legal
Community guidelines
Effective
Panopticon exists to help game communities moderate their servers well. These Community Guidelines set the standard for how people behave both in the community forum and when using the moderation panel. They are part of our Terms of Service; breaking them can cost you access.
Two ideas run through everything below: treat people decently, and keep accusations about players inside the review process, not out in public.
The basics
- Be respectful. No harassment, hate speech, slurs, threats, or discrimination on any basis.
- Assume good faith. Disagree with ideas without attacking people.
- No doxxing. Do not post anyone’s private information, and do not try to identify people against their wishes.
- Keep it legal. No content that is illegal, that infringes others’ rights, or that promotes serious harm.
In the forum
- Post in the right place. Use the correct tags, search before you start a new thread, and keep one topic per thread. For feature requests, one idea per thread, and describe the moderation problem, not just the feature.
- No spam or unsolicited promotion. No advertising, referral spam, or off-topic flooding.
- Keep uploads clean. Share images and, where allowed, log files — nothing else. No malware, and no NSFW or shock content.
- Respect staff and other members. Follow moderator instructions; if you disagree with a decision, appeal it (see below) rather than re-litigating it in public.
The player-evidence rule
This is the rule that matters most on a moderation forum, so read it carefully:
- Do not publicly accuse specific players of cheating or misconduct, and do not post their SteamIDs or other identifiers in a thread.
- Cheating reports and ban disputes go through escalation and anti-cheat review in the App — not through public posts.
- Redact player identifiers in any screenshot or log you share publicly.
Public accusations naming a player are a defamation and harassment risk, and they route around the review process the whole product is built on. Threads that break this rule will be edited or removed.
In the moderation panel
If you moderate with Panopticon, you hold real power over other players. Use it responsibly:
- Moderate in good faith. Mutes, kicks, and bans should be justified, and you should record an honest reason. Every action is written to the immutable audit log.
- Protect the global ban list. Escalate a player only for genuine, evidenced cheating. No false, retaliatory, or grudge-driven escalations — the audit log makes misuse visible, and misuse can cost you access to the global ban program.
- Do not weaponize the tools. Do not use Panopticon to harass players, rival communities, or anyone else.
- Handle player data carefully. Record only what you need, keep notes professional, and do not leak or misuse the data you can see.
- Respect other tenants. Bans from other tenants appear as read-only on your servers; enforce them if you opt in, but do not treat other communities’ records as yours to edit.
Reporting problems
- In the forum, use the flag feature to report a post to the moderators.
- For serious issues — harassment, threats, doxxing, or abuse of the moderation tools — email us at [email protected].
Enforcement
When these Guidelines are broken, we may — at our discretion and depending on severity — issue a warning, edit or remove content, suspend or remove forum access, revoke API keys, remove a tenant or moderator from the global ban program, or end access to the Services entirely. Serious or repeated violations lead to the stronger responses sooner.
Appeals
If you believe a forum suspension or a global ban entry is wrong, you can appeal. For forum decisions, reply to the notice you received or contact the moderators. For a global ban, use the dispute process or email [email protected]. We will review appeals in good faith, but decisions about a specific server rest first with the tenant that made them.
Changes
We may update these Guidelines from time to time. When we do, we will change the effective date above, and for material changes we will give reasonable notice.