Terms of Service

What Friends Ahoy Is

Friends Ahoy is a self-reflection tool for adult friendship, operated by Friends Ahoy LLC. The Connection Profile asks how your friendships actually work. It gives you a Crew Role, a read across the five areas of connection health, and one small thing to try next. The Islands pages each take one interest you already have and work out why it has not turned into friendships yet.

Friends Ahoy does not introduce you to anyone. There is no feed, no profile to maintain, no messaging, no forum, and no matching. Nobody here can contact you, and we cannot pass your details to another person using the site.

We are not a dating service, a social network, a therapy or counseling service, or a clinical assessment tool. If one of those is what you need, our Resources page points somewhere better.

Who Can Use Friends Ahoy

You must be 18 or older. By using the site, you confirm that you are.

We do not knowingly keep anything from anyone under 18, and if we find that we have, we delete it. If you believe someone under 18 has taken the Connection Profile, email connect@friendsahoy.com.

The Connection Profile and Crew Roles

Your Crew Role is one of ten ways of being a friend. It is a description you can recognize yourself in and act on. It is not a test, not a psychological assessment, not a diagnosis, and it is not used to pair you with anyone.

The Connection Profile is our own instrument, informed by published work on adult attachment, personality, Dunbar's layered relationship model, Self-Determination Theory, and friendship maintenance. The 5 Pillars of Connection Health is a framework we developed, and it is not a validated psychological instrument.

Nine of the questions are not ours. They come from two published loneliness scales used in research: the UCLA 3-Item Loneliness Scale (Hughes, Waite, Hawkley and Cacioppo, 2004) and the De Jong Gierveld 6-Item Loneliness Scale (De Jong Gierveld and Van Tilburg, 2006), reproduced as published. They are there so we can see whether things actually improve for people over time, and report that as counts and trends across everyone.

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by the authors of either scale or their institutions. Answering those questions is not a screening and does not produce a diagnosis. You are never shown a loneliness score, and neither is anyone else. Those answers help shape the words your reading uses, the same way the rest of your answers do, but no number or label ever comes back at you. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly how that works.

If what you are carrying needs more than a friendship tool, our Resources page lists places to start, and a licensed professional is a reasonable next call.

Your Information and Your Data

There are no accounts and no passwords here, so nothing is stored about you until you choose to send it. When you finish the Connection Profile, your answers are saved against a random ID your own browser generates.

A name and an email address are both optional, and the reading works without either. If you would like a copy of your results sent to you, that is what we use an email address for. You can also give us your email for occasional news about Friends Ahoy, and you can stop that at any time with the link in any email. We do not sell it, we do not pass it to anyone else, and we send very little.

What we collect, how long we keep it, and how to get it removed are all in the Privacy Policy.

How We Ask You to Behave

Most of what a behavior policy usually governs does not exist here, because there is nobody on this site to interact with. What is left is the part that involves us, and the part that involves somebody else's reading.

You agree to keep what you send us honest, to treat the person reading our inbox the way you would want to be treated, not to use the suggestion box to advertise, not to submit deliberately false or junk responses to skew the data, and not to repost or pass along somebody else's Connection Profile if they shared it with you. The longer version is in our Community Guidelines.

What we can do about a problem is limited to what we control. We can reply, we can stop replying and block an address, we can remove a suggestion, we can correct or take down something we published, and we can report a matter to the authorities. There is no membership to revoke, because there is no membership.

Islands

Each Island is a page we wrote about one interest: why that interest tends not to produce friendships, and what to change about how you already do it. That is all they are. They are not a directory and not listings, and they do not sign you up for anything or link you to any specific group, venue, or event.

What is in them is general advice rather than a plan built for your situation, and reading it is not a guarantee of anything. Whether an idea fits your life is your call.

When you do go and meet people, the ordinary sensible things apply. Meet somewhere public the first few times, tell someone you trust where you are going, and leave if something feels off. "No thanks" is a complete sentence.

Accessibility

We are working toward this site being fully usable by keyboard and with a screen reader, and it is not all the way there yet. That matters more here than in most places, because the people most likely to need this are among the people most likely to be shut out of it.

If something is hard or impossible for you to use, email connect@friendsahoy.com and say what broke. We will fix it and write back when it is fixed.

Intellectual Property

The Friends Ahoy name and logo, the artwork on this site, the 5 Pillars of Connection Health framework, the Crew Role system, the Islands pages, the questions we wrote ourselves, and the readings and plans they produce all belong to Friends Ahoy LLC.

Two carve-outs, so that claim is accurate. The nine loneliness-scale items named above are not ours; they belong to their authors and are used as published. And your own answers are yours, not ours.

Please share your own Crew Role result and link to the site. That is the point of it. Please do not reproduce, repackage, or redistribute our frameworks, our questions, or our readings as your own or inside another product without written permission.

Suggestions You Send Us

If you send us an idea or a suggestion, we may use it and we may not, and we are not able to treat it as confidential or to pay for it. So please do not send us anything you need kept secret, or anything that belongs to someone else.

Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Friends Ahoy LLC is not liable for what you decide to do after reading your Connection Profile or an Island, for how other people behave when you go and meet them, for emotional distress arising from your social life, or for a data breach caused by a third-party service outside our reasonable control.

Our total liability to you for any claim arising from your use of Friends Ahoy is limited to what you have paid us. Friends Ahoy is free, so that amount is $0.

Disclaimer

Friends Ahoy is provided "as is" with no warranties of any kind, express or implied. It is built and maintained by a very small team. Features change and bugs happen. Nothing on this site is medical, mental health, or legal advice.

Friends Ahoy is not a crisis service. If you or someone you know is having a hard time, call or text 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline), text HOME to 741741, or call 211 for local help. That holds whether or not things feel like an emergency.

Changes to These Terms

We may update these terms as Friends Ahoy changes. When a change is material we will post the new version here and update the date at the bottom of this page. Continuing to use the site after that means you accept the update.

Governing Law

Friends Ahoy LLC is based in Colorado. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, United States, and any dispute will be handled in the state or federal courts located in Colorado. If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.

If You Want to Stop

You can stop using Friends Ahoy whenever you like. There is no account to close and nothing to cancel.

Clearing this site's stored data in your browser clears your saved reading, your Connection Plan, and anything else the site kept on your own device.

Anything stored on our end is covered by the Privacy Policy, including how long we keep it and how to ask for it to be removed.

No hard feelings either way. If Friends Ahoy was not the right fit, we hope you find the people you are looking for.