Terms & Conditions

Last updated: August 6, 2026

Welcome to NextLine — a platform where one person writes the first line, and everyone else decides what happens next. These Terms & Conditions ("Terms") are the agreement between you and NextLine ("we," "us," "our") that governs your use of the NextLine website, apps, and services (together, the "Service").

By creating an account or using NextLine, you agree to these Terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the Service.

1. Acceptance of Terms

Using NextLine in any way — reading pieces, creating an account, posting, continuing someone else's story, commenting, or messaging — means you accept these Terms, our Privacy Policy, and our Community Guidelines. We may update these Terms from time to time (see Section 24); continuing to use NextLine after an update means you accept the revised Terms.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 13 years old (or the minimum age required in your country to consent to use online services without parental permission) to create a NextLine account. By registering, you confirm that:

• The information you give us is accurate and current.
• You're legally able to enter into this agreement.
• You aren't barred from using the Service under any applicable law, and you haven't previously been suspended or removed from NextLine for violating these Terms, unless we've given you written permission to return.

3. Account Registration

You can create an account with an email address and password, or by continuing with Google. If you register with email, we'll ask you to verify it with a one-time code (OTP) before your account is fully active. You're responsible for:

• Keeping your password confidential and not sharing your account with anyone else.
• Everything that happens under your account, whether or not you personally did it, unless it resulted from our security failure.
• Telling us promptly if you suspect unauthorized access to your account (see Contact).

One person, one account. Creating multiple accounts to evade a suspension, manipulate likes/follows, or game challenges and leaderboards is not allowed.

4. Username Rules

Your username is your identity on NextLine and appears in your profile URL. Usernames must:

• Be 3–30 characters long.
• Use only lowercase letters (a–z), numbers (0–9), periods (.), and underscores (_).
• Not start or end with a period or underscore, and not contain two of those characters in a row.
• Not impersonate another person, brand, or organization, and not use a trademark you don't have rights to.
• Not be misleading (e.g. implying an official NextLine account you don't run) or offensive.

We reserve a short list of usernames (like admin, nextline, and similar system words) for platform use. We may rename an account whose username violates these rules, with notice where reasonably possible.

5. User Responsibilities

You agree to use NextLine respectfully and lawfully. Specifically, you won't:

• Post content that violates our Community Guidelines or Safety Policy.
• Harass, threaten, bully, or attempt to intimidate other users.
• Use NextLine to distribute spam, malware, phishing links, or fraudulent schemes.
• Scrape, crawl, or use automated tools to extract data from NextLine without our written permission.
• Interfere with the Service's normal operation, including attempts to bypass rate limits, security controls, or account privacy settings.
• Reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code of the Service, except where the law gives you that right despite this restriction.

6. User-Generated Content

"User Content" means anything you post, write, upload, or send through NextLine — story openings, continuations, poems, shayari, dialogues, scripts, quotes, comments, images, and messages. You're solely responsible for your User Content and for making sure you have the rights to post it.

By posting User Content, you confirm that it doesn't infringe anyone else's copyright, trademark, privacy, or other rights, and that it complies with these Terms and our Community Guidelines.

7. Intellectual Property

NextLine's name, logo, design, and underlying software are owned by us (or our licensors) and protected by intellectual property law. These Terms don't grant you any rights to our branding or platform technology beyond what's needed to use the Service normally.

8. Ownership of Original Content

You own what you write. Posting on NextLine doesn't transfer ownership of your original content to us. You keep full authorship and copyright over every piece, continuation, comment, or message you create.

9. License Granted to NextLine

To let us actually run the Service — display your writing, show it in feeds and search, let other users read and continue it, and back it up — you grant NextLine a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable license to host, store, reproduce, display, distribute, and adapt (e.g. to generate excerpts or thumbnails) your User Content, solely for operating, promoting, and improving NextLine.

This license lasts as long as your content remains on NextLine. If you delete a piece of writing you authored alone (with no continuations from other users), the license ends and we remove it from active display, subject to routine backups aging out over time. See Section 10 for how this works differently for collaborative threads, and our Privacy Policy for what happens when you delete your account.

10. Collaborative Writing Ownership

This is the part that makes NextLine, NextLine, so we want to be direct about it. When you continue someone else's post, you're adding a new branch to a tree that other people's work already depends on, and that other people may build on top of yours.

• You own your own contribution. Each line, continuation, or branch belongs to the person who wrote it.
• You don't own the whole thread. Writing a continuation doesn't give you any rights over the original post or other people's branches, and posting an opening line doesn't give you rights over what others write in response.
• The license survives edits to the chain above or below you. Because your continuation is meaningfully tied to the branch it sits in, the license you grant under Section 9 continues to cover your contribution's display within that thread even if you later delete your account — see Privacy Policy §Account Deletion for exactly what that means in practice (your byline is anonymized to "Deleted user"; the words themselves stay, so the branches other people wrote on top of yours keep making sense).
• Removing a single continuation you wrote (without deleting your account) removes it from display, but if other users have already continued it, we may keep it visible, marked as removed, so their branches remain coherent — the same principle as account deletion, just at the level of one post instead of a whole account.

11. Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have. It's part of these Terms.

12. Public vs Private Accounts

Every account is Public or Private (your choice, changeable anytime in Settings):

• Public accounts: anyone can see your public pieces and follow you instantly.
• Private accounts: only people whose follow request you approve can see your pieces; everyone else sees a locked profile.

Switching to Private doesn't retroactively hide continuations you've already written on other people's public posts — see Section 13.

13. Content Visibility

A piece of writing is visible to a reader only if both of these are true: they're allowed to see the post it replies to (all the way up the branch to the root), and they're allowed to see its author (public account, or an approved follower of a private one). If either fails, that branch — and everything written under it — is hidden from that reader, without revealing that it exists. Individual posts can also be marked "Followers only" regardless of your account's overall privacy setting. Blocking another user (Section — see Safety Policy) hides your content from each other in both directions.

14. Community Standards

All User Content must follow our Community Guidelines. We may remove content, restrict features, or take enforcement action (see Section 20 and our Account Enforcement Policy) against accounts that violate them.

15. Copyright Policy

See our full Copyright Policy. In short: post only work you have the rights to post, and we'll respond to valid infringement complaints, including removing content and, for repeat infringers, suspending or terminating accounts.

16. DMCA / Copyright Complaint Process

If you believe your copyrighted work has been posted on NextLine without permission, send a written notice to [legal@nextlines.in] including: (1) your contact information, (2) a description of the copyrighted work, (3) the URL(s) of the infringing content, (4) a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is unauthorized, and (5) a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the notice is accurate and you're authorized to act. We'll review valid notices and may remove or disable access to the reported content. The person who posted it can submit a counter-notice if they believe the removal was a mistake — see our Copyright Policy for the process.

17. Reporting Abuse

Any user can report a piece of writing, a comment, or a profile using the Report button. Tell us what's wrong (spam, plagiarism, harassment, hate speech, NSFW content, copyright, or other) and add details if you can. Our moderation team reviews reports — see our Content Moderation Policy for how that works.

18. Account Suspension

We may suspend an account (temporarily restrict access) if we reasonably believe it violated these Terms, our Community Guidelines, or the law, while we investigate or as a proportionate response to a confirmed violation. See our Account Enforcement Policy for the tiers we generally use.

19. Temporary Ban

A temporary ban restricts your ability to log in or interact with NextLine for a set period. We'll generally tell you the reason and, where applicable, how long it lasts.

20. Permanent Ban

For severe or repeated violations — illegal content, targeted harassment, child safety violations, serious copyright infringement, or evading a previous ban — we may permanently ban an account. A permanent ban means you may no longer use NextLine, and creating a new account to get around it is itself a violation of these Terms.

21. Removal of Content

We may remove or restrict access to content that violates these Terms, our Community Guidelines, or the law, or that we're required to remove under a valid legal process, with or without prior notice depending on the severity.

22. Termination of Account

You can delete your own account anytime from Settings (see Privacy Policy §Account Deletion). We may suspend or terminate your account for violating these Terms, prolonged inactivity combined with abandoned/unclaimed content, or as required by law. Sections of these Terms that by their nature should survive termination (ownership, licenses already granted, limitation of liability, indemnification, governing law) will continue to apply.

23. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, NextLine and its team aren't liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or any loss of data, goodwill, or profits, arising from your use of the Service — including content posted by other users, which we don't pre-screen and don't control. Our total liability for any claim relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the past twelve months (likely zero, since NextLine is free to use) or [Insert a fixed liability cap amount, e.g. ₹5,000 / $100].

Nothing in these Terms limits liability where the law doesn't allow it to be limited (for example, in the case of gross negligence or willful misconduct, depending on your jurisdiction).

24. Disclaimer

NextLine is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We don't guarantee the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or completely secure, or that any particular piece of content is accurate, appropriate, or non-infringing — user-generated platforms carry an inherent risk that some content won't meet everyone's standards, and we rely on reporting and moderation (not pre-screening) to address it.

25. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless NextLine and its team from claims, damages, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your use of the Service, your User Content, or your violation of these Terms or applicable law.

26. Changes to Terms

We may update these Terms as NextLine grows. We'll update the "Last updated" date above, and for material changes, we'll make a reasonable effort to notify you (e.g. an in-app notice or email) before they take effect. Continuing to use NextLine after changes take effect means you accept them.

27. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of [Insert your country/state, e.g. India / the State of Delaware], without regard to conflict-of-law principles. Any dispute arising from these Terms or your use of NextLine will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of [Insert city/jurisdiction].

28. Contact Information

Questions about these Terms? Reach us at [legal@nextlines.in] or see our Contact page.