Community rules — Slowburn

Slowburn is a private reading journal. Almost everything in it is yours alone and is never seen by anybody else.

A Circle is different. It is a small, private group of people you invited one at a time, and a Buddy Read is a book you agreed to read alongside someone. These rules are about those two things, and only those two things.

There are no public profiles here, no followers, no feed, no comments section and no way for a stranger to find you. Nobody reaches you unless you handed them a link. That is the design, and it is most of what keeps this place calm.

What is not allowed

Harassment. Repeated unwanted contact, pile-ons, or using a Buddy Read or a shared note to get at someone who wants you to stop.

Threats and dangerous behaviour. Threatening to hurt somebody, encouraging self-harm, or trying to arrange harm to a person.

Hate. Attacking or demeaning people for who they are — race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age.

Sexual content used abusively. Slowburn is a romance reading journal; readers discuss spice, and that is entirely fine. What is not fine is sending sexual content to somebody who has not asked for it, sexualising someone without consent, or anything at all involving minors.

Spam and scams. Using a Circle invitation to advertise, to sell, to recruit, or to run any kind of confidence trick.

Impersonation. Presenting yourself as a specific real person you are not, in order to mislead somebody.

Misusing somebody’s private information. Anything shared with you inside a Circle or a Buddy Read was shared with you. Publishing it elsewhere, threatening to, or using it to identify, locate or pressure somebody is not allowed.

What you can do about it

Block. In a person’s page in your Circle: Block. They immediately stop being able to reach you — no new material in either direction, no replies, no reactions, no notifications, and any Buddy Read you share closes. They cannot reconnect. They are not told. You can undo it later; undoing it does not put you back in each other’s circles.

Remove from circle. If it is not a safety matter, this is the ordinary door. You are simply no longer connected.

Report. On a shared note, a reply, a moment, or a person. Pick a reason from the list — you do not have to write anything. We ask afterwards whether you would also like to block them; that is your choice and reporting never blocks anybody on its own.

What we see when you report

Only the thing you reported.

That means the specific note, reply or moment, and who wrote it. It does not mean your journal, your bookshelf, your reading history, your private notes, your saved lines, your ratings, or any other conversation. The report screen tells you exactly what is being sent before you send it.

A moment in a Buddy Read that has not unlocked for you yet cannot be reported, because we will not show you something to let you report it.

We keep a copy of the reported content so that a report is still actionable if its author deletes it afterwards. That copy is used for safety only, is not part of your Circle, and is deleted 90 days after we finish reviewing it.

What we do about it

A person reads every report. Depending on what we find:

nothing, if there is nothing wrong
we reply, or give a warning
we remove the specific content
we suspend the account’s Circle features for a period
we permanently disable the account’s Circle features

Your reading journal is yours. None of these touch your books, your notes, your ratings or your shelves. A person who loses access to Circle can still use Slowburn as a private reading journal, because moderating a social feature is not a reason to reach into somebody’s bookshelf.

We do not run automated scoring, we do not publish ban lists, and we do not shadowban. If we act, it is because a person decided to.

If you think we got it wrong

Write to us through the contact page and say what happened. A human will read it.

If someone is in danger