When you sit down to a nice meal at a restaurant with family or friends, safety shouldn’t have to be your first concern. You should be able to trust that the food was prepared safely, that your chair isn’t going to fall apart when you sit on it, and that if other diners start to cause a scene, they will be asked to leave.

Our Trust & Safety team at Replit has a very similar job, quietly working to keep Replit a safe and welcoming community so that your coding and creativity can thrive. Although most of the time this work is invisible to you, in this blog post we’ll give you a peek behind the scenes of Trust & Safety at Replit, as well as providing you with some tips to make your own Replit experience safe and comfortable. (Helmet optional.)

How moderation works on Replit

Supporting our users’ freedom of expression and creativity is baked deep into the DNA of Replit. You don’t need to ask for our permission to create and share your work, you can just do it. After all, we can’t ask you to trust us if we don’t show trust in you first. So, nothing that you do on Replit requires pre-approval by a moderator.

Moderators only step in when a possible violation of our Terms of Service has been reported or detected. If your content is in violation, then a moderator may send you a warning and remove the violating content. For serious violations or if you repeatedly post such content, you may be suspended or banned from using Replit. In either case, you will be notified of our decision and given the chance to appeal.

Some Replit users earn the title of Community Moderator, and are identified as such by a badge on their profile page. As the name implies, Community Moderators are members of our community who have kindly volunteered their time to help our moderators on staff. Unlike staff, they don’t represent Replit and don’t have the power to ban or delete users or Repls.

How to report and resolve concerns - kebabs are on the menu!

Not only are kebabs delicious, but the “kebab menu” is also the name given to the “vertical three dots” menu that is found throughout Replit, as well as on many other websites and apps. It’s inside this kebab menu that you can find an array of tools that you can use to keep your Replit experience safe and pleasant. Here’s how it works:

Reporting a Repl

Reporting a user

Hiding, deleting, or reporting a comment

• To report a Repl to a moderator, simply visit its cover page and click the kebab menu, as illustrated here, to reveal the “Report” link. Type in a reason for your report, and a moderator will look into it and take appropriate action within 24 hours.
• To report a user, you’ll find both reporting and blocking links under a menu on their profile page, as also illustrated above. Unsure which to use? If the user is bothering you but not necessarily breaking any rules, blocking will ensure that you can no longer see or interact with each other. If you think that they might also be violating Replit’s rules, click Report and write a short reason, and a moderator will deal with your report within 24 hours.
• As for comments, the options that you have depend on whether the comment is on your Repl or another user’s. You can quickly deal with abusive comments on one of your own Repls without the need to make a report to a moderator. Simply click on the kebab menu to reveal the “Hide Comment” and “Delete” options, either of which will remove the comment from view. If an abusive comment is on someone else’s Repl, then you will instead find the “Report” option which will send the comment to a moderator for review.

Image safety

In addition to the reporting options outlined above, today we announce some extra precautions that we are taking against inappropriate images being published to Replit. We are now automatically scanning all images that are uploaded to Replit using machine learning technologies. This enables most images that infringe our rules to be detected and flagged for removal by a moderator within minutes.

Currently we are scanning for NSFW (not safe for work) images such as nudity and sex, but over the coming months we expect to expand this to include more categories of inappropriate images such as violent and graphic content. In all cases, our team of trained human moderators reviews images flagged by the machine learning system, to make sure that innocent images are not wrongly taken down.

In addition to this, we already block adult content and malware from being accessed on external websites through Replit. In combination, these safeguards help to provide peace of mind to users, parents, and teachers that unsafe content won’t be encountered when using Replit.

Extra safety features for school users

While the safety precautions mentioned above apply to everybody, we take extra special care to ensure the safety of our school-age users.

To begin with, Replit upholds the highest global privacy standards for our youngest members. To ensure that their personal information remains safe, we don't collect it in the first place. Our Teams for Education platform enables students to join Replit without providing even a name or email address—only a username and password are required.

As a further safeguard against students seeing inappropriate content, we offer schools and families the choice of using our Firewalled Replit product. It’s a full-featured alternative to our main Replit website, but with the Community features hidden, and a firewall put in place to prevent Repls from accessing most external Internet content. You can read more about it here.

Terms of service

To clarify exactly where we draw the line between what's allowed on Replit and what isn't, we're also recently published some minor updates to Replit's Terms of Service. We now make it clear that nudity and sexually explicit content or activities are not permitted, and that neither is gambling content.

To safeguard teen safety, we've also published a rule that Replit does not allow content that promotes or facilitates suicide or self-harm. If a user's activity on Replit suggests that they are struggling with thoughts of self-harm, you can report this to us to ensure that our team reaches out to them with support resources.

Finally, our Terms of Service update clarifies that Replit may not be used in any way that promotes or facilitates human trafficking, sex trafficking, or physical abuse. We've also updated our Discord, Community Forum, and Facebook group rules to link them to the current Terms of Service.

Conclusion

If this is more information than you ever wanted to know about Trust & Safety on Replit, then relax – it’s our job to make sure that you don’t have to worry about it. Over 95% of Replit users never have received a warning about their content or behavior, and most never find the need to make a report. But in case you ever do need to do so, now you know how.

Every Internet platform fights a battle against abuse, and Replit is no exception. By investing in new safety measures such as those described here, we plan to stay a step ahead of malicious actors, ensuring that Replit remains a trusted and safe community as we continue to grow. If you ever have concerns about trust and safety on Replit, you can contact us at [email protected].