Moderation Policy

• A report. Users report listings, messages, and other users. A report requires a real campaign relationship with the person reported — drive-by reporting is not possible, deliberately.
• Automated filters. Messages and free text are screened for slurs, hidden characters used to disguise text, and embedded links. Blocked submissions are logged for review; nothing is deleted on the strength of a filter alone.
• Abuse signals. Patterns such as several accounts sharing a device, or repeated attempts to mint Trade Credit at the ceiling, raise a case for a human to look at.

Automated systems queue cases. They do not ban people. We tried automatic suspension once, on a report threshold, and removed it: signup is free, so three throwaway accounts could take an honest developer offline in the middle of their 14-day window. An irreversible penalty needs a person, and the queue is how that person sees it.

Content may be hidden automatically and quickly while it waits for review. Hiding is reversible; removal and suspension are not treated as the same thing.

• Nothing — most reports are disagreements, not violations.
• Hide pending review for content that is plausibly harmful while a decision is made.
• Remove content that breaks the Guidelines. Removed content leaves a marker rather than vanishing, so a conversation still makes sense afterwards and the record survives.
• Strike a party who fails a trade obligation. Three strikes in 30 days pauses new trades; strikes age out of that window on their own.
• Suspend or ban for fraud, abuse, or repeated violations.

We never silently edit what somebody wrote. We hide it, remove it with a marker, or leave it — rewriting a user's words and presenting them as theirs is not a tool we want.

Check-in screenshots are evidence: they cannot be edited or deleted by the person who submitted them, and they are visible only to the campaign counterparty and to admins. They are never published, and are purged on the retention schedule in the Privacy Policy.

Moderation actions are logged with who acted, what changed, and why. That log is how we answer "what actually happened here" months later, and it is retained even when the content is not.

Email [email protected] from the address on the account, saying what was removed or restricted and why you think the decision was wrong. We aim to reply within five working days.

Appeals are read by a person. A decision that turns out to be wrong is reversed, including its consequences — an exonerated dispute clears the strike and the failure count that came with it, not just the status.

A dispute over a trade is not a moderation matter until it has been through the dispute process, which exists to settle exactly that.

• We do not adjudicate app quality. A tester disliking your app is not a violation.
• We do not remove honest negative feedback because it is unflattering.
• We do not act on reports from parties with no relationship to the campaign.
• We do not represent Google. We cannot restore a Play Console account, appeal a Play decision, or influence production access.