Content Policy

MeFi Policies: Community Guidelines | Content Policy | Microaggressions: Making space for everybody

At MetaFilter we want everyone to feel welcome to participate. We encourage open conversations between members and value the different contributions that make this community positive and dynamic. We have a set of Community Guidelines that we expect all members to follow and staff who provide moderation coverage and support. Some of the MetaFilter subsites have different guidelines that you can find below.

In order to keep the discussions here healthy, we have outlined the policy below to serve as a guide of the types of content and behavior that will be considered inappropriate and may lead to removal of content, warnings or having your account banned.

Inappropriate Content

The following types of content or behavior will not be tolerated:

Hateful or Insensitive content: MetaFilter is an inclusive space. Avoid posting racial slurs or stereotypes; deliberately misgendering/misnaming others; questioning the existence and/or validity of trans identities as well as other racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, ageist, ableist or otherwise hateful speech. This includes making hateful or insensitive statements ironically or sarcastically as well as linking hateful sources (authors or websites).

Name calling: Any kind of name calling and/or cursing directed at others in a conversation. (Pointing out that a statement is inappropriate or otherwise problematic is not name-calling.) In general, cursing is fine on the site, but cursing at someone else is not okay.

Trolling: Systematically making posts or comments solely intended to upset, attack others, or provoke an angry response.

Doxxing: Posting someone else's personal information without consent. If someone hasn't explicitly and intentionally brought their personal information into a public discussion, don't make that decision for them.

Hacking/Impersonation/Misrepresentation: Compromising or accessing another person's account or pretending to be somebody else.

Stalking/harassment: Any unwanted and persistent attention or otherwise creepy behavior making other members or staff uncomfortable. This includes contacting someone after they have said they do not want to be contacted by you.

Discrimination: Any type of discrimination or offensive content based on (but not limited to) age, appearance, body shape, ethnicity, disability, gender identity, race, religion, sexual orientation. This includes demanding members to provide information about their identity within a conversation.

Spamming: Posting or advertising unsolicited commercial/promotional content, This includes self-promotional content and funding campaigns.

AI Generated Content: MetaFilter is, at its core, about the knowledge and wisdom shared by its members. While conversations about AI are okay, using large language models (LLM) or other Generative AI tools to write comments and posts for you is discouraged and said content will likely be removed, except in rare clear-cut cases and when properly labeled as such (such as if someone asks for an example of LLM content).

Violence: It can be okay to talk in strongly critical terms about people's words but don't cross the line into any threats of violence or wishing violence on other people.

Specific Subsite rules

Ask MetaFilter Guidelines

Ask MetaFilter has more strict guidelines. Questions there should have a purpose or a problem to be solved. Also, please don't try to ask multiple questions in a single post, a few related questions in one post are fine.

Common reasons for question removal are: rants posing as questions, questions asking how to break the law, questions about suicide, questions about how to get revenge or harm others, asking for personal information, poll/survey-type questions. If you are having suicidal thoughts, please seek in-person help. MetaFilter has compiled a list of resources to assist you.

Ask MetaFilter comments should address the main question being asked. Jokes, derailing the conversation, ranting, picking a fight or chastising the asker, arguing among commenters, single word comments and other non-answers will probably be removed.

Projects Guidelines

MetaFilter Projects is a place for members of the site to share their own creative work. It's okay if your project has a commercial component of some sort, but it's not a site for personal fundraising appeals, and it's not a pay-to-play marketing site. Submissions that are primarily asking for money or doing promotional work will be rejected.

Also, this needs to be something you, personally, were responsible for making; group work is okay (with consent from the rest of the group), but you need to be directly involved in the creation of the project.

FanFare Guidelines

Posts that indicate the ending of a book, movie, sporting event etc -- If your post contains spoilers please be polite and include them inside the thread or a [more inside] section rather than in the post itself. Mods do not police spoilers on the site except to try to keep them off the front pages of the subsites.

Enforcement

If you want to report a post or comment, you can use the flag [!] link next to the content you are reporting. Also, you can contact us to report any other abusive behavior or issue. Our team evaluates each report on a case-by-case basis. In some cases we will remove content or take another publicly visible action, but in other cases we might take other actions that aren't publicly visible or watch the discussion closely and evaluate further actions as the conversation progresses. We ask you to keep in mind that if you report something to us and it is not removed it might mean that we have taken other actions.

Here are some of the actions we may take:

Please keep in mind that when we take any of these actions, we do not reveal who has reported the content so that your privacy in reporting is still assured.

Also, we do keep a record of every report and might add private notes to the threads or user accounts. Over time this helps us to identify patterns of abusive behaviour, and take the necessary actions.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.