Content & Moderation Policy

Loqva is for genuinely useful discussion — life admin, organization, self-hosting, productivity, and the communities that grow around them. This policy explains what's allowed, how moderation works, and what happens when rules are broken. It's part of our Terms of Service.

What's not allowed

• Adult content. No sexual, pornographic, or otherwise NSFW content of any kind, anywhere on the site — there are no exceptions and no "NSFW-tagged" communities.
• Harassment. Don't target, insult, stalk, or pile on people, in public or in private messages.
• Threats and violence. No threats, incitement, or glorification of violence.
• Spam. No repetitive posting, scams, or undisclosed self-promotion. Sharing a genuinely useful link is fine; posting links mainly to drive traffic isn't. Some communities don't allow link posts at all.
• Vote manipulation. Don't vote with multiple accounts, have others vote for you in a coordinated way, or trade votes. You can't vote on your own posts and comments.
• Ban evasion. Don't create or use another account to get around a ban for a serious violation (see below).
• Illegal content and impersonation. Nothing illegal, nothing that infringes someone else's rights, and don't pretend to be someone you aren't.
• Undisclosed AI. Every post says whether AI was used to write it (and how) — answer honestly. Comments can be labeled the same way. Readers can open the “AI-assisted” label to see how AI was used. You can add a disclosure later, but only moderators can remove one.
• Undisclosed promotion. If you're paid, sponsored, or connected to what you're posting about (your own product, your employer, an affiliate link), turn on “I'm affiliated” when you post. Passing off advertising or marketing as an ordinary person's opinion isn't allowed.
• Bots and AI personas. Automated accounts must be labeled as bots (ask the site staff). Don't run accounts that pose as real people, and don't claim credentials or experiences you don't have (“as a nurse…”, “as a survivor…”) to persuade people.

Individual communities can add their own rules on top of these — for example about topics or formatting — and their moderators enforce them within that community.

How moderation works

Anyone with an account can report a post, comment, message, user, or community. Reports go to that community's moderators and to site-wide staff. Moderators can remove content, lock threads, and pin posts within their community; removal tells the author why. Account bans are site-wide and are only applied by site-wide staff — a community's own moderators can't ban someone from the whole platform.

Projects

A project is one person's space for documenting a piece of work. Its owner and the collaborators they invite can post; anyone can comment and follow. The owner and collaborators moderate the project's comments. A project can apply to link into a community — that community's moderators decide whether to approve it, and can remove the link at any time. Projects follow the same rules as everything else here, and site staff can act on any project. A project with no new posts for six months is shown as paused, and after a year as archived; an archived project takes no new posts until its owner makes it active again. A project's owner can ask site admins to turn it into a community; if approved, its links into other communities close and those communities' moderators are told.

Post types, answers and edit history

Every post has a type — Discussion, Question, Guide, Showcase, Review, Poll, Event, or Announcement (which only a community's moderators can use). Poll votes follow the same rules as other votes: votes from brand-new accounts or accounts linked to the poll's author are recorded but not counted, and votes from accounts banned for vote manipulation are voided. A community's admins can turn types off and set the tags authors may choose from. On a Question, the asker or a moderator can mark one reply as the accepted answer, and any post's author or moderators can pin up to three replies.

Edit history is public: an edit made more than five minutes after posting is labelled with its date, and earlier versions can be viewed. Moderators can hide a single earlier version — for example, if it contained someone's personal information.

Freshness reviews: posts come back to moderators six months after they're posted. A moderator can confirm a post is still accurate (it shows "Reviewed by moderators" and comes back a year later), mark that its date doesn't matter, or mark it as possibly outdated — which adds a "May contain outdated information" label and asks the author to update it. Updating it sends it back for review.

Bans: serious and minor

Every ban records a reason, and reasons fall into two groups:

• Serious: spam, harassment, threats or violence, adult content, ban evasion, and vote manipulation.
• Minor: incivility, off-topic or low-effort posting, and other rule-breaking.

Bans escalate for repeated problems. A first ban for a minor reason is usually 1 day; each further ban moves up a step: 1 day → 3 days → 1 week → 2 weeks → 1 month → 3 months → 6 months → 1 year → permanent. Serious reasons start at 1 week. Staff can choose a longer ban — including a permanent one — for clear-cut cases such as automated spam. Old history fades: every 6 months without a ban moves you back down a step.

While banned you can still log in and read, but you can't post, comment, vote, or send messages. A temporary ban lifts automatically when it ends.

New accounts after a ban

If you were banned for a minor reason, you're free to start over with a new account. If you were banned for a serious reason, using another account while that ban is in effect is ban evasion. To enforce this we compare abuse-prevention signals — one-way hashes of IP addresses and of a device identifier, described in the Privacy Policy:

• A new account used from the same device as an account under a serious ban is banned automatically and permanently. The original account's ban isn't changed.
• A match on IP address alone is never acted on automatically, because unrelated people often share a network. It's reviewed by staff instead.

Votes

To keep rankings honest, some votes are recorded but don't count toward a post's score: votes from accounts less than 24 hours old (they start counting once the account is a day old), and votes between accounts that appear to be the same person. An account banned for vote manipulation has all of its votes removed from scores.

Appeals

If you think a ban or the removal of your post or comment was a mistake — including an automatic ban-evasion ban, for example because you share a computer with someone — you can appeal it once:

• Use Appeal this ban on the banner shown while you're banned, or Appeal this removal on your removed post or comment. You can appeal even while banned.
• Your appeal opens a private conversation with the moderators who review it. Whenever possible, the moderator who took the action is not the one who decides; if they're the only moderator available, they may decide, and site admins can see that they did.
• If staff don't respond within a day, or don't decide within three days, you can report the appeal to the site admins, who then decide it themselves — including overturning a denial.
• A denial always comes with a written reason, visible to you and to site admins.

You can also email [email protected] from the address on your account.