Moderation and Enforcement Policy

It covers what we do when someone breaks the Community Guidelines, or when content on Outsidey may be illegal.

It covers reports about members, reports about content, complaints about decisions we’ve made, appeals against those decisions, and complaints about how we’ve handled something. It also covers complaints from venues and other people who aren’t members.

It doesn’t cover your membership fee, cancellation, or refunds. Those are in the Terms of Service.

Reports from members. Through the post-event feedback page, or by email to safety@outsidey.co.uk or support@outsidey.co.uk — both reach us.

Reports from people who aren’t members. By email to safety@outsidey.co.uk. No account needed. This route exists for anyone affected: a venue, someone named in a review, someone who came to an event with a member, or anyone else.

Our own review.We review every proposed event and every venue submission before it’s published. We don’t review profiles, photos, or reviews before publication.

Patterns in our own data. Repeated no-shows, repeated negative feedback about the same person, and repeated reports from or about the same account.

We don’t monitor generally.We don’t scan, filter, or automatically classify content, and we’re not looking over your shoulder. We look at things that are reported to us, and things our own checks put in front of us.

The standard is reasonable grounds, not proof.We’re not a court, we don’t have investigative powers, and we usually can’t establish what happened between two people at a table in a pub. We act where we have reasonable grounds to infer that a rule has been broken, judged on the information available to us. That’s the standard the law sets for a service our size, and it’s the honest description of what we’re able to do.

A report is not a finding.We record what was reported, what we found, and what we decided, and we keep those three things separate. We don’t treat an allegation as established fact, and we don’t repeat the substance of a report to anyone who doesn’t need it.

We’ll usually hear from both people. Not always: where telling someone would put the reporter at risk, or would let evidence disappear, we may act first.

We apply the same rules to everyone.We keep records of what we decided and why, so we can check that comparable reports get comparable outcomes. If they don’t, that’s a problem we want to find.

We weigh two things against acting.People’s ability to speak freely, including to criticise a venue or disagree with each other, and people’s privacy. Neither outweighs someone’s safety, but both are real, and we record how we’ve balanced them where a decision is close.

Every decision is made by a person.We don’t automate warnings, removals, suspensions, or account closures, and we don’t intend to. Automated tools may one day help us sort and prioritise reports; they won’t decide them.

Under clause 18.2 of the Terms, we use the least severe measure that meets the problem. Depending on what has happened, that may be a warning, a restriction on a particular feature, removal from a community or activity group, or suspension of your account.

In practice:

We may contact you or issue a recorded warning. For lighter issues we may get in touch, explain the problem, and leave it there, or issue a formal warning recorded against your account, which counts if something else happens. This is at our discretion, not an entitlement: by default we act on a breach directly, and nothing obliges us to warn first.

Removal from a community or activity group. You leave that group. Your membership continues, and you go back into normal placement or a waiting list.

Suspension.Your account is locked and it is indefinite: you can’t sign in, you’re removed from your communities and activity groups, your upcoming reservations are cancelled, any events you’d proposed are cancelled and other members’ bookings for them are released, and any proposals awaiting review are turned down. We’d rather be disruptive than leave people exposed. A suspension stays in place unless an appeal succeeds or we decide to lift it.

What makes an outcome more severe:how serious the behaviour was; whether anyone was harmed or frightened; whether it’s happened before; whether it looks deliberate; whether the person affected was particularly vulnerable; whether you’ve tried to evade a previous sanction; and whether you’ve been straight with us about it.

What we act on immediately.Some things lead straight to permanent removal on a first occurrence: anything in Community Guidelines rule 5 (intimate images), terrorism content, child sexual exploitation and abuse content, a credible threat of serious violence, a sexual offence at an event, and supplying controlled drugs at an event. For those we act as soon as we’re aware, and we report to the police.

If we take action against your account or your content, we’ll email you, and we’ll tell you:

• what rule we think you broke, by reference to the numbered rule in the Community Guidelines;
• what the decision relates to, in enough detail to know what we mean;
• what the action is, and what it affects;
• a case number in the form OY-NNNNNN; and
• how to appeal, and by when.

We won’t tell you who reported you.We promise reporters confidentiality and we mean it. If you later ask us for a copy of your personal data, we’ll give you what we hold about you, and we’ll redact anything that would identify the person who reported you or anyone else, including details that would let you work it out.

There are two cases where we may act before telling you: where telling you first would put someone at risk, and where the law requires us not to. We’ll tell you as soon as we reasonably can afterwards.

You can appeal any warning, removal, suspension, or closure.

How. Email appeals@outsidey.co.uk from the email address on your account, quoting your OY-NNNNNNcase number, and tell us which ground you’re relying on and why. We need all three, because a suspended account can’t sign in and this is how we confirm the appeal is really from you.

By when. Within 28 days of the date on our notice, as set out in clause 18.6 of the Terms.

The grounds. You can appeal on any of these:

1. We didn’t follow our own process.For example, we didn’t tell you what rule you’d broken, or we didn’t give you a chance to respond when we should have.
2. There’s information we didn’t have.Something that could reasonably have changed the outcome, which we didn’t know when we decided.
3. The decision was unreasonable.Not that you’d have decided differently, but that the decision wasn’t one that could reasonably be reached on the information available.

Disagreeing with the decision isn’t in itself a ground.We’ve set the grounds out this way so appeals are about whether we got the process and the reasoning right, which is something we can actually review fairly, rather than a second bite at the same argument.

What happens.We’ll acknowledge your appeal and give you a decision, with reasons, within 10 working days (Terms, clause 18.7). Appeals are decided against the written grounds above rather than on instinct, the reasoning is recorded, and the appeal is stored against your case number. Where it is practicable, the appeal is considered by someone other than the person who made the original decision.

Outcomes.We may uphold the decision, replace it with something less severe, or overturn it entirely. If we overturn a suspension, we’ll restore your access, but we can’t restore your previous community or activity group memberships, because those places will have been filled. You’ll go back into normal placement.

After that.Our decision on an appeal is final within Outsidey. It isn’t final in law, and section 8 explains what else is open to you.

An appeal is about a decision we made about you. A complaint is broader. You can complain to us about any of the following, and you don’t need to be a member:

• content you reported that we didn’t act on, or didn’t act on quickly enough;
• content of yours that we removed or restricted;
• a warning, removal, suspension, or account closure;
• how we handled a report, an appeal, or your personal information; and
• anything else about how we’re meeting our online safety obligations.

How. Email support@outsidey.co.uk or safety@outsidey.co.uk. Tell us what happened and what you’d like us to do. We’ll acknowledge your complaint within 2 working days and aim to resolve it within 10 working days; if it’s going to take longer, we’ll tell you (Terms, clause 22.2). If you’re not satisfied with our answer, ask us to look at it again and a different person will review it where that’s practicable.

Misusing this process.Reporting people in bad faith, reporting in retaliation, or making repeated reports about the same thing after we’ve dealt with it are all breaches of the Community Guidelines, and we act on them like any other breach.

If we take down your content or restrict access to it, or if we suspend or ban you, and in doing so we break our own Terms of Service, you have the right to bring a claim against us for breach of contract.

Nothing in this policy, the Community Guidelines, or our Terms takes that right away, and our appeals process is not a substitute for it. You can use the appeals process, go to court, or both.

You can also complain about us to Ofcom, the regulator for online safety in the UK, and to the Information Commissioner’s Office about how we handle your personal information. Using our process first doesn’t affect either.

Venue reviews sit under a separate legal process, so they get their own section.

If you think a review about your venue is defamatory. Email legal@outsidey.co.uk. For us to act on it as a formal notice of complaint, we need all of the following:

• your name and an email address for you;
• the review you’re complaining about, and where on the site it appears;
• what you say the review means;
• which parts you say are factually inaccurate, and which are opinions that aren’t supported by fact, with an explanation in each case;
• confirmation that you don’t have enough information to identify the person who posted it; and
• whether you consent to your name and email address being passed to them.

What we do then.We’ll acknowledge your complaint. If we can contact the reviewer, we’ll pass your complaint to them and ask whether they want the review to stay up. If they don’t respond in time, or ask us to remove it, we’ll remove it. If they tell us they want it to stay up and give us their contact details, we won’t remove it, and we’ll tell you. The statutory process requires that, and at that point your dispute is with the reviewer rather than with us.

If we can’t contact the reviewer at all, we’ll remove the review.

These steps run to short statutory deadlines, so please give us everything on the list first time.

If you think a review is fake. Email legal@outsidey.co.uk and tell us why. We check attendance before anyone can write a review, which prevents most of this, but tell us anyway.

We’ll look at whether the reviewer actually attended, whether the account shows signs of duplication, and whether the review looks bulk-written or incentivised. If we remove a review as fake, we also correct the venue’s rating and review count so the numbers reflect what’s actually there.

A review being unfavourable doesn’t make it fake, and we won’t treat it as such. Removing honest negative reviews to keep a venue happy would be misleading our members, and it’s something we’re specifically required not to do. This matters more as we start earning referral fees from venues, and we’ve written the rule down now, before that happens.

We record reports, the decisions we make, our reasons, notices sent, appeals, and appeal outcomes. We need these to be consistent, to answer complaints, and to defend decisions if we’re challenged.

Where someone is suspended or banned, we keep a limited record after their account is deleted: an identifier, the fact of the ban, the category, the date, and who decided. We keep it so our decisions remain answerable after the account is gone. We don’t keep the whole case file indefinitely.

Reports about members can include allegations of criminal conduct. That’s a category of information the law treats with extra care, and we handle it under a written policy covering how we secure it, who can see it, and how long we hold it. Full detail on all of this, including retention periods and your rights, is in our Privacy Notice.

Javier Flores Almagro, founder and director of Outsidey Ltd (company no. 17148298), is the individual accountable for our compliance with online safety obligations, including this policy and the Community Guidelines.

You can reach him at safety@outsidey.co.uk.

This policy is about conduct and enforcement. What happens to your membership and your fee if your account is suspended or closed is set out in our Terms of Service, and you should read that section before you join.

We’ll update this policy when our service changes, when our enforcement practices change, or when the law changes. Where a change materially affects your rights, we’ll give reasonable notice, update the effective date, and describe what changed on this page.

What changed: Version 1.0 is the first published version.