How we moderate photos in private messages
This morning you could start attaching photos to private messages. That opens a question we had to answer before the feature got busy: what happens when someone sends a picture they shouldn't?
Up to now our rule for private messages was narrow. A moderator could open one conversation, and only after one of the two people in it reported it. For text we're keeping that rule exactly as it is. For photos we're changing it.
What moderators see
The moderation console has a new tab with every photo sent in a private message, newest first. Each tile shows the photo, who sent it, who received it and when. It doesn't show the conversation. The text of your messages still isn't loaded anywhere in that view, and a moderator who wants to read a thread still needs a report.
Why treat photos differently? A picture can do damage in a single message, before anyone gets around to reporting it. The person who receives it may just close the tab and never come back. Waiting for a report works well for arguments and spam. It doesn't work for the one image that should never have been sent.
What a moderator can do
There are three options, from lightest to heaviest.
Remove the photo. The message stays, including any caption, but the picture disappears for both people. The recipient sees a note saying it was removed by moderation, and the sender gets a bell notification with the reason. The file stays on our side, so a wrong call can be reversed.
Mute the account. This is new. A muted account can still read messages and chat, react, fly and collect. It can't send anything: no private messages, including replies in threads that are already open, no lines in the public rooms and nothing in radio chat. The person gets a bell notification saying so, with the reason. Only a moderator can lift a mute.
Ban the account. Same as before, the whole account.
If a mute lands while you're typing, the message box tells you plainly why your line didn't go through instead of dropping it silently.
What did not change
Photos are still re-encoded when you send them, so the location and camera data a phone writes into every photo never reach the other person or our storage. They still live in private storage with no public address, and the links to them still expire within two hours. Deleting a message still deletes its photo. The privacy policy has been updated to say all of this, in all five languages.
If a photo of yours was removed and you think that was a mistake, write to us on Discord or at [email protected]. Removals can be undone.