Public Community Guidelines

These guidelines apply only to Read Write.as, our public writing community. See our Platform Guidelines for our broader Write.as policies.

We are an open community for everyone to share their thoughts freely. Write.as provides a platform that keeps your identity safe, and stands up for free expression.

As a publishing platform, we are an amplifier for voices that write here, and take that role seriously. To ensure that everyone feels (and continues feeling) welcome to express themselves, we have a few guidelines on what is expected of everyone in our public community, Read Write.as.

In short, Read Write.as is for writing: share your thoughts, feelings, trials, tribulations, and anything on your mind. If you'd like to publish other things, feel free to do it on your individual Write.as blogs — but note that they may not be accepted here in our public community.

Note: If you don't agree with these policies, you can also join another community powered by the same software behind Write.as, or even start your own.

Don't use Read Write.as for this

• Pure self-promotion & advertising. To stay focused on meaningful, human writing, we won't promote writing that seems to exist for the sole purpose of promoting a product or service. This includes content marketing that purports to have valuable information for the reader, but ultimately leads to a product or service the author has a commercial connection to.
• Malicious speech. To help us maintain a welcoming space full of diverse perspectives, don't encourage violence or hatred. Don't use Read Write.as to bully people.
• Spam. In the same vein, don't repeatedly post the same content. Don't use our platform for spamming people elsewhere on the web.
• Deceptive or link-only posts. To keep readers at ease, don't willingly mislead people, especially in order to get them to do something, like download malware or click your affiliate link.
• Privacy violations. So we can uphold our strong reputation, do not undermine anyone's privacy. Don't post personal details without someone's consent, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other sensitive information.
• Unlawful uses. To keep people safe and make sure our lives don't get so difficult we need to shut down, don't use Read Write.as to conduct illegal behavior, like fraud or phishing.
• Exploits and resource abuse. So everyone can continue enjoying our platform, don't attempt to exploit, disrupt, or otherwise abuse our system resources.

Be mindful of this

Read Write.as is regularly visited by thousands of people every month, in various places. For certain content, we don't explicitly prohibit it, but ask that you be self-aware and considerate of others.

• Not Safe for Work (NSFW) content. As a courtesy to readers, if you decide to make your NSFW blog public, please:
  • Ensure your post title is Safe for Work (SFW), even if it's suggestive
  • Use the <!--more--> tag to limit the excerpt that shows up on Read Write.as
  • Add a #nsfw hashtag somewhere in your post
  This will help readers decide whether or not to read your content.

How we handle violations

When we are made aware of a post that potentially violates these guidelines, we have a real, live human read over the post. They will also read other posts on the post's blog if necessary, to gain context.

If the post violates our policies but there is no imminent harm or damage being done, we'll first try to get in touch with the post's author, and notify them of the violation. We'll often suggest changes to make, if any are possible.

If the changes aren't made, are insufficient, or can't be made, we'll disable the Public option on the offending blog. Unless the blog also violates our Platform Guidelines, this will be the only action we take. The blog will still be fully-functioning — it simply won't be showcased on Read Write.as.

Improvements

Running a welcoming, inclusive community is something we're new at and constantly learning from. If you have ideas on how we can improve, we'd love to hear from you.

Changes

We'll announce any major changes to this policy on our Mastodon account.