We base our community rules on our Code of Conduct. If you have any questions on the mindset behind our rules, that would be a good place to start looking!

We usually provide an abridged version of these rules directly within our community spaces. If the shortened version appears to conflict with the rules written below, this document takes priority, and you should consider it to be the primary source of truth.

We reserve the right to pre-emptively deny or restrict access to our community spaces to users who violate our rules elsewhere, even if those violations happen in completely unrelated spaces. While this may seem drastic, we do this to better protect the minorities in our spaces, who're often the target of political violence or harassment campaigns.

As a community, we must follow the rules and terms set out by the platforms we use. These rules will differ between each platform, and we recommend making yourself familiar with them.

• Discord: Terms of Service and Community Guidelines
• GitHub: Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policies

We understand that not everyone speaks English and that it can be a challenging language to get used to if you don't speak it natively. However, English is the common language in our community spaces, which means we can't moderate content written in other languages. For that reason, we'd appreciate it if you could try to speak English in our spaces.

If another community member speaks your native language, and they don't mind translating for you, feel free to accept their help. Otherwise, you can use translation tools like Kagi Translate, Google Translate, or DeepL if you need to.

We don't tolerate users that make fun of others for their level of English, and we'll moderate any harassment or bullying.

All tools and projects shared or worked on in our community spaces must be legal, legitimate, appropriate, and ethical. For example, don't promote or ask for help with any of the following:

• Projects or code built around a generative AI tool, such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Midjourney, or Synthesia.
  • This doesn't include light, ethical generative AI tools, such as the individual line completion feature bundled with IntelliJ IDEA.

• Projects or code designed to violate the terms of service for any platform.
  • This doesn't include anything that explicitly falls under progressive activism, but it must be clear and obvious.

• Projects or code built around NFTs or cryptocurrencies.
• Projects or code designed to manipulate, defraud, misinform, financially disadvantage, spam, or scam others.
• Projects or code that otherwise violate Rule 1.

We reserve the right to update this list as trends change. However, this list simply contains examples, and we reserve the right to moderate and remove anything we feel doesn't meet our standards.

Rephasing is a progressive, collaborative organisation, and it is important everyone respects each other's differences and accounts for others' accessibility needs. To give specific examples:

• We absolutely will not tolerate any bigotry — including, but not limited to, racism, antisemitism, body-shaming, ableism, sexism, anti-feminism, classism, transphobia, pluralphobia (including discrimination towards “endogenic” systems), and queerphobia.
  • We don't believe in reverse-isms, including “reverse racism” and “heterophobia”. “Cis” isn't a slur, and minorities of colour protecting themselves from the actions of the white majority (or joking and complaining about it) are not racist.
  • Our definition of bigotry includes expressions of support for fascists and fascism, both historical and modern. This is true regardless of the context — and regardless of whether you pose it as “differing views” or “just an opinion”.
    • Yes, 2025's self-crowned King of America, his lackeys, and the President of Twitter count.

• Remember that not every potentially bigoted statement comes from a place of malice – many people are misinformed, and we can do a lot more good by educating them than we can by yelling at them.
  • We don't expect members of minority groups to educate others – minorities shouldn't be responsible for solving their own oppression.
  • If you're not in a position to educate, or simply don't want to, we would prefer a report rather than an argument. If you feel like yelling is warranted, then we'll probably agree with you, but it doesn't solve any problems!

• Keep all discussions and content “safe for work” — sexual/suggestive content and behaviour, gore, violence and abuse content have no place in our community spaces, except:
  • Discussions about newsworthy events, at our discretion, and limited to dedicated channels and categories.
  • Educational content and discussions, at our discretion.
  • Projects that support sex workers and their content, when posted in relevant showcase channels and spaces, and when correctly tagged.
  • Discussions relating to sexual health and safey – including (as recommended by orgs such as WISER) with minors, who cannot be protected from sexual violence without this kind of education.
• It shouldn't have to be said, but someone simply being queer or trans does not make their behaviour sexual or inappropriate.

• There's no room in our community spaces for blackmail, piracy, or any other manipulative or illegal behaviour.
• Don't post images, emotes, videos, or other media with fast-moving animations or flashing colours, or anything else likely to be a problem for photosensitive users.
• Respect any accessibility tools we provide, and the community members who use them. For example:
  • Discord: PluralKit, meant for plural systems, or as a mental health tool.
• Don't use any of our community's content to train AI models.
• Remember that all staff members are imperfect entities — and understand that, while we can and do make mistakes, we're all trying to do what we feel is best for everyone.

You should always report any violations of this rule to our staff team. We appreciate your reports, and we encourage our community remembers to talk with us if they have any concerns.

For more information on how to make a report and how we handle your reports, see the reporting section below.

If we want to have productive and respectful discussions, then everyone must respect our community spaces. To give more specific examples:

• Everyone needs to pull together to help keep our community spaces healthy, regardless of whether they're on the staff team. While this largely means following our rules and interacting authentically, it also means that we expect our community members to report any rule violations they run into, rather than joining in or ignoring issues.

• Do not spam our community spaces. This includes:
  • Unsolicited advertising, including promoting your projects outside channels or spaces designed for that.
  • Posting or dumping memes into off-topic channels or spaces without any intent or relevance to discussion.
  • Pinging or mentioning community members as a joke or to harass them.
  • Taking over channels or spaces with personal grievances, or other issues best dealt with privately.

• Read through any relevant posting guidelines, including channel topics and category descriptions, and adhere to them. While discussions sometimes tend to drift off-topic, we appreciate it when users do their best to keep things relevant to the channel or space they're using.

• Do not attack, exploit, or otherwise technically hinder our spaces or work. If you find a security or moderation exploit, or a loophole in our rules, report them instead of using them. This also includes rules-lawyering, gaming the system, and malicious compliance.
  • If you feel inclined towards these tactics, please give us feedback and let us know where we went wrong instead.

It is important to take care of yourself and your mental health. While this obviously allows you to interact in healthier ways, it also makes it easier to follow our other rules, and helps you to avoid saying things you later regret. Some examples of things you can do include:

• Taking breaks when you feel too heated or tired, when you feel self-destructive, or when you're not sober enough to chat.
  • On the Discord server, you can time yourself out using the /self-timeout command.

• Hiding or muting any channels/categories/similar spaces in our communities that you don't want to read or interact in.
• Reporting problems when things go wrong, and blocking/ignoring other community members as necessary.
• Taking the time to focus on yourself, your life, and your real-world interactions instead of spending too much time online, or using your discussions as an excuse to put off something important.
• Seeking therapy and other professional help for any serious life issues, rather than relying on random, untrained community members for support, where possible.

This should go without saying, but we don't exclude community members based only on the state of their mental health. However, poor mental health is not an excuse for breaking our rules!

As mentioned above, we expect our community members to contribute to the overall health of our community spaces, in part by reporting any rule violations they witness. Our staff team can't be everywhere all the time — we have our own lives and jobs to deal with, and sometimes we won't notice a violation happening.

When you notice an issue, please keep this section in mind and report violations appropriately.

It is important to put in the effort to write a proper and useful report:

• Provide as much relevant information as possible, including reference links and screenshots where necessary.
• If you have any commentary or suggestions, place them at the end of your report.

Reports can be submitted using one of the following avenues:

• Discord: Pick one of the following options:
  • Tap-and-hold or right-click on any user or message, select “Apps”, then select the corresponding “Report” command.
  • Send a private message to any of the admins or moderators.
  • Ping @Moderators in the relevant Discord channel, for urgent public issues.
• Forum: Pick one of the following options:
  • Posts: Tap or click on the menu button on any post, and select the Flag Post option.
  • User Profiles: Navigate to the user's profile, and tap or click on the Flag Profile option.
• GitHub: Email your report to moderation (AT) rephas.ing. Only gdude2002 (Gareth Coles) monitors this inbox right now, but this may change as moderation needs evolve.

If the incident you're reporting breaks the platform's rules, then you should also report it directly to the platform.

• Discord: Pick one or both the following options:
  • Europe: For content that's illegal under Europe's Digital Services Act, use Discord's dedicated reporting form. This form is not available outside of the EU.
  • Global: Right-click / tap-and-hold the relevant message, select the “Report” option, and follow the instructions.
• GitHub: Follow the instructions shown on GitHub's Report Abuse or Spam page.

If you need to send in a report about our staff members, please send it to the highest-ranking staff member possible, aside from the staff members in question.

For example, if your report is about Moderators A and B, send your report to Admin C.

If you have feedback or a complaint about our policies or staffing methodology, it may make more sense to provide direct feedback as explained on the About Us page.

When a staff member receives a report, the first step is to read the report and begin a small investigation.

In simpler situations, we'll act immediately without much discussion — otherwise, we'll share more complex reports (or those requiring larger investigations) with the rest of the moderation team and chat about its merits.

We may need to contact you for more details or to have a discussion with you, so please ensure we can contact you after you send in your report.

We're committed to keeping all reports private, and we're especially wary of sharing details of any reports with anyone outside our staff team.

However, we believe it is important for communities to work together, and we reserve the right to share some details of our moderation actions (and the reports leading up to them) with other moderation teams and community moderation organisations. When we do this, we don't share information on who submitted the report, and we try to only share details that are specifically relevant to the moderation case.

We reserve the right to use the full suite of moderation tools available to us when dealing with violations. This includes but is not limited to:

• Nothing, when no action is necessary.
• Privately intervening in destructive behaviours and checking on community members' mental health.
• Giving community members public or private warnings.
• Limiting how often a community member may interact with our spaces.
• Limiting the parts of our community that are available to specific community members.
• Removing community members from our spaces.
• Removing community members' ability to interact without removing them from our spaces, often known as “muting”.
• Reporting community members' activity to platforms relevant to the violation.
• Warning other communities we work with about severe violations.

Our team reserves the right to take whichever action seems most appropriate, and we may decide to act across all our community spaces at once if needed.

Please note that sending an appeal doesn't guarantee that we'll undo the action in question. If we decide to deny your appeal, then we'll try to provide as much detail as possible — but in some situations, we may not be able to.

Donating or otherwise contributing to our projects will not make your appeal more likely to be successful. Instead, please be civil and patient when writing your appeal and be as clear as possible when explaining why we should undo our moderation action.

If we decide to ban you from our community spaces or otherwise limit your access, and you feel we took that action in error, or you'd like to make a case for undoing that action, then please let us know via one of the following options:

• Discord: Appeal a ban or mute by using our appeals form. Warnings cannot be appealed, and will become irrelevant after a certain amount of time.
• Other Platforms: Email moderation (AT) rephas.ing.