Community Guidelines

Protecting Anonymity

We protect anonymity above everything.

Every story belongs here — but the person behind it stays unseen.

Content Standards

Dear Nobody^™ welcomes honesty in all its forms — joy, grief, anger, regret, desire — but there are lines we do not cross. Honesty doesn't require harm.

If your letter includes mature themes but not explicit detail, it may belong on the main site. Explicit material will be reviewed for our 18+ Archive.

18+ Archive

Because human emotion sometimes includes sexual and explicit realities, we maintain a separate, age-restricted archive.

If a submission crosses the ethical line, it won't be published — even in the 18+ section.

Mental Health & Safety

Sharing can be healing, but Dear Nobody^™ is not a substitute for therapy or crisis support.

We may remove letters that include active suicidal intent, detailed methods of self-harm, or urgent safety concerns. This is not censorship — it's care.

Writing Guidelines

You don't have to be a writer to write here. Just be human.

Moderation & Curation

To maintain these standards:

• Content may be filtered automatically for prohibited material
• Submissions may be reviewed by curators before publishing
• Dear Nobody^™ reserves the right to edit, withhold, or remove any submission
• We may redact (obscure) identifying information such as names, locations, or contact details from your submission to protect privacy — yours and others'
• In limited cases, an administrator may reverse a redaction (unredact) if the content is determined to be safe. All redactions and unredactions are logged in our audit trail
• We may apply trigger warnings or content warnings to submissions containing sensitive topics (e.g., self-harm, violence, substance use, explicit material). These warnings are based on AI analysis and/or moderator judgment
• Removed content may be archived privately for documentation
• When a public submission is rejected after human review, we may use technical safeguards (including content fingerprints where available) to reduce repeat abuse—we don’t publish the specifics of those tools so they can’t be gamed

How review works

Most public submissions are reviewed by people before they can appear in the Mailbox. Automated checks may run first, but humans decide whether something is published or rejected.

1. Queue: Your submission enters a moderation queue for curator review.
2. First review: A moderator performs an initial review (and may edit redactions, warnings, or routing such as 18+ where appropriate).
3. Second review (when required): For many moderators, a different person must complete a second approval before a public letter can go live. Senior roles may allow a single approver when policy permits.
4. Outcome: Public path → published to the Mailbox (subject to the visibility you chose). Private path → processed for safety but not placed in the Mailbox; internal status may show as approved/acknowledged without public fields.

Common reasons a public submission isn’t published

Curators record a category when rejecting a queued submission so our internal standards stay consistent with this page. The labels below are the same kinds of reasons we use in review—think of them as a checklist aligned with sections 1–3 above:

Violates guidelines

Breaks the spirit or letter of these standards (e.g. hate, illegal encouragement, disallowed threats) even if the writer didn’t intend harm.

Contains identifying information

Names, addresses, contact details, social handles, or other details that could expose you or someone else; we may redact first, but severe or repeated identification can lead to rejection.

Harmful content

Material that could seriously endanger readers or third parties (e.g. graphic shock content, instructions for harm, or other high-risk patterns we describe under safety and prohibited content).

Spam or duplicate

Advertising, repetitive posting, or low-effort duplicate submissions that crowd out genuine expression.

Too short or incomplete

Not enough substance to treat as a finished letter for the Mailbox (we’re not grading prose—we’re filtering empty or throwaway posts).

Explicit content not marked for 18+

Sexual explicitness or other adult material that belongs in the 18+ Archive flow but wasn’t submitted or labeled appropriately.

Targeting or harassment

Pile-ons, coordinated harassment, or identifiable accusations aimed at hurting a real person; anonymity is not a shield for cruelty.

Other

Edge cases that don’t fit a single box but still fail moderation after human judgment.

We do not publish live percentages or rankings of rejection categories on this page (volumes change, and exact breakdowns are easy to misread). High-level moderation activity—without anything that could identify a writer or a specific letter—may appear in our Transparency Ledger and periodic reports described under Transparency & Use.

We moderate to protect honesty — not to sanitize it.

Reporting Concerns

If you encounter content that violates these guidelines or feels unsafe:

1. Click the Report button below the post
2. Select your reason for reporting
3. Do not engage with the content directly

Reports are reviewed carefully by our small moderation team. We may take action including removal, content blurring, or curation review.

Transparency & Use

Dear Nobody^™ is a platform for anonymous expression. We do not verify the truth or accuracy of submissions. Letters represent the views of their authors, not Dear Nobody^™ or Intelliquinte L.L.C.

By submitting, you grant Dear Nobody^™ permission to publish your work anonymously in digital or print form, and you agree that it may be edited for clarity, safety, or readability.

We maintain a live Transparency Ledger with real-time platform statistics and intend to publish periodic quarterly reports covering moderation actions, legal requests, mandatory reports filed, and platform statistics. These never contain information that could identify individual users or specific submissions. See our Privacy Policy for details.

Privacy & Data

• We do not collect personal data beyond what is necessary to operate the site
• No email, name, or device information is required to write or read
• Reports and submissions are stored securely and reviewed only by authorized curators
• All data is encrypted in transit (TLS/HTTPS) and encrypted at rest (ECDH-P256/AES-GCM) in our database
• We never sell your data or share it for advertising purposes
• We use trusted service providers (Supabase for database storage, authentication, and real-time administrative updates; Cloudflare for hosting, security, and AI content analysis) strictly for platform operations — they process data under our direction and cannot use it for their own purposes
• We use privacy-preserving error monitoring that captures only generic error types and page locations. It does not log IP addresses, user agents, or any identifying information