Community Guidelines

Ballad works because people trust each other enough to hand over the next page. These guidelines protect that trust. They apply to everything on Ballad, including verses, titles, handles, and bios, and they’re part of our Terms of Use.

Fiction can go dark

Stories need villains, heartbreak, and monsters in the lighthouse. Dark themes are welcome on Ballad as long as they fit the ballad’s rating:

Creators pick the rating when a ballad begins. If a story drifts, it’s up to the creator to keep new verses within the rating.

Never allowed, in any ballad or rating

• Sexual content involving minors, in any form, including fiction. This is zero tolerance: we remove the account immediately and report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and to law enforcement.
• Sexually explicit or pornographic content.
• Harassment and bullying of anyone, including other bards. Aiming a story at a real person to demean them counts too.
• Real private people. Don’t write about real people you know, or use their names, without their permission.
• Hate. No content that attacks or dehumanizes people because of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age.
• Threats and incitement. No threats of violence against real people, and nothing that encourages violence or terrorism.
• Self-harm promotion. Stories can deal with hard experiences, but nothing that encourages self-harm or suicide or explains how to do it.
• Personal information. Never post anyone’s address, phone number, school, or other identifying details. Keep your own contact details out of your verses and bio too.
• Spam and scams. No advertising, no links meant to mislead, and no impersonating other people or Ballad staff.
• Illegal activity. No real instructions for dangerous or illegal acts, whether or not a character is the one explaining them.
• Other people’s writing. Don’t paste in copyrighted work you don’t have the rights to. Everything you add should be yours.
• Getting around the rules. Don’t lie about your age, make new accounts to get around a block or ban, or try to put Mature content where younger bards can see it.

Being a good bard

• Build on what came before. Take the story somewhere new, but don’t wipe out everything the last bard set up.
• Respect the clock. Write your verse within your turn. If you can’t, let the turn pass. Ghost protection hands it on automatically.
• Creators: decline kindly. Handing a verse back is part of how a story gets written, not a rejection of the bard. If a verse breaks these guidelines, decline it and report it.
• Keep the drama on the page. Disagree about where the story is going through the story itself, not by attacking the person.

Your safety tools

• Report a verse: press and hold it and choose Report verse. The bard isn’t told who reported them.
• Block a bard: open their profile and tap Block. Their ballads disappear from your shelf. Manage blocks in Profile → Blocked bards.
• Remove a bard (creators): swipe them out of the turn order in Manage ballad.
• Email us: for anything else, email [email protected]. Include the ballad’s title and the bard’s handle.

What happens after a report

1. A person on our team reviews every report within 24 hours.
2. If the content breaks these guidelines, we remove it.
3. Depending on how serious it is and whether it’s happened before, we warn the bard, suspend them, or permanently remove them from Ballad. Zero-tolerance violations lead to immediate removal.
4. Where the law requires it, or someone’s safety is at risk, we report to the authorities.

Appeals

If you think we got it wrong, email [email protected] with your handle and what happened, and we’ll take a second look.