Report abuse

1. What can be reported

Three kinds of thing, each reportable on its own:

• An article — when the problem is one specific page.
• A publication — when the problem is the whole site rather than one post.
• An account — impersonation, or a pattern of behaviour across several publications.

These are the categories the platform recognises:

Malware

Pages distributing malicious software, or linking to it.

Phishing

Pages built to harvest credentials, payment details or personal data under a false identity.

Impersonation

Passing off as a person, organisation or product in a way meant to deceive readers.

Copyright

Material published without the rights to publish it. See section 4.

Spam

Bulk unsolicited content, link farms, and pages published only to manipulate search results.

Prohibited content

Anything the terms of service forbid: unlawful material, harassment of a specific person, incitement to violence, and sexual content involving minors.

Something else

If none of the above fits, describe it and it still gets read.

2. How to report something

Reporting does not require an account, and you do not need to sign in to be taken seriously.

A reporting control on the article page itself is not built yet. Until it is, send the report to the operator through the contact page, and include:

• the full URL of the article, publication or profile;
• which of the categories above fits best;
• a short description of the problem — a couple of sentences is usually enough, and anything over a couple of paragraphs rarely adds to it;
• a way to reach you, if you want to hear what happened.

If content is causing active harm right now — malware being served, a phishing page collecting credentials, material involving a child — say so in the first line so it is not sitting behind a queue.

3. What happens to a report

A person reads it. Depending on what they find, the operator can hide a single post, restrict a whole publication so it stops serving to readers, or suspend or ban an account. Every one of those actions is written to an append-only audit log recording who did it, to what, and why.

Clear-cut cases — malware, phishing, material involving minors — are acted on immediately and without waiting for the author to respond. Everything else usually starts with the author being asked about it.

Two things the system deliberately will not do:

• It will not tell the author who reported them. Reports are stored without the reporter’s identity attached in any form the author can see.
• It will not confirm whether something exists. A report gets the same answer whether or not the thing being reported turned out to be real, so the reporting endpoint cannot be used to probe for private drafts or deleted accounts.

A reader who reaches restricted content is told only that it is unavailable. Not naming the reason in public is what stops moderation from becoming its own harassment channel.

4. Copyright complaints

Copyright complaints go to the operator, and the procedure that applies depends on where they operate. Whatever the jurisdiction, a complaint that can be acted on contains:

• identification of the work you say has been copied;
• the URL on this platform where it appears;
• your name and a contact address;
• a statement that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them, and that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised.

Deliberately false complaints have consequences in most jurisdictions. If what you actually have is a licensing disagreement, say so — it is a different conversation and a faster one.

5. Security vulnerabilities

Report those privately to the operator through the contact page, not by publishing them, and give them time to fix it before you do.

Please do not test against other people’s publications. Create your own — signup is open — and stay inside it. Denial-of-service testing, mass account creation and attempts to reach another tenant’s data are not research, and are treated as attacks under the terms.

6. If it is your publication getting the abuse

The platform gives you some of this directly. Roles decide who can publish — an author can write but cannot make anything public — so an account that is compromised or that turns out to be careless cannot put something live on its own. Every session can be ended from your account settings, and every revision of every post is kept, so anything that was changed can be recovered.

For anything the platform cannot handle for you, contact the operator.