Moderation Policy
What gets reviewed, what gets taken down, who decides, and how to argue with them. Written so that a decision made about your account is one you could have predicted before you made the post.
What moderation is for here
This site answers the question "what queer content is actually in this?" by letting the community vote. Almost everything that gets moderated is something that breaks the count or hurts a person: spam, sockpuppets, harassment, and claims about real people that nobody can source.
Disagreement is not one of those things. A title where the vote splits 51/49 is the site working. Contested numbers are worth more than tidy ones, and no moderator will remove a descriptor, a vote or a note because the answer it gives is unflattering to a work they like.
Who decides
- Anyone can read the whole site, and ask for their own name to be taken off it.
- A confirmed account - one that has clicked the link in its email - can vote, rate, shelve, submit titles, write notes, suggest links, propose descriptors, submit credits and file reports.
- Trusted members carry a badge granted by hand, never by an automatic threshold, always with a reason written down. All it does is let their submissions, notes and links appear without waiting in a queue. It is not a rank, it confers no authority over other members, and it does not apply to credits about real people, which are always read first.
- Moderators work the queues, act on reports, edit and hide content, and suspend member accounts.
- Admins do all of that, plus roles, badges, the descriptor vocabulary, action on other staff, and reading the audit log.
Reviewed before it appears, or reviewed after
Some things wait for a moderator; the rest go up straight away and are dealt with reactively. The split is deliberate - a queue in front of everything would kill the site's pace, and a queue in front of nothing would make it a spam target.
Read before anyone sees it: submitted titles, notes, member-suggested links, proposed descriptors, and - with no exceptions and no bypass - every credit about a real person. Trusted members and staff skip the first three; nobody skips the last.
Live immediately, removed if reported: votes, star ratings, profile pictures, display names, pronouns, bios, identity labels, and anything a trusted account posts.
Every rejection is recorded with a reason against the decision. The site does not yet put that reason in front of the person who submitted the thing - a rejected title shows as rejected on your profile and a rejected note disappears from the page, neither of them saying why, which is a gap we intend to close. Until it is closed, ask: message staff about anything of yours that did not make it and you will be told what the reason was.
The standards
Titles
A real, published work (film, television, book, comic or game) entered once, with the metadata belonging to it.
Rejected: duplicates of something already listed, works invented for the joke, entries whose only purpose is to carry a link somewhere, and anything unreleased enough that nobody can vote honestly on it yet.
Descriptors
A descriptor is a an attribute that asking a yes or no question about a work, answerable by somebody who has seen it, and phrased so that two people who agree about the work will agree about the answer. Proposals get rejected for being two questions in a coat, for being unanswerable without reading a creator's mind, or for duplicating a descriptor that already exists.
Some descriptors describe harmful patterns, because a list of only nice things is no use to anyone deciding what to watch tonight. Marking a work as fitting one is a statement about the work, never about the people voting.
Notes
A note says why a descriptor fits a title - evidence, not review. Spoilers are expected and are not a reason to remove one: half the descriptors on this site are outcomes, and the site says so plainly rather than hiding them.
Removed: abuse aimed at other members, creators or performers; claims about real people's identities, which belong in credits with a source or nowhere at all; copied text passed off as your own; anything posted to sell something; and notes about a member rather than the work.
Votes and ratings
Vote your honest reading of the work. The things that get accounts suspended are the ones that corrupt the count: running several accounts, organising a group to swing a title's numbers, and voting through a title's entire descriptor list without having seen it. A vote you later disagree with is not misconduct - change it.
Links
Where a title can legitimately be got: an official site, a storefront, a publisher's own shop, a free archive the rights-holder put up. Rejected: affiliate links other than the site's own, referral and survey wrappers, aggregators that exist to run ads, dead addresses, and anything a moderator would not click twice. Button text is derived for you and is a moderator's to overrule, because free text on a button is half the spam problem.
Profiles
Display names, pictures and bios are yours to choose, within the obvious: no impersonating another member, staff member or a real person; no slurs; no harassment of anyone by way of a bio; no sexual content, and nothing sexualising minors, which is removed on sight and reported to the authorities where the law requires it; no advertising. A name or picture may be reset without the account being suspended, and usually is.
Identity labels
The labels a member puts on their own profile are theirs alone. Nobody may cite another member's labels to dispute a vote, to demand they justify an opinion, or to challenge whether they are queer enough to be here. Doing so is harassment and is handled as harassment. Staff will not use them in a moderation decision either. Nobody is asked to prove an identity on this site, ever.
Off limits everywhere on the site
- Harassment, threats, and following a member around the site.
- Publishing private information about anybody, member or not.
- Outing a real person who has not publicly said it themselves. This is the line the whole credits system is built around.
- Hate speech targeting people for who they are. Describing the queerphobia inside a work is the job, and is not this.
- Spam, scams, malware and vote manipulation.
- Content that is illegal where the site is hosted.
Real people get different rules
Claims about the people behind a work, such as that an author is a lesbian or that a performer is trans, are never voted on. They live in credits, and every one of them carries a link to a source.
- Sourced or gone. The source has to be the person's own public words or an on-the-record statement they made. A fan wiki is not a source. A tabloid is not a source. A role they played is not a source. An "everyone knows" is not a source.
- Always reviewed. Credits wait for a moderator however trusted the account is. A pending or rejected credit renders nothing at all - no empty row, no "claim disputed", because a disputed claim about somebody's sexuality is still a claim about their sexuality.
- Removal is honored. Anyone can ask, from the person's page, with no account and no proof of identity. We do not ask you to out yourself further to be taken off a list of queer people. Honoring a request hides every credit for that person and stops anybody adding them again.
- A dead source is a takedown. Sources are checked automatically each month; one that stops resolving goes to a moderator and the credit comes down. A claim whose evidence has evaporated does not get to stay up on momentum.
Reporting something
Titles, notes and profile pictures each carry a report link on their own page. Anything else - a member, a voting pattern, a credit, or something that needs explaining at length - goes to staff through the message form. If you have no account or cannot use it, email privacy@justhowqueeristhis.com.
Reports are private: they are visible to moderators, never on a public page, and the person reported is not told who reported them. A report does not hide anything by itself - nothing here is removed automatically by a volume of complaints, because that mechanism is only ever used as a weapon. A moderator reads it and decides, and every decision is written to the audit log with their name against it.
Reporting in bad faith - mass-reporting somebody you are arguing with, or reporting a member for their identity - is itself a suspendable thing.
What we can do about it
In rough order, and we reach for the smallest one that solves the problem:
- Leave it alone, and say so to whoever reported it.
- Fix it - correct a title's metadata, retitle a link button, merge a duplicate descriptor.
- Take one item down: hide a note, reject a queued item with a reason, reset a display name or picture. A hidden note is hidden, not deleted, and can be put straight back.
- Write to the member. Most things end here.
- Suspend the account for a fixed period.
- Suspend it permanently, and where the account existed only to abuse the site, block re-registration from that address.
Bans, in detail
A suspended account can still read every page. What it cannot do is vote, rate, shelve, submit, write notes, suggest links, propose descriptors, file reports or message staff. The message form closing is why the email address above exists.
A suspension carries a reason and a length, both shown to the person it is applied to on every page they load. A fixed-term one lifts itself automatically on the day it expires - nobody has to remember to do it. A permanent one stays until an admin lifts it.
A moderator may also remove some or all of what the account contributed: its votes, its ratings, its notes, its queued submissions, its descriptor proposals, and its already-approved titles. Two things about that are worth knowing. Nothing is deleted outright - everything removed is stashed for thirty days, and undoing the ban inside that window puts it all back and restores the vote counts. Approved titles are hidden rather than deleted, because other people's votes hang off them and those people did nothing wrong.
Removing content is not automatic with a ban. Somebody suspended for a fortnight over an argument keeps their votes; somebody who spent a week building a spam catalogue does not.
Rules the staff work under
- Every moderation action is written to the audit log with who did it, what it was and when. The log is not editable from anywhere in the site.
- Moderators handle members. Only an admin can act on a moderator or another admin - one bad day should not cost the site its whole team, and that rule is enforced by the code, not by good manners.
- A moderator who is party to a dispute hands it to somebody else. That includes approving your own submissions when they are contentious, and it includes credits you submitted yourself.
- Staff do not moderate on the basis of who a member is, what they have voted, or what identity labels they have set.
- Trusted status is granted with a written reason and can be revoked the same way. It buys a shorter route to the page, not a softer standard.
Appeals
Every decision can be appealed, and appealing one costs you nothing.
If your account still works, send staff a message. If it is suspended, email privacy@justhowqueeristhis.com - that address is the one route that keeps working when the account does not. Say what was removed or when you were suspended, and what you think we got wrong; you do not need to be polite about it, only clear.
An appeal is read by an admin, and wherever there is more than one person available, not by the person who made the original call. We aim to answer within a week. If the appeal succeeds inside the thirty-day window, undoing the ban restores everything that was removed with it, votes and counts included; after that window the account can be restored but the content is gone for good, which is a reason to appeal early rather than to wait and see. If it fails you will be told why, in terms specific to what happened rather than a line from this page.
What we will not do
- Remove a title because somebody finds its subject uncomfortable, or because its numbers are unflattering. Descriptors are describing the work, not endorsing it.
- Adjudicate whether a work is "really" queer. That is the question the votes exist to answer, and staff do not get a casting vote in it.
- Edit or reweight a vote count by hand to reach a number a moderator prefers.
- Ask anyone to prove their identity, their orientation, or their right to an opinion about a work.
- Hand a member's email address, IP address or identity labels to another member, or to anyone else absent a legal obligation.
- Act on a report because there were a lot of them.
Legal requests
Copyright complaints have their own route, set out under Copyright Infringements in the Terms of Use. Covers and metadata come from TMDB, OpenLibrary and Comic Vine; a cover a rights-holder wants gone is removed on request without an argument.
Requests from law enforcement are answered where the law of the place the site is hosted actually requires it, and not otherwise. There is very little here to hand over: no real names, no addresses, no payment records. Where we are permitted to tell the member a request was made, we will.
Contact
Signed-in members: the message form. Everybody else, and anyone whose account is suspended: privacy@justhowqueeristhis.com. To be taken off the site as a credited person, use the removal link on your own page - it needs no account.