Moderation & safety

Version 1.5 — effective 2026-11-16.

Waidrn is a public town square. Moderation protects people from harm and keeps rules honest. Below: contracts, removals, reporting, outcomes, appeals. The Rules and Content Policy set the standard; the Terms are the legal side.

Realm contracts and tiers

Moderation follows the effective contract of the place content lives in: the realm chain's contracts combined with the thread's own contract, and the platform's unlawful-content floor on top. Tiers run tame → standard → mature → uncensored-lawful; flags cover adult-only, explicit-sex, image/link rules, profile rules, report thresholds, age assurance and location availability. A child realm or thread may only be stricter than its parent; adult capability needs operator approval. Posting in a realm records your acceptance of its current contract version, and material contract changes are announced before they are enforced on existing lawful content. See the Content Policy for the flag list.

What we remove and why

We remove illegal content — sexual content involving minors, credible threats, doxxing, malware — plus harassment or hate, spam, stolen or copyright-infringing work (Copyright & takedown), and unlabelled adult content or content shown outside its contract's visibility rules. We do not remove work for being unpopular or critical of us.

Adult content works like this today: Mature/Explicit works and threads are never shown to anonymous visitors; signed-in accounts need the adult preference and an explicit per-session confirmation. Adult-only profiles can post only where the contract is adult-capable. Signup asks you to declare you are an adult; stronger age assurance is not implemented yet and will be described here before it is required.

How reporting works

Every post, thread, work, chapter, comment, project and profile has a Report link. Pick one of eight reasons — Harassment or abuse, Hate speech, Spam, Copyright, Illegal content, Doxxing or privacy, Adult content violation, Other — and add details if they help. Reports are private: the reported person is not told who reported them. Accounts can send five reports an hour; the limit protects the queue from abuse, not criticism.

What happens next

Reports go into a moderator queue. A moderator can hide content (it stops being public, keeps a tombstone and can be restored), dismiss the report with no action, or suspend an account for serious or repeated violations — signing it out, revoking its sessions and blocking sign-in, posting, trading and minting (the person can still read as a visitor).

If a post, thread or comment collects three or more open reports, it is hidden automatically pending human review. Works, projects and accounts are never auto-hidden — they are queued for a moderator.

Soft-delete and tombstones

Removed content leaves a tombstone: title, author and date stay visible, so links and receipts do not develop silent holes. Authors can see that their content was removed.

Transparency

Every moderation action — hide, dismissal, resolution, suspension, lock or tag correction — is written to the audit log, visible to moderators and admins. There are no invisible penalties.

Who does what

Moderators handle content: they hide content, resolve reports, lock or pin threads, and correct tags. They cannot touch money, roles or platform settings; those are admin-only, along with the simulation clock and the email queue.

Tag corrections

Fandom and freeform tags can be renamed, aliased or merged so fandom pages stay clean. When a tag's URL changes, the old link redirects permanently, so bookmarks do not break.

Appeals and contact

Decision-aware moderation records an immutable decision with a public identifier, the contract version and the reason class. If you believe a decision was wrong, appeal from the decision's page or mail moderation@waidrn.com with the link/decision id and what was missed; an admin or moderator who did not make the original decision reviews it. Contract decisions can be appealed to an admin; suspension appeals have their own path. Security issues go to security@waidrn.com — see /.well-known/security.txt.

Legal notices are a separate track

Copyright and other legal notices (court orders, law-enforcement requests, regulator/DSA orders, foreign demands) follow the notice workflows described in the Copyright policy and DMCA page. They are not user reports: they are tracked, decided with reasons, audited, and can place a legal hold that preserves evidence. Some notices cannot be discussed publicly; aggregate counts appear on Transparency.

Safety tools and expectations

Block people you do not want to hear from, mute tags or fandoms you do not want to see, and set the adult gate and rating/warning labels as you prefer. We aim to review reports within 48 hours; illegal content is escalated immediately. Waidrn is a small team. Location-based availability (geo policy) is applied provisionally while it awaits legal review; hidden content returns an ordinary not-found page, and the fact of a hide is audited.

Communities, organizations and verification (v1.4)