for their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion or sect, sex, disability, sexual orientation or gender reassignment is out, and it is out when the target is not a Muslim.
• Post graphic or violent content. A body, a killing or an injury is not a post, whatever the cause it is being used to argue for.
• Support, promote or recruit for a terrorist organisation or an organised hate group.
• Traffic, exploit or advertise a human being. This includes forced marriage and forced labour.
• Post sexual content involving a child, or anything that sexualises a child. See the section on children below. This one has its own answer and it is not only removal.

Report it as: Violence, hate or exploitation.

Sectarian abuse

Sunni and Shia both use Ya Habibi. So do people who have not settled the question and people who did not know there was one. Prayer settings in this app let you pick your sect and your madhab, and that choice is nobody else's business.

Discussing a difference is allowed, including sharply, including with evidence that the other side finds weak. Insulting the Companions, insulting the family of the Prophet, cursing a group, calling a whole sect filth, or hunting somebody through the app because of the school they follow, is abuse and is treated as hate speech.

Takfir

Do not declare another person a disbeliever in Ya Habibi. Not by name, not by handle, not by implication, not as a rhetorical flourish, and not as a warning to others about somebody.

We are not making a fiqh ruling by writing this. We are saying that a public accusation of disbelief, made by strangers on a phone, about a person whose situation nobody in the thread knows, does no good here and does a lot of harm. Where it is aimed at an individual it is treated as bullying. Where it is aimed at a group it is treated as hate speech. Where it comes with a suggestion of what should be done about such people, it is treated as incitement to violence and the account is closed.

Say "I think that view is wrong, and here is why". That sentence is always available to you.

Outing somebody

A particular warning for this app. Publishing that a named person is a convert, has left the religion, follows a particular sect, is in a particular marriage, or has committed a particular sin, is not a debating point. In several countries where people read this app it puts them in physical danger. Do it and the post goes and the account goes with it, whether or not what you said was true.

5. Do not sell or promote restricted things

Ya Habibi is not a marketplace, and some things are not to be sold or promoted anywhere: drugs, weapons, alcohol or tobacco, counterfeit goods, gambling, and endangered species or live animals. This applies to a post, a profile, a bio, a circle and a private message equally.

Halal Food listings are the one place where a business speaks about what it sells, and those are held to what the listing claims. A business that claims a halal certification it does not hold is dealt with under this rule and under rule 7.

Report it as: Selling or promoting restricted items.

6. Keep it modest

No nudity and no pornography. No sexual activity and no soliciting sex. No threatening to share somebody's intimate images, which is a criminal offence, and no sharing them.

Modesty here is not only a legal line. Brothers and sisters read the same feed. Assume that the person reading your post is somebody's sister or somebody's father, because they are.

If somebody in the content is under 18, that is not a modesty problem. It is the most serious thing that can happen in this app, and it is handled in the section on children.

Report it as: Nudity or sexual activity.

7. Do not take people's money, and do not fill the place with noise

• No scams and no fraud. No phishing, no fake shops, no investment schemes, no "send me a small fee first".
• No spam, and no posting the same thing over and over.
• No fake accounts, and no accounts run to inflate somebody's numbers.
• No fake, incentivised or traded reviews. A restaurant review must describe your own genuine experience of that business. Writing a review of a place you have never eaten at, being paid or rewarded for one, writing one about a competitor to harm them, or asking somebody else to write one for you, is a breach here and is banned by law in the United Kingdom. A business owner cannot hide or delete a review of their own listing and must not ask anybody else to write one.
• No dishonest appeals for money or charity. This one is written for this app, because a charity appeal is one of the most common posts you will see here and a dishonest one is one of the most common things worth reporting.

On appeals in particular: if you ask this community for money, be able to stand behind it. Say who the money reaches and how. Do not repost an appeal you have not checked, do not use somebody else's photographs of somebody else's suffering, do not present a personal collection as a registered charity, and do not use zakat as a word if what you are collecting is not zakat. Taking money from Muslims by dressing it up as sadaqah is a betrayal of two things at once, and it is fraud.

Report it as: Scam, fraud or spam. The exact wording for the last one is "Asking for money or charity dishonestly".

8. Do not put words into anybody's mouth, least of all Islam's

• Do not post false health claims, including cures.
• Do not post something falsely attributed to Islam or to a scholar.
• Do not post fabricated claims about a political or social event.
• Do not post digitally altered or artificially generated media as though it were real. If you made it with a tool, say so. That includes text: an answer produced by a model and posted as your own reasoning, or as a scholar's, is a fabrication whatever the tool was.

The second one is why this rule exists in this app. A fabricated hadith, a saying put into the mouth of the Prophet, peace be upon him, a fatwa attributed to a scholar who never gave it, a quotation from an imam that appears nowhere in his books, a screenshot of a ruling with no source: these are the false information we see most, and they are not "politics" and not "health". They are their own reason in the report sheet for that reason.

Attribution is the whole discipline. If you cannot say where something came from, post it as something you heard. If you are quoting a hadith, name the collection. If you are quoting a living scholar, be able to point at where they said it. Getting this wrong innocently earns a correction. Doing it on purpose, or repeating it after being corrected, is a rule broken.

Report it as: False information. The exact wording is "Something falsely attributed to Islam or to a scholar".

9. Somebody else's work is not yours

Do not post work that belongs to another person as though it were yours, and do not post work you have no permission to publish. Photographs, articles, book scans, designs, logos, recitation recordings and translations all belong to somebody, even when the underlying text does not. The Qur'an belongs to no publisher. A particular English translation of it, and a particular recording of a particular reciter, usually do.

If your own work has been posted here without your agreement, report it and say so. If a claim about copyright or a trademark is made against something you posted, you are told and you can put your side.

Report it as: Intellectual property.

How the rules apply in the particular parts of Ya Habibi

Anonymous posting

You can post in the Ummah without your name on it. That hides you from other people. It does not hide you from Ya Habibi, and it does not change a single rule.

An anonymous post is reportable in exactly the same way, it is read in exactly the same way, and the outcome lands on the account that wrote it. Linking an anonymous post back to an account is possible, it requires a written reason from a member of staff, and it is logged every single time.

Anonymity here exists so that somebody can ask a question they are ashamed of, or say something true about their own life without their family reading it. It does not exist so that somebody can say what they would not sign their name to.

Private messages and voice notes

Private messages are between two adults, one conversation at a time, and they start as a request the other person has to accept. You can have five open conversations. You can turn off messages from the opposite gender, and the server applies that in both directions. You can attach an image or a voice note.

Four things you should know, plainly.

1. 1.Messages are not end to end encrypted. We can read them, and we read a conversation when it is reported. The database now enforces the limit rather than trusting it: the ordinary server key cannot read messages at all, so the only route in is a report being worked, under an investigation with a written reason and an expiry.
2. 2.Reporting a conversation hands the whole conversation to staff, both sides of it, including what you wrote. The app tells you this on the row before you tap it, and it is worth saying again here. A report about a private conversation is worthless to a reviewer without the conversation.
3. 3.You can only report a conversation you are in. The server checks that rather than believing the app.
4. 4.If either of you presses Translate on a message, that message is sent to a translation service outside Ya Habibi. Clause 15 of the Terms and section 9 of the Privacy Policy explain it.

The rules that matter most in messages are rule 2 and rule 6. If somebody keeps contacting you after being asked to stop, that is unwanted contact. Decline, block, and report it if it continues.

Staff Live Chat

There is a row at the top of Messages that opens a conversation with staff. Everything in it is read by staff, because that is the point of it. Do not put anything in it that you would not want a member of staff to read, and do not use it to abuse the person on the other end.

Circles

Circles are rooms for a subject. Some are open only to brothers and some only to sisters. Where a circle has a gender audience, do not try to get around it, do not ask somebody inside to relay it to you, and do not carry what was said in it out into the open feed. Somebody wrote it in a room they believed was closed.

Every rule in this document applies inside a circle. A circle is not a private house where the rules changed at the door.

Scholars, teachers and institutions

A verified tick means a person at Ya Habibi checked something. For a scholar, that check involves identity documents, an account of their own training in their own words, and their certificates, read by a human being. Software is one input into that decision and never the decision itself.

So:

• Do not present yourself as a scholar, a shaykh, a mufti, an imam or a student of a named teacher if you are not one.
• Do not run an account in the name of a real scholar, a masjid, a university, a charity or an institution without their authority.
• Do not use a verified person's name, photograph or handle in a way designed to make people think you are them or that they endorse you.
• Do not present a private opinion as a ruling from an institution.

Impersonation is reportable two ways, and both are right: as Bullying or unwanted contact where the wording is "Pretending to be someone", and as Scam, fraud or spam where the wording is "A fake account". If it is being used to collect money, use the second one.

Being verified is not an endorsement of everything a person says. It is a statement that they are who they say they are.

One thing about handles belongs here because it surprises people. A verified Islamic official can ask for a username that somebody else is holding, and a member of staff decides it. If it is granted, the current holder keeps their account and everything in it, and is moved to the same name with a number added. The holder is not asked first. An account that is verified and holds a granted scholar role cannot lose its handle this way; a verified account without a role can. The Terms of Use set this out in full, and it is not a hidden rule: it is written down before it can happen to you.

Halal Food

A listing is the business's claim about itself. A review is the reviewer's own experience. The star rating is anonymous and the words are not, so a score is never shown beside a name. A business can reply to a review and can report one it believes breaks these rules. A business cannot hide or delete a review of itself. Only staff can hide a review, and the record says that they did and why.

Reporting

How to report

Tap into the post, the profile, the message or the conversation and choose to report it. You will be asked one question, then one more, then shown a confirmation. There are nine first answers, which are the nine rules above. You can add a note, and the note goes to the person who reviews it.

What you are reporting is worked out on the server, so a report always points at the thing you were actually looking at.

The reporter is never named

The account you report is never told who reported it. Not in the warning, not in the suspension notice, not in an appeal, not by support. If a decision has to describe where it came from, it says that it came from a report.

What happens to it

A person reads every report. Nothing is removed, and no account is suspended, because of how many reports something has. There is no threshold, there is no automatic takedown, and a coordinated campaign of reports achieves nothing except a longer queue.

Reports about somebody in danger, and reports about a child, are handled first.

You are told that your report has been received. You are not currently told what was decided. That is the honest position rather than a policy: the software does not send the outcome back to the person who filed the report, and it should. If you want to know what happened to a report you filed, write to support@ya-habibi.co.uk quoting roughly when you filed it and what it was about, and a person will tell you unless doing so would identify somebody else or interfere with something still open.

Reporting is not a weapon

Filing reports you know to be baseless, in volume or against one person, is itself a breach. You will be warned, and if it continues the account is suspended under the ordinary route described below. A person applies that. Nothing in the software refuses reports from an account on its own.

Illegal content

Some content is not only against these rules, it is against the law. Terrorism, child sexual abuse material, threats to kill, harassment and stalking, hate offences, fraud, encouraging suicide or serious self-harm, sharing intimate images without consent, controlling or coercive behaviour, and selling controlled drugs or weapons are all criminal offences in the United Kingdom, and we treat them as such.

How to report it from inside the app. Use the report sheet, pick the reason that fits, and use the note to say that you believe it is a criminal offence and why.

How to report it if you do not have an account, or you are reporting on behalf of an organisation. Write to support@ya-habibi.co.uk, or use the contact form at ya-habibi.co.uk. A notice we can act on contains:

• the exact location of the content: a link to the post, the profile or the conversation;
• a sufficiently substantiated explanation of why you believe it is illegal;
• your name and an email address, so that we can confirm receipt and tell you the outcome;
• a statement that you believe, in good faith, that what you have said is accurate and complete.

Your name and email are not required if you are reporting child sexual abuse material.

What we do. A person reads it. We confirm we have received it. If the content is illegal, it is removed and the account is suspended or closed. Where the law requires it or where a life is at risk, we preserve what is needed and report it to the police or the relevant authority, and we comply with orders from the courts and from the authorities of the United Kingdom and of the European Union. You are told what was decided. law-enforcement-and-disclosure.md sets out what we require from an authority before we hand anything over, and what we refuse.

If somebody is in immediate danger, contact the emergency services in your country first. We are not an emergency service and there is nobody at a desk here overnight.

Children

Ya Habibi's Ummah is for adults. You must be 18 or over to use it. The section "Who can be here" near the top of this document explains how that is applied and where the gaps are.

If we learn by any route that an account belongs to somebody under 18, the account is restricted to the parts of the app that do not put a child in front of a stranger, and where that is not appropriate it is closed.

Content involving children. Do not post sexual content involving a child. Do not sexualise a child in any way, including in a comment about somebody else's photograph. Do not contact a child for a sexual purpose, and do not encourage anybody else to. Do not post another person's child in a way their parent would not want, and think twice before posting your own.

Child sexual abuse material. There is one answer to this and no discretion in it. The content is removed, the account is closed permanently, the material and the account records are preserved, and it is reported to the authorities. There is no warning first, no appeal that gets it back, and no argument about context. Nothing about that report is disclosed to the account holder.

If you come across it: report it, do not download it, do not forward it to anybody to prove a point, and do not post about it publicly with a link. Passing it on is itself a criminal offence. Reporting it here is not a substitute for reporting it to the police, and you should do both.

What happens when a rule is broken

The four answers

A person reads the report and it ends in one of four things.

• Dismissed. No rule was broken, or not enough was. Nothing happens and nobody is told anything.
• A warning. A sentence you have to read and acknowledge before you can carry on using the app. It cannot be swiped away. If there is more than one waiting, you get the oldest first.
• A suspension. The app is replaced by a screen carrying the reason and the date. You can appeal from that screen. A suspension runs until it is lifted; it does not expire by itself.
• A closure. The account is taken away permanently.

A post can also be removed on its own without anything happening to the account, and a restaurant review can be hidden.

A reason is always given

The system refuses to record a suspension or a closure without a reason written by the person who decided it, and that exact sentence is what you are shown. It is not a category code and it is not a template. Reinstating an account is the only decision that does not need one, because there is nothing to explain.

If your account is suspended, sign in and you are told so rather than being told your password is wrong. If a decision reaches your phone while you are using the app, it takes effect at once.

What you are told

When a decision is made about you, you are told:

• what was decided: a warning, a suspension or a closure;
• what it applies to;
• the reason, in the words of the person who decided it;
• that it came from a report, where it did, without naming who reported it;
• that a person made the decision, because here a person always does;
• how to challenge it.

Two things are deliberately absent. You are never told who reported you. And you are never told that an algorithm decided, because none does: no automated system in Ya Habibi removes content, issues a warning, suspends an account or closes one.

One thing you are not told, and should be. When a post of yours is removed on its own, without a warning attached to it, the software sends you nothing. The post is simply gone. That is stated here plainly rather than left as an implication, because a removal you are not told about is one you cannot argue with. If a post of yours has disappeared and you do not know why, write to support@ya-habibi.co.uk and you will be told.

Appealing

If your account is suspended or closed by us, you can appeal in writing from the screen you are shown. There is no charge for this, ever.

• You can have one appeal open at a time.
• A person reads it. No appeal is decided by software.
• If it is granted, your account is reinstated in the same action. You do not wait for a second step.
• If it is refused, you are given a reason for that too.
• You can appeal a decision for at least six months after it was made.

If your account was closed by you rather than by us, there is nothing to appeal, and the screen will not offer it.

For anything else, including a decision about a post rather than an account, write to support@ya-habibi.co.uk or open a support ticket in the app. Every ticket carries a reference you can quote.

Nothing in this document takes away your right to go to a court. If you are in the United Kingdom, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office about how your personal data was handled, and Ofcom takes reports about how an online service is run, although it does not settle individual disputes. If you are in the European Union, Article 21 of the Digital Services Act gives users of an online platform the right to take a dispute to a certified out-of-court dispute settlement body. That right sits in a group of provisions, Articles 20 to 28, that do not apply to providers which are micro or small enterprises. Ya Habibi does not claim that exemption, and no certified body has been named for Ya Habibi yet. If you want to use that route, write to support@ya-habibi.co.uk and you will be told where it stands. Your right to go to a court is not affected either way.

What we will not do

• Remove something because a lot of people reported it.
• Tell the account who reported it.
• Read your private messages for entertainment. A conversation is read when it is reported, by somebody who wrote down why, under an authority that expires, with the read recorded.
• Let a decision stand that a person here got wrong, once it is pointed out.
• Show you advertising, or profile you for it. There is no advertising in Ya Habibi and there is no third party analytics, tracking or attribution software in the app at all. Ya Habibi does measure its own app, using its own code, writing to its own database and to nobody else's; section 4.11 of the Privacy Policy says exactly what that holds and what is still wrong with it.

Where this way of working comes from

We built moderation this way because it is the right way to run a Muslim community. It also lines up with two laws that apply to services like this one, and it is worth naming them so you can hold us to them.

The EU Digital Services Act requires the rules of moderation to be published in clear language (Article 14), requires a way for anyone to notify illegal content and for the notifier to be told the outcome (Article 16), requires a decision to come with a statement of reasons that explains what was decided, on what ground and how to challenge it (Article 17), and requires suspicions of an offence involving a threat to life or safety to be reported to the authorities (Article 18).

The UK Online Safety Act 2023 places duties on services that let people post to each other: to assess the risk of illegal content and act on it, to give people a way to report it and complain, to protect children, to have regard to free expression and privacy while doing it, and to keep written records of all of it. Ofcom is the regulator.

Two of those we do not meet today, and they are marked above where they arise rather than collected quietly at the end: the outcome of a report is not sent back, and a post removal is silent.

Free expression

Removing a post is a serious thing to do to a person and we treat it that way. A view is not removed here for being uncomfortable, unfashionable, critical of Ya Habibi, critical of a government, or contrary to the majority school. Scholarly disagreement is not a breach. Criticism of an idea, a state, an institution or a public figure is not a breach. Anger is not a breach.

What gets acted on is in the nine rules above and nowhere else.

Changes

These guidelines will change as Ya Habibi grows and as we learn what actually turns up in the queue. When a change is significant, you are shown a notice inside the app the next time you open it, before the change takes effect, and the date at the top of this document changes. That notice is drawn by the app itself. There is no push provider in Ya Habibi and no server can send your phone a message, so a change is not announced by a notification: it waits for you in the app.

Getting in touch

• support@ya-habibi.co.uk for anything, including reports of illegal content from people without a Ya Habibi account.
• The contact form at ya-habibi.co.uk, if you do not have an account. It opens a real ticket with a reference.
• Staff Live Chat, at the top of Messages in the app.
• Support, in the app, which gives you a reference you can quote.

• In writing: DAPPER TRADING LTD, Oak House, Reeds Crescent, Watford, WD24 4QP, United Kingdom. That is the registered office and it is the address for service of a legal notice.
• Single point of contact for authorities and for users, Articles 11 and 12 of the Digital Services Act: Ya Habibi has not yet published a single point of contact under Articles 11 and 12 of the Digital Services Act. Authorities and users should write to support@ya-habibi.co.uk in English.
• Legal representative in the European Union, Article 13 of the Digital Services Act: Ya Habibi has not yet appointed a legal representative under Article 13 of the Digital Services Act.

What still needs a solicitor

This document was drafted from what the software actually does. It has not been reviewed by a qualified lawyer, and it is not legal advice. The following are not ours to decide and should be settled before launch.

1. 1.The route for reporting child sexual abuse material. Registration with the National Crime Agency is a precondition of making a report under section 66 of the Online Safety Act 2023, and nothing here registers. What must be preserved and for how long, how that is reconciled with the fact that possession of the material is an offence, whether membership of the Internet Watch Foundation is appropriate, and how staff are protected and supervised, all need advice. The commitment in the children's section is written as an absolute and must be operationally real. This is blocking.
2. 2.Whether the service is in scope of the UK Online Safety Act 2023 and which duties bite. The illegal content risk assessment, the children's access assessment and the children's risk assessment have not been done and their deadlines passed in 2025. The record-keeping duty in section 23 is unmet, and Ofcom is running an enforcement programme against exactly those duties. The commencement position and the current codes need verifying against Ofcom as at the launch date rather than assumed from this draft.
3. 3.The age position. A date of birth is now collected server side, it is asked at the first step of signing up in both clients, and the Ummah is closed to under 18s by a server rule. Two gaps remain, the accounts that existed before the question was added and the accounts that leave the signup questions on the phone without answering them, and both are stated in "Who can be here". Asking for a date of birth is not highly effective age assurance in the sense Ofcom uses, so it does not by itself answer the children's access assessment or take the service outside the ICO's Age Appropriate Design Code. A solicitor should advise on what standard of assurance is required.
4. 4.Whether the EU Digital Services Act applies, and whether Ya Habibi is a micro or small enterprise. That determines whether Articles 20 to 28 apply, including the out-of-court dispute settlement route. Articles 14, 16, 17 and 18 apply either way, and Article 24(3), the obligation to submit statements of reasons to the Commission's transparency database, is expressly outside the exemption. An EU legal representative under Article 13 has to exist before any of it can be complied with.
5. 5.The two promises this document cannot keep today, both marked in the text: the outcome of a report is not sent back to the person who filed it, and a post removal does not notify its author. Each is a build item, and each is a Digital Services Act obligation for a service in scope.
6. 6.Whether the six month appeal window and the "one open appeal at a time" limit are lawful together, and whether a refused appeal must be re-openable. The same question arises for the one-open-ticket limit on support, which must never be capable of blocking a data protection complaint.
7. 7.Reading private messages. This document says we read a reported conversation in full, both sides, including messages written by the person who did not report anything. The notice on the row is good practice, the investigation gate is better, and whether either is a sufficient lawful basis and a sufficient fairness notice for the other participant is a data protection question that belongs with the Privacy Policy review.
8. 8.Translation of private messages, which sends what one person wrote to a third party at the request of the other. Section 9 of the Privacy Policy records this as an open decision.
9. 9.Sectarian abuse and takfir as moderation grounds. These are religious judgements enforced by a commercial service. The drafting above deliberately avoids ruling on the theology and treats the conduct as harassment or hate speech. A solicitor should confirm that the wording does not create a discrimination exposure under the Equality Act 2010, in either direction, and the same question arises for the paragraph on outing somebody.
10. 10.The review rules in rule 7, against the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which bans fake and incentivised reviews outright and imposes a positive duty to take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent them from appearing.
11. 11.Jurisdiction. This document is written for England and Wales. If Ya Habibi is offered in Scotland, Northern Ireland, the EU or elsewhere, local advice is needed on the parts that describe criminal offences, because they differ. In several countries where this app is downloadable, describing somebody's sect or apostasy in public is not merely a rule breach but a danger to them, and the paragraph on outing is written with that in mind.

Version history

2026-08-25. The version in force.

2026-08-14. Superseded.

Who publishes this document

Ya Habibi is a trading name of DAPPER TRADING LTD, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 8800299. Registered office, which is also the address for service of any legal notice: Oak House, Reeds Crescent, Watford, WD24 4QP, United Kingdom. VAT number 190396586. Ya Habibi is part of the Webmasters LDN group, webmastersldn.com, which is also a trading name of the same company.

Contact: support@ya-habibi.co.uk, or in writing to the registered office above.

*Prepared 25 August 2026 for review by a qualified solicitor. Not legal advice.*