Code of conduct

These are part of the Terms of Service. They apply at the meetup, in your group’s chat, in the emails around it, and to anything that follows from having met someone at a Meet40 meetup.

• Let other people talk. Six people, a couple of hours. If you have been speaking for ten minutes, ask someone else a question.
• No harassment. Nothing sexual aimed at someone who did not invite it, no slurs, no comments about someone’s body, no persistent attention after somebody has moved away from it.
• No discrimination. Race, religion, disability, sexuality, gender, where somebody is from, what they do for work. A meetup is not a place to audition someone.
• No threats, no intimidation, no violence. Obviously, and it is written down anyway.
• Nobody gets dropped, and nobody gets pushed. On anything with walking or running in it, the group moves at the pace of the slowest of the six. Section 4 is the whole rule, and breaking it is one of the things we remove people for.
• Do not comment on anybody’s body, fitness or speed. Not as encouragement, not as a joke. Somebody at the back of a walk knows they are at the back.
• Take no for an answer, the first time. Contact details, a second meetup, a walk to the car. One ask, then let it go.
• Stay sober enough to be responsible for yourself, and never turn up to anything with walking or running in it having had a drink.
• Do not sell anything. No pitching, no recruiting, no multi-level marketing, no collecting the group for your mailing list. That includes the chat, where a link is easier to send than to say.
• Write in the chat the way you would speak in person. It reaches all six of you, it is not private from us, and it is not the place for anything you would not say with the other members listening — because they are.
• Treat the place and its staff well. Pay your share, tip properly, stay on the path, take your litter, and do not make our welcome somewhere a problem.
• What is said at the meetup stays at the meetup. Do not photograph people without asking, and do not post about them afterwards.
• Be the person you signed up as. Your real first name, your real date of birth, your own seat.

Meet40 is a service for making friends. It is not a dating service, we do not build groups on any romantic basis, and nobody in your group agreed to be a prospect by booking a coffee.

Adults meet, and sometimes something starts. We are not policing anyone’s private life. What we do police is the behaviour at the meetup: treating it as a date you have arranged, working around the group, or continuing after someone has made it clear they are not interested.

Unwanted romantic or sexual pursuit is the single most likely reason we remove somebody, and it is the one we act on fastest. If it is happening to you, you do not need to be sure, and you do not need proof. Tell us what you noticed.

One thing this pivot added: on a walk or a run, a group spreads out, and two people end up alone together on a path without either of them choosing it. If you find yourself walking with somebody you would rather not be walking with, drop back or go ahead to the others. You owe nobody an explanation, and anyone who follows you up the group after you have moved is doing the thing this section is about.

Your group chat opens when the meeting point is revealed and remains open afterwards. If both people enable 1-1 chat, prior attendees may also message privately. Nobody can message a person they did not actually attend with, and nobody can browse the membership.

Everything on this page applies there. Harassment is harassment in writing. So is a comment about somebody’s body, a slur, or carrying on after somebody has gone quiet. The chat feels more casual than standing in a café and it is not.

• Nobody in there is being pursued. Section 2 is the same in the chat. One person messaging one other person about how nice they seem, in a room of six, is the behaviour we act on fastest — and it is easier to do in writing than in person, which is exactly why it is named here.
• It is not an emergency channel and nobody is watching it. A message sent from a trail may sit unread for hours. If you need help, call 911; if you need the group, say it out loud to the group.
• Do not ask the group for money, and do not send links about money. No investment, no crypto, no payment apps, no “quick favour”. A message with a link or a payment handle in it is marked for a founder to look at automatically. If someone does this to you, report it — that person has probably done it to another group.
• Swapping numbers is fine. Pressing for them is not. One ask, then let it go, in the chat exactly as in person.
• What is said at the meetup stays at the meetup. Do not screenshot the chat and put it anywhere.

Either of the two of us can read your group’s chat, and every time one of us opens one, it is recorded. We are not sitting there reading it — nobody is watching it live, and we would not pretend otherwise. We open one when something is reported. The Privacy Policy says what we store and for how long.

Nobody publishes how hard it is, so the group has to say it

This is the paragraph that changed most under ADR 0015, and it changed against our own interest, so it is worth reading. It used to promise that each event published its own difficulty ahead of payment, followed by a ladder of graded levels with distances and climbs on it. No Meet40 event states a difficulty, a distance or a route, and none ever will — we do not choose where a group goes, so we have nothing to grade and nothing to publish. Our database will not even let an event that is on sale carry those fields.

So the work that a route card would have done is done out loud, at the meeting point, by the people there. Before the group sets off, somebody should ask how far and how fast, and everybody should answer honestly. If that conversation does not happen, the pace rule below is the only thing standing between the slowest person and being alone on a path. Deciding whether to take part is yours to do — we do not assess anybody, we are not qualified to, and we do not know what you would be assessing yourself against.

If you want to slow down, or stop

• Say so, out loud, to the group. That is the whole mechanism. Nobody is going to guess, and nobody is going to think less of you — half the group is usually relieved.
• The group slows down. It does not split. A faster half and a slower half is exactly how somebody ends up alone, so it is not allowed. If two people want a harder run, they can arrange one privately after everybody has finished together.
• If you want to turn back, the group turns back — all six. Not you alone, and not you with one volunteer while the rest carry on. The meetup ends where the group ends it.
• Nobody waits alone at a junction, and nobody walks back alone. If people must separate at all, it is never one person on their own.
• Nobody comments on it. See section 1. Encouragement is a comment.

Pushing the pace, going on ahead, or leaving somebody behind is a conduct matter, and it is in the list of things we cancel a booking and close a membership for. If it happened to you, tell us: it is exactly the sort of thing people talk themselves out of reporting, and it is the thing most likely to end with somebody hurt and alone.

This section describes walks, runs and hikes, and all three are on sale today alongside coffee. Until 2026-08-17 a line here said the opposite — that they were not yet purchasable and that coffee was the only thing we ran — while a Run, a Hike and two Walks were open for booking at $10. If you booked one of those, this section applied to you and that line was wrong.

What the group does, in order

• 1. Call 911, and say where you actually are. Not the meeting point — where the group has got to. This is the step that changed, and it changed because we stopped choosing routes: your confirmation carries the meeting point and its address, and that is genuinely all we know. Nobody at Meet40 can tell a dispatcher where your group went. Drop a pin from your own phone; it is worth more than anything in our database.
• 2. Somebody stays. At least one person stays with anyone who is hurt or unwell, and stays until help arrives. Nobody is left on their own, at any point, for any reason.
• 3. The meetup is over. The group does not carry on and finish. Not for the people who are fine, not to “get help faster” from the far end.
• 4. If somebody must go for signal, two go. Never one person alone, and never the person who is unwell.
• 5. Count out, the way you counted in. Six at the meeting point, six at the end, said out loud by somebody. If anyone is unaccounted for at the end, call them. If there is no answer within 15 minutes, call 911 and report a person separated from the group — then tell us, in writing, at the addresses in step 6. Do not go back to search for them yourselves in the dark or off the path.
• 6. Then tell us. Afterwards, not instead. Use the report form or email support@meet40.com. Both reach the same two people, and section 7 lists the rest. There is no number to ring. We do not have one, nobody is on call, and you should not spend a second of an emergency looking for one. Our commitment is a reply from a person within 24 hours, which is a commitment about the days after, not the minutes during. In those minutes there is nothing we could do that 911 cannot do better and sooner.

What we do afterwards

• Within 24 hours a founder writes it up — what happened, where, who was there, what was called, what the injury was — and it is kept with the incident records, whether or not anybody has made a complaint.
• We contact everyone who was there. Both to check on them and because six accounts of the same twenty minutes are worth more than one.
• We decide whether that meeting point runs again, and whether that theme does. Those are the two things we choose, so those are the two things we can withdraw. A meeting point that put a group somewhere it should not have been is retired until we can say why it will not happen again, and “bad luck” is not an answer.
• Everybody’s seat is refunded, including the people who were not hurt. Nobody pays for the meetup where this happened.

If you feel unsafe, leave. You do not owe anyone an explanation, a goodbye, or the rest of the meetup. Your seat is paid for either way, and nobody at Meet40 will ask you to justify going. Tell a member of staff wherever you are on the way out if you want somebody to know, or tell the group you are heading off.

If it is an emergency, call 911 first. We are two people running a meetup club and we are not a safety service. Tell us afterwards, in writing — section 7 lists every way, and none of them is a phone call.

If it is uncomfortable rather than unsafe, you do not have to wait until you get home to tell us. The Report or block link under any message in your group’s chat emails both of us the moment you tap it, and so does the form at /legal/report. Either works from a phone, standing where you are.

But be clear about what that gets you in the moment: very little. We publish no phone number, there is no number on your booking confirmation, and nobody is on call. What we promise is a reply from a person within 24 hours — a promise about the days after a meetup, not about the hour you are standing in. A message sent at seven on a Saturday evening is read when one of us next opens a laptop. There is no host at a Meet40 meetup and nobody in the group works for us, so there is nobody on the ground to send. What we can do properly happens afterwards, and section 8 says how fast.

If waiting is not good enough, the first line of this section is the answer, and it is not a formality: leave. Your seat is paid for either way. If it is worse than uncomfortable, section 5 applies — call 911.

Four ways, and they all reach the same two people.

• The report button in your group’s chat. The Report or block link under any message. No reason required, and the person is not told who reported them. It emails both of us the moment you tap it — the same alert the form below sends — and it brings the message with it, so a founder reads what was said and what was said around it without having to ask you to repeat it.
• The form at /legal/report. Every field except the description is optional, including your name and your email address. It works whether or not you have ever booked a meetup.
• Email support@meet40.com. Carries exactly the same weight as the form.
• The next-morning feedback email. There is a box for anything that went wrong, and it comes to the same place.

You can report anonymously. A report with no name still gets read and still counts. The only thing we lose is the ability to ask you a question, and a question is usually what a report needs — so if you can bear to leave an email address, it helps.

There is no deadline. A week later, a month later, after you have thought about whether it was a big deal: still send it.

Who reads it: one of the two founders. Not a moderation team, not a contractor, not an automated classifier. There is nobody else here.

The commitments, in hours

• Within 24 hours: you hear from a person, if you left us a way to reply. That first message is an acknowledgement written by a human who has read what you sent — not a ticket number, and not a promise of an outcome.
• Within 24 hours, if anyone is in immediate danger: we act before we investigate. That means cancelling a booking and taking somebody out of the next meetup while we work out what happened.
• Before the next meetup: a decision. Every open report is looked at when groups are built, which is the deadline that matters — no report is left sitting while the person it concerns is grouped again.
• Within seven days: we tell you what we did. In general terms. We will not tell you the details of what happened to another member.

If we miss one of these, it is a failure on our side and you are entitled to say so. Write again, and say it is a second attempt.

What we actually do in between

• We read it, and we write down what was reported and when.
• We look at whether there is anything else on file about that meetup or that person. Two unrelated reports about the same person is a different situation from one.
• Unless doing so would put you at risk, we normally ask the person what happened from their side. People are wrong about each other, and we would rather find that out before we act than after.
• Sometimes we ask others who were there. We do this carefully and we do not tell them who reported anything.
• We decide, we write down why, and we tell you.

The possible outcomes are: nothing further, a private word, a warning on file, removal from a specific meetup, or removal from Meet40 entirely.

A founder decides. One of the two people who run Digital Apps LLC. There is no score, no automatic threshold, and no algorithm anywhere in this. Where it is not urgent, both of us discuss it first.

The bar is not “proven”. This is a club for meeting people, not a court. If we believe on what we have that somebody makes a group unsafe or miserable, we will stop seating them, and we accept that we will occasionally be wrong about a person. We would rather carry that than seat somebody who frightened another member because we could not prove it.

The person is told. They get an email saying their membership is closed, what kind of behaviour it concerns, and that it is final unless they have something we did not know.

• We tell them the substance, not the source. “A report of unwanted romantic attention at your meetup”, not who said it, not when they said it, and never anything only one person could have known — which sometimes means describing it more vaguely than we would like.
• If naming the behaviour would identify you, we say less. Your safety beats their curiosity, every time.
• They can reply, and a person reads it. We have changed our minds before. We will not enter a negotiation, and we will not pass their reply on to you unless you ask to see it.

Removal means we stop selling them seats. We are a private business choosing who we do business with; that is all it is, and it is not a finding about anybody as a person.

If you were at a meetup that was ruined by somebody’s behaviour, tell us. We will usually refund your seat or put you on the next one at no cost. You do not have to ask twice and you do not have to argue for it.

Almost nothing, and that is deliberate. If somebody is removed, the other people at that meetup are not told who reported what, what was said, or usually that a removal happened at all.

• We never name the person who reported something. Not to the person reported about, not to the group, not to anyone.
• We do not announce removals. Publishing that somebody was thrown out of a club is a serious thing to do to a person on evidence gathered by two people over email.
• We do tell you what affects you. If your group changed, we say the group changed. If you were the one at risk, we tell you what we did about it.
• If somebody in the group might be in danger, we say so. That is the case where privacy loses, and it is the only one.

You can ask us not to group you with a particular person again, ever, and we will do it. You do not have to say why, and nothing else follows from asking — it is not a report, nobody is investigated, and the other person is never told.

Say so in the next-morning feedback, on the report form, or by email.

Blocking somebody from inside the chat does this too, and instantly: that person is added to your avoid list permanently, and neither of you sees the other in the chat. It still does not tell us that anything happened — if you want us to know, report as well.

So this is what we do instead, and it is the whole list:

• Every seat is paid for. A real card, in a real name, through Stripe. That is not identity verification, but it is a meaningful cost to being anonymous, and it is the reason a Meet40 group is not a room of made-up names.
• Every meetup is in a public place, at a fixed time, in daylight, with other people around. Never a home, never after dark.
• Everyone is booked and known to us. Nobody walks up, and no one brings a guest. If somebody was in your group, we know who they are and how to reach them.
• The meeting point is chosen, and the hour is chosen. Those two, and cancelling, are the only real safety controls we have on an activity — and they are the only ones the ceiling claims. We do not choose the route and we do not grade it, so no distance and no difficulty is stated before you pay. That line used to say the opposite and it was wrong.
• We cancel on stated weather thresholds, from a desk, the day before, rather than leaving six people to decide in a car park.
• Reporting takes two minutes and no name. A report reaches a founder the same day.
• We remove people. Quickly, on a judgement call, at the cost of occasionally being unfair to somebody.
• Blocking is instant and it is yours. You do not need us, and you do not have to explain it to anybody in the group. It is permanent and it works both ways — neither of you sees the other again, and we never group you together — so it is a decision rather than a volume knob. Section 3 says exactly what it does.
• We tell you what we know about your group beforehand — first name, decade, neighbourhood — so you are not walking in blind.

Use the judgement you would use meeting anyone new. Tell somebody where you are going. Make your own way home. Those are ordinary precautions and nothing on this page replaces them.

If you have been assaulted, threatened, stalked or defrauded, that is a crime, and Meet40 is not the right place to take it. Call 911 in an emergency, or your local police department afterwards. Reporting it to us is not a substitute and we will say so.

What we will do: keep our records of the meetup, the booking and the report, so they exist if you need them; provide what we hold when the law requires it or when you ask us to support a report you are making; and remove the person meanwhile.

Whether we go to the police ourselves depends on what happened. If someone appears to be in danger we may, and we may do it without asking you first. Otherwise we follow your lead — reporting a crime to the police is your decision, not ours to make on your behalf.

These rules bind the two of us as well. If a founder was rude, if we handled your report badly, if we took a week to answer something urgent, or if we removed you and you think we got it wrong — say so to support@meet40.com.

It goes to the same two people, which is the obvious weakness of a company this size and we are not going to dress it up. What we can promise is that it gets read, answered, and not held against you.