Moderation and appeal procedures

How decisions are made

Every moderation decision records who made it and under what authority, the rule version it cites, the specific conduct, the version of the content it concerned, the reason, the severity, and how long it lasts. Decisions are never edited afterwards: a later decision can confirm, extend, amend or reverse an earlier one, and both stay on the record.

Moderators use graduated sanctions. Restricting an account that has had no warning or removal in that community in the last six months requires a written explanation of why it is urgent and why its scope is right. Restrictions longer than 30 days, indefinite restrictions and platform-wide restrictions can only be made by a platform administrator.

If a decision affects you, you get a notice with the rule, the reason, the scope, the duration and a link to appeal. Removed content leaves a public explanation in the thread when that is safe. Private information and dangerous material are never repeated in public notices.

Urgent temporary removals

Moderators can remove threats, private information, illegal content and spam immediately, without waiting for any review. Each temporary removal has a deadline (48 hours by default). Before the deadline a moderator confirms it as a final decision, extends it once with a recorded justification, or restores the content. Further extensions need a platform administrator. A temporary removal is never renewed silently.

If the deadline passes without a decision:

under rules marked as safety-sensitive (threats, private information, illegal content), the content stays hidden and the case is sent to a platform administrator, because restoring it automatically could put someone at risk;
under other rules, the content is restored automatically and the restoration is recorded.

Appeals

The person a decision affects submits an appeal with an explanation or new evidence.
Enterwebs acknowledges it and shows the target response time: 72 hours.
An eligible independent reviewer receives the complete case and the rules that applied.
The reviewer upholds, modifies or reverses the decision, or asks for more information.
The appellant receives the explanation and, where available, how to escalate.
A redacted outcome is published in the transparency ledger.

Appeals against moderation decisions are separate from challenges to evidence notes.

Who may review an appeal

A reviewer is not eligible for an appeal if they:

made, or took part in, the decision being appealed;
moderate the community where the decision was made, or moderated it when the decision was made;
are the person appealing or the person the decision concerns;
reported the content in question;
reviewed an earlier stage of the same appeal;
have declared a conflict of interest involving that community or the people involved.

Appeals are assigned automatically to the eligible reviewer with the fewest open appeals. If nobody eligible is available, the appeal waits and is shown as "Waiting for an independent reviewer". It is never given to the team that made the decision, and same-team review is never described as independent. A reviewer who finds a conflict recuses, and the appeal is reassigned.

Escalation

After an appeal is decided you can escalate it once, if the review did not follow these procedures or you have material new evidence. An identical resubmission is not reviewed again. Escalations go to a reviewer who has not seen the case.

Appointing and removing moderators and reviewers

Platform administrators grant and revoke the roles of community moderator, appeal reviewer and evidence reviewer. Every grant and revocation is published in the transparency ledger with its reason. Repeated, substantiated abuse of a role can lead to training, reduced permissions, suspension or removal from the role. Reversal rates alone are not treated as proof of misconduct; case difficulty, sample size and reasons matter.

Administrator overrides

Administrators can reverse or amend a decision outside the appeal process only with a written justification. Overrides are labelled as overrides in the ledger and can themselves be appealed.

Records

Moderation records cannot be edited or deleted through Enterwebs. The public ledger is hash-chained, and checkpoints of it are published, so that rewriting history would be detectable even by someone with database access.