Content Policy

Last updated 27 August 2026.

Groups on Hearthhall are private, and we do not read them. That makes this short list more important, not less: it is the only thing that applies everywhere, and it holds whether or not anyone is watching. It forms part of the Terms of Service.

A few pages here are not private — a campaign somebody listed, a character somebody published, a notice on the player board, and every profile. Strangers read those, and “In public” below says what changes when they do.

Never, in any group

• Sexual content involving minors. Any depiction: written, drawn, photographed, uploaded or generated, real or fictional. This is reported to the authorities and the account is removed permanently. There is no warning and no appeal.
• Content that sexualises a real person without their consent, including synthetic or edited imagery.
• Credible threats of violence, or encouraging someone to hurt themselves.
• Doxxing: posting someone’s private information, whether or not they use this site.
• Harassment aimed at a real person, and hate directed at people for who they are rather than what they have done.
• Material that is illegal to possess or distribute where you or we are.
• Malware, phishing, and attacks on the service or on the people using it.
• Other people’s copyrighted work posted without permission.

Fiction, and the line around it

Roleplaying goes to dark places. Villains do terrible things; characters die badly; wars, cruelty and horror are ordinary subject matter, and none of that is against the rules. A character is not their player, and writing an appalling person is not being one.

The line is not the subject. It is these two things:

• Fiction is not a wrapper. Real threats, real harassment, or illegal material do not stop being those things because a character said them.
• The first list has no fictional exception. Most of all the first item.

Pictures

Everything above applies to a picture exactly as it applies to a sentence, and to one a machine made as surely as to a photograph. Beyond that, two things about uploading are worth knowing before you press the button, because neither is obvious from the interface.

A map or a handout is readable only by its campaign. The storage checks membership rather than trusting the address, and an unrevealed handout is refused even to a member — so a GM can prepare six things nobody knows exist.

Everything else you upload is not secret, only unfindable. An avatar, a character portrait, a picture set into a wiki page or a post: each sits at an address that is a long random string, never published and impossible to guess or list. That is real protection and it is the whole of it. It is not a password, it does not expire, and it does not care who is signed in — anyone you send the address to can open the picture. Put into a campaign what belongs to that campaign, and nothing you would mind being passed on.

In public

Four things here are read outside your campaign. A campaign its owner listed in the directory and a character its player published are readable by anyone and can turn up in a search engine. A notice on the player board is visible to people with an account. A profile needs no account either, though crawlers are asked to stay away from it.

The rules do not change on those pages. What changes is who is standing there when one is broken, so three things that are your own business inside a campaign are not on a page a stranger can open:

• Contact details, yours or anybody else’s. A published character page is a page on the internet, and it will be read by people you did not have in mind when you wrote it.
• Pretending to be somebody real, or to be one of us. Playing a character is not this. A profile that claims to be a real person, or a moderator, is.
• Advertising, and anything whose purpose is to get somebody to click, pay or install. A campaign looking for players is what the directory is for. Anything else on it is spam and goes without discussion.

Within your group

Beyond that, groups set their own standards, and owners and moderators enforce them. Agree early on what your table is comfortable with: content warnings, subjects to avoid, how to say “not this, please” mid-scene without derailing everything. A group that has had that conversation needs moderators far less often.

Group moderators can lock pages and threads, remove posts, and remove members. We do not overrule them on matters of taste. We do step in where this policy is broken.

Reporting

There is a Report link on every post, at the foot of every thread, on every wiki page, and on characters and profiles. It asks what is wrong, and sends that to the moderators of the campaign it happened in — who can act immediately and know the context — and to us. Use it in preference to writing: it carries the address of the thing with it, which an email has to be told, and it reaches the person who can act fastest. Report the post where the problem is a line of it, and the thread where the problem is the scene.

For anything on the first list, or anything a group’s own moderators are involved in, write to support@hearthhall.com instead. Include a link and enough detail to find it. Copyright complaints go there too; section 7 of the Terms of Service says what to put in one.

Reports are not shown to the person reported.

What we do about it

Most things get a warning and a request to remove something. Repeated or deliberate breaches get a suspension. The first list gets a permanent removal on the first occurrence, and, where the law requires it, a referral.

A suspended account can still read, and can still download everything it has written; it cannot post, edit, or roll.

When we act, we tell you why

If we remove something you wrote, or suspend your account, you get a message saying what we did and on what basis: which rule above, or which law; what we actually relied on; whether it came from a report, from a campaign’s own moderators, or from an authority; and how to challenge it. A removal you have to guess the reason for is not moderation, it is just something disappearing.

A person makes these decisions. Nothing here is judged by an automated system, no account is suspended by one, and there is no scanning of anybody’s posts by machine.

If we got it wrong, say so. Write to support@hearthhall.com and a person will look again — a different look, not the same one repeated. If we were wrong we put it back and say so. You can also take it to a court in the Czech Republic; you do not have to come to us first, and asking us costs you nothing and gives up nothing.