Frequently asked questions

Qafila is one place for everything around a sport that isn't the sport itself: where to play, who else plays, what's on this weekend, and where to get the kit. A map of community-verified spots, the communities that form around them, activities and tournaments, a gear marketplace, venue pages, messages, and a logbook of everywhere you've been.

Most of that currently lives in a group chat, a spreadsheet and somebody's memory. Qafila puts it somewhere it survives.

Both the outdoor and the court side. Paragliding, trekking, rock climbing, camping, mountain biking, cycling, rafting, fishing, skiing, swimming and golf; plus cricket, football, padel, tennis, badminton, squash, table tennis, basketball, volleyball, pickleball and gym.

You pick a sport when you sign up and can switch at any time. The map, the feed and the marketplace all follow whichever one you're in, so a padel player isn't scrolling past paragliding harnesses.

Yes. Qafila is built around who's there — who confirmed a spot, who's coming on Saturday, who you're messaging — and that doesn't work anonymously. You can sign in with Google, or with an email address and password.

Then you pick a display name, a username, your city and your sport. That's the whole of it.

At least 13, and at least 16 in countries that set a higher age for consenting to online services. See section 1 of the Terms.

Pakistan is where it starts — that's where the spots, the communities and the venues are concentrated today. It works anywhere, and every area on the map began with one person adding the place they already knew.

So if you're somewhere new to Qafila, you're early rather than unlucky: the first few spots and the first community shape what the scene there looks like.

English, Arabic and Russian. You switch in your profile and it sticks — dates and numbers follow too, not just the labels. Arabic flips the layout right-to-left rather than only translating the words.

Any specific place you go to do your sport: a paragliding launch, a climbing crag, a trailhead, a fishing point, a public court, a swimming spot. It carries a name, a region, a difficulty, a description, photos and a pin — plus the technical details that matter for that sport. A paragliding spot lists launch altitude, best wind and season; a climbing one lists rock type, grade range and approach; a court lists surface and floodlights.

Anyone can add a spot and it appears on the map straight away — but unverified. It earns the badge only once enough people who know the place confirm it.

You get one confirmation per spot, you can't confirm your own, and you can take yours back later. If enough are taken back, the badge goes. So a verified spot means several people independently said yes, this is real and it's where the pin says it is — and it stays true only as long as they still think so.

The technical details — wind, grade, surface, season and the rest — yes, anyone can. Each one has a Confirm and a That's not right. Confirm backs the value showing now; "that's not right" lets you put forward a different one. The value people back most is the one everyone sees, so a better answer wins by being agreed with rather than by shouting.

The rest of the spot — its name, description, photo and pin — belongs to whoever added it. If that isn't you, report it or raise it in the community.

Because someone else added it. A spot's description, photo and pin stay with the person who put it there, so it can't be quietly rewritten under everyone who vouched for it. The technical details are still open to you — see above.

A few older spots have no owner at all. Anyone can help fill those in while they're still unverified; once they're verified they lock, so the version the community agreed on is the version that stays.

Editing a spot starts its verification again. People confirmed the spot they read, and carrying that over to a changed one wouldn't be honest — so the badge comes off and the spot earns it back.

Worth doing your edits in one go rather than a few at a time.

A nudge asking you to help check other people's spots — not a warning about yours. It shows unverified spots near you, in the sport you're looking at, and each asks a single question: have you been there or not. Either answer clears it.

When there's nothing to check, the button isn't there at all.

Use it to plan, never to decide. A spot tells you what a place is normally like — the altitude, the usual wind, the approach, how you get in. That is exactly what you want when you're working out where to go on Saturday.

What it cannot tell you is what today is like. Conditions turn by the hour, a detail written last season may have moved on, and no app can read the sky for you. So make the call yourself, on the day, the way you would anywhere — the mountain doesn't know what the app said. Qafila does not inspect, supervise or certify any spot; see section 8 of the Terms.

No. Location centres the map on you, shows what's nearby and sorts by distance. Refuse it and the app still works — it just can't do those three things. You can change your mind later in your device settings.

We don't store your location or keep a history of where you've been. The only coordinates we hold are ones attached to something you chose to save: a spot, a venue, or a route on a trip.

Yes — bookmark them into your own library, in the menu on the Map tab.

The logbook is the other half: log the trips you actually did, with a route, photos and notes. A trip is private by default and stays in your logbook until you choose to publish it.

The group behind a spot or a scene. Each has a feed, a members list, moderators, and a group chat that belongs to the community rather than to whoever happened to make the WhatsApp group. It survives people leaving, which is the whole point.

A community's front door. Every community gets a short handle written as q/yourhandle, and a matching link at qafilaapp.com/q/yourhandle. You can say it out loud, put it in a bio, or hand out the QR code to stick on a noticeboard.

Opening the link on a phone with Qafila installed goes straight into the community. Without the app it shows a page confirming the link is the right one — deliberately without the community's name, photo or members, because a link anyone can forward shouldn't expose the group behind it.

Yes. A public community is one anyone can find and join. A private one you ask to join, and a moderator decides.

Either way, what you hand out is the handle or the QR code and the other person decides whether to knock — nobody can be added who didn't ask. Posts, chat and polls inside a community are visible to that community.

From the Community tab. Pick the sport, the name and the handle, and you're its first moderator. Handles are first-come and they're how people find and say your community, so choose one you'd be happy reading out loud.

Because that community has its feed set to moderators only. That's the default, so a new community starts as an announcement channel rather than a free-for-all — a moderator can open it up to members in the community's settings.

You can create activities and join the group chat either way.

Post to the feed, run polls, manage members, approve or decline join requests, make other people moderators, and remove content or people. They also decide whether ordinary members can post to the feed.

A moderator runs their own community and nothing else — outside it they're an ordinary member like anyone. What they cannot do is see reports: those go to us, including reports about their own community.

Tell us. If a community has been left with nobody to run it, we can look into handing it to an active member.

We won't do that quickly or on one person's say-so — we try to reach the current moderators first and give them a fair chance to reply. Being quiet for a few weeks isn't the same as being gone, and taking away a community someone built would be the worse mistake.

Something happening at a place and a time, that people mark themselves into — "I'm going". The point is knowing who's actually coming before you commit to a four-hour drive, which a group chat can't tell you and a spreadsheet won't remind anyone about.

Anyone can create one, with or without a community behind it, and it can follow a route someone has published from their logbook.

Whoever organised it, not Qafila. We don't vet organisers or the people who turn up, and we don't arrange permits, insurance, supervision or safety cover. Turn up prepared, and be honest with yourself about whether you're ready for it.

A tournament runs inside a community — there are no standalone ones. Moderators set it up as solo or team, and either fill the bracket themselves or open it so anyone can enter. Results go in round by round and the bracket redraws itself: no spreadsheet, no photographing a whiteboard.

It doesn't have to be knockout scoring either. A tournament can be judged on points, on time, or on air time, and on whether a higher or lower number wins — which is why the same tool works for a padel ladder and a cross-country flying comp.

What you get for finishing a tournament well. Gold, silver and bronze go to the top three when it's closed out, and each trophy keeps the score that earned it — "2 hr airtime" reads differently from "14 points", and both beat a bare first place.

They sit in your profile's trophy case, so a season leaves a record instead of evaporating into a chat thread.

Gear for the sports Qafila covers — a wing, a harness, a bike, a racket, a rope, a tent. You must own it, be entitled to sell it, and describe it honestly, including damage and repairs.

Each listing has its own sport, so a shop stocking both climbing and padel files each item where its buyers are looking.

No. Qafila is not the seller, the buyer, an agent, an escrow service or a payment processor. The marketplace is a place to find each other; the sale is between the two of you. We don't hold funds, and there is no buyer protection, refund or guarantee. You arrange payment and handover yourselves.

Second-hand is how most people get into these sports, and buying from someone who knows what the thing is beats buying from a classifieds site that doesn't. What the marketplace can't do is look inside the gear.

A wing, a reserve, a harness, a rope or a helmet can be unfit in ways nobody can see — UV, a hard fall, water, age, bad storage — and we don't screen listings or sellers. So have anything safety-critical checked by a qualified person before you fly, climb or ride it, and don't let a good price talk you out of that. Every experienced buyer does this; it isn't an insult to the seller.

Message them in the app from the listing. No phone-number swapping and no comment section — the conversation stays attached to the thing you're asking about, and blocking works there like anywhere else.

Sellers come in two kinds. An individual is a person clearing out gear, with a simple profile. A shop is a business: a logo, a named person to ask for, and a page holding its whole range, so a listing leads somewhere instead of dead-ending.

The things you check right before leaving the house: opening hours for each day of the week, photos, what facilities it has, where it is, a phone number and a website. Owners can pin a short notice to the top — "closed today", "new hours", "open late".

Courts, clubs, schools, gyms and rental shops all sit under the sport you picked rather than in one general directory.

Choose a business account when you sign up — it asks for your business name, which becomes your public face — and add your venues from the venues console. It's a different starting screen, not a different set of permissions: you can still use the rest of Qafila normally.

Yes — the venue dashboard shows how many people viewed your venue and how they found it. Counts only; never a list of who looked.

They're private between the people in them: nobody else can read them, and we don't use them to profile you or sell anything. They are not end-to-end encrypted — we'd rather say so plainly than let you assume otherwise. Messages can be looked at if they're reported, for safety and moderation. Don't send anything through Qafila you'd be unwilling to have reviewed in a moderation case.

Thirty days, then they go. Every conversation in Qafila works this way — a direct message, a private group chat, a community's chat — and any photo sent with a message goes on the same clock. It happens by itself, to everyone's copy, and there is no setting to turn it off.

That is deliberate. Chat here is for sorting out who is driving, what time you are meeting and whether the wind is any good — once the outing has happened, the thread has done its job. Anything you want to keep, keep properly: a spot, a trip, a post in your community. Those stay until you delete them.

After thirty days an old photo shows as expired rather than simply vanishing, so a thread never looks as though something has been hidden from you.

Yes, from their profile. They can no longer message you and their messages are hidden from you — and neither of you is shown a message button, so nobody is left tapping something that silently fails. Unblocking is in the same place.

No. They're only used for things aimed at you — a message, a friend request, an invitation, something new in a community you joined, or a reply to something you reported. There is no marketing push.

You can decline at install or turn them off later in your device settings.

Use the report action on the thing itself — a post, a spot, a listing, a shop, someone's profile, a community, or a conversation. That's better than emailing us, because the report arrives with the context attached instead of as a description of it.

Every report comes to us — the whole lot, wherever the content was posted. Community moderators do not see reports, not even ones about their own community, and they are never told who reported what. They can still remove a post or a person from their community, because that is their community to run; deciding on a report is our job, and keeping the two apart is what stops reporting something from becoming a quarrel with the person you reported it to.

It goes up straight away — a map that made you wait for approval would always be out of date. What keeps it honest is what happens after: a spot earns its badge only when people who have been there confirm it, moderators run their own communities, and anything reported is looked at by a person.

That is a community holding itself to a standard rather than a rubber stamp pretending to. It works because people take part — so if something looks wrong, report it. That part is genuinely yours.

Report the spot and say why. Sensitive access, private land, a protected site or a place with a fragile arrangement with locals are all reasons we'll act on. Publishing a precise location is one of the few things on Qafila you genuinely can't take back once people have seen it, so think before posting one.

No. Scraping Qafila — the spots, trails, routes, venues, listings, communities or member data — is prohibited, including to train an AI model. It's a privacy protection as much as a commercial one: profiles, usernames and photographs are the main thing a scraper is after. See section 3.1 of the Terms.

Your display name, username, profile photo, bio, city and country, your sports, and the things you publish: spots, posts, comments, reviews, listings, activities and tournaments. Community posts and chat are visible to that community. Direct messages are private between the people in them. Your logbook is private until you publish a trip.

No, and no. There is no advertising in Qafila, no ad profiling, no cross-app or cross-site tracking, and no advertising cookies. We don't sell personal data.

On Google Cloud infrastructure, in their Mumbai region. The full list of who processes what is in section 7 of the Privacy Policy.

Yes — ask us at jadoontech@outlook.com. The rest of your rights, including correction, objection and complaint, are in section 11 of the Privacy Policy.

Email jadoontech@outlook.com with the subject “Delete my account”, from the address on your account — that's how we confirm the request is yours. It's done within 30 days, usually much sooner. The delete your account page lists exactly what's removed and the short list of what isn't, and why.

Your profile, messages and the content you posted are deleted with the account. Two things survive, both for reasons outside our control: copies of messages you sent that sit in someone else's conversation, and content that has become part of a shared record — a tournament result, or a community other people are still using — which we keep in a form that no longer identifies you.

Yes, from your profile, as long as the username you want is free. Both are rate-limited so people can still recognise who they're talking to: a username can be changed once every 14 days, a display name once every 7. The app tells you the date you can change it again.

General and business are a starting screen, not a permission level, and you can switch from your profile. Nothing you've already created is lost.

Yes for everything you'd use as a player — finding spots, joining communities, activities, tournaments, messaging and the marketplace. Nothing is charged today, and nothing can be: there is no way to pay us yet.

A paid tier, Qafila Plus, is coming, along with plans for sellers and for businesses listing venues. A couple of business extras are already held back for it — the stats dashboard on a venue, and pinning a notice to a venue page — so those show as arriving with Plus rather than being open now. Everything else is.

When Plus arrives you'll see the price and what's included before you buy anything, and nothing is charged without you choosing it.

Soon — Qafila is still being built, and the store badges on the home page turn into real links the day the listings go live.

There's no waitlist to join. If you want a nudge when it lands, or you're somewhere you'd like Qafila to work well from day one, tell us — the early areas are the ones where someone spoke up.

For reading, mostly. A community, conversation or spot you've opened before comes back straight away without a connection, and catches up when you're back on one.

Anything new needs signal: the map, things you haven't opened before, and sending anything at all. If you're heading somewhere without coverage, open what you need while you still have it.

Please tell us — contact us here, or use Get Help in the app, in the menu on the Map tab. That one can attach screenshots. Both land in the same place. Bugs with the steps to reproduce them get fixed fastest.