Community Safety & Acceptable Use

Last updated: July 11, 2026 · Effective only after counsel review

KinStation is a community for people who care for animals and plants — common to exotic, aquatic to flying. This page explains what is welcome here, what is not, how we moderate content, and how to report a problem. It works alongside our Terms of Service, our Privacy Policy, and our community rules. We aim to hold every claim on this page to a real, shipped mechanism — where something is not built yet, we say so plainly rather than promise it.

Two postures for two kinds of content

KinStation deliberately runs two different moderation postures rather than one uniform rule:

• Community Q&A posts are held in a moderation queue and reviewed before they go public. Nothing appears the instant you submit it.
• Tank journals, Boards, Cards, Groups, and public-habitat pages and their comments publish immediately (no pre-review), but remain subject to these guidelines, the report mechanism below, and our right to hide or remove content — or force a habitat back to private — at any time.

We pre-moderate Q&A because it is an advice-adjacent surface where a wrong or dangerous care answer sitting live even briefly is a real harm. We allow immediate publishing for journals, boards, cards, and groups because they are personal record-keeping and community-building surfaces where speed matters more and the harm profile is lower. If that reasoning ever stops matching reality — for example, if journals start attracting harassment or dangerous-advice patterns — the posture will change, and this page will be updated when it does.

What’s welcome here

• Questions and honest struggles about pet or plant care, including difficult topics: chronic illness, euthanasia decisions, grief over the loss of an animal or plant, and the financial and emotional weight of caregiving.
• Sharing your collection, your build logs, your habitat setups, and your successes and failures with other keepers.
• Disagreement and debate about husbandry practices, species care, and equipment choices — aimed at the practice, not at the person.
• Buying, selling, and trading discussion in the Marketplace forum, within the law — see the Marketplace section below.

What’s not allowed

• Content that promotes animal cruelty, neglect, or unsafe care practices.
• Illegal wildlife trade, or any offer, request, or facilitation of a transaction involving a species, specimen, or product prohibited by CITES, the Lacey Act, the Endangered Species Act, or applicable state or local law.
• Harassment, threats, or defamation directed at any person, business, or animal-welfare worker.
• Impersonating a veterinarian, horticulturist, or other licensed professional, or presenting personal opinion as professional advice.
• Doxxing another member — including posting their home address, or a photo whose embedded location data reveals it (see “Photo privacy” below).
• Spam, scams, and content unrelated to pets, plants, or the communities they support.

If we remove something you posted, we will normally tell you why via a notification you can reply to and appeal, except for unambiguous spam, which may be removed without notice.

How reporting works

Every post, board, card, group, and journal entry on KinStation can be reported through the in-app report tool. Reports go into a moderation queue for review by our team. We review reports as quickly as we can and treat the most serious ones — for example, an illegal-wildlife-trade listing or a threat of violence — as a priority. We have not yet committed to a published response-time target or an automated severity-based fast-track; see “What we’re still building” below for where we are honest about that.

Human moderation is backed by automated protections that run quietly in the background: rate limits and a temporary account lock after repeated failed logins, bot-detection on sign-up, screening for spam and scam patterns on community posts, and the ability to block access from networks tied to abuse or ban-evasion. These reduce the volume of obvious abuse so our team can focus on the reports that need human judgment. They are best-effort, not perfect — reporting is still the fastest way to reach us about something harmful.

Automated dangerous-content protection

Beyond spam and scam screening, every public post you write — a community thread or reply, a tank or build journal or entry, a public habitat comment, a public board comment, or a group name and description — is checked by an automated safety scanner as it is published. It looks for genuinely dangerous or illegal content:

• Self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and acute mental-health distress (handled as a supportcase — see below).
• Credible threats of violence, terrorism or mass-harm planning, child sexual exploitation, and human trafficking.
• Solicitation of illegal drugs, weapons, or wildlife; hate incitement and slurs; doxxing, stalking, and swatting; blackmail; animal cruelty; and financial scams.

A human always makes the call.The scanner does not decide anything on its own. Most flagged posts stay visible and are simply queued for a moderator to review; only a narrow set of the most serious, hard-illegal categories (such as child-safety, credible threats, terrorism, and trafficking) may be hidden automatically while a person reviews them. A moderator can confirm the flag or clear it as a false positive, and content we clear is not auto-hidden again. The scanner is deliberately tuned so ordinary pet, plant, and aquarium talk — euthanizing a suffering pet, culling fry, killing algae or pests, aggressive fish, or dosing in ml, mg, pH, GH, or KH — does not get flagged. It is a safety aid, not a guarantee: it can miss things, which is why reporting still matters.

If you or someone else is struggling, support comes first — not punishment. When the scanner sees language about self-harm or suicide, the post is not removed for that reason; instead we surface crisis resources and alert our team so a person can check in. If you are in crisis, please reach out right now:

Something the system missed? No automated check catches everything. If you see dangerous, illegal, or abusive content that is still live, report it with the in-app report tool on the post, board, card, group, or journal entry, or email [email protected]. Reports of the most serious content are treated as a priority.

Copyright complaints (DMCA)

KinStation responds to notices of alleged copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If you believe content on KinStation — a Board or Card image, a Group cover, a Journal or Habitat Lab photo, a community post, or other user-submitted or linked material — infringes your copyright, see our DMCA / Copyright Policy for how to file a takedown notice, the counter-notice process, and our repeat-infringer policy.

Educational content, not professional advice

Everything on KinStation — the encyclopedia, Behavioral AI, Habitat Lab readings and alerts, Biome Dex, Card care summaries, and community Q&A answers — is general educational information, never a substitute for a licensed veterinarian or horticulturist. If your pet is sick, injured, or behaving unusually, contact a veterinarian or emergency animal hospital immediately. For suspected poisoning, call the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center at (888) 426-4435.

First-aid content is not currently available. It is being prepared for per-article sign-off by licensed veterinarians before it is turned on, so please do not rely on KinStation for first-aid guidance today.

Marketplace forum, livestock & regulated species

The Marketplace discussion forum is for talking about buying, selling, or trading livestock, plants, frags, corals, and gear. KinStation is not a party to, and does not facilitate, escrow, verify, or guarantee any transaction discussed there.Any exchange is between the members involved, at their own risk. You are solely responsible for confirming that any species you keep, discuss, offer, or trade may lawfully be kept, sold, or transported in your jurisdiction and the other party’s — including CITES, the Lacey Act, the Endangered Species Act, and state or local invasive-species and livestock law.

If you believe a Marketplace post involves an illegal transaction, a scam, or a misrepresented animal or plant, report it immediately — do not try to resolve it by sending money or personal information to the other party first.

Public habitats

A keeper can choose to make one of their Habitat Lab habitats public. When they do, its page — cover photo, name, type, a short intro, the inhabitants, and the photo timeline — becomes viewable by anyone at a public link, and other signed-in members can comment on it and react. Everything shown there is a keeper’s personal record and is educational only — never veterinary or medical advice; the same health disclaimer that governs the rest of KinStation applies.

Making a habitat public does not publish your water readings or parameter trends. Those stay private unless you separately turn on public parameter sharing for that habitat. Comments run through the same content filter, account-suspension checks, and per-user rate limits as the rest of the community, publish immediately, and can be hidden by moderators. Every public habitat and every comment can be reported with the in-app report tool, and a keeper can revert a habitat to private at any time from its settings. This feature is gated and rolls out only after review.

Photo privacy

Camera photos can carry embedded EXIF/GPS metadata that reveals where a shot was taken — often your home. When you upload a photo to a Habitat Lab habitat (its cover image or its photo timeline), KinStation re-encodes the image in your browser beforeit is uploaded, which strips that embedded metadata — GPS included — so your habitat, aquarium, terrarium, or garden photos don’t carry your location.

Two honest limits. First, this is a best-effort, in-browser measure: an upload that doesn’t run our web code — a scripted upload, or for now the native mobile app — can bypass it, and a server-side re-encode that covers those paths is a documented follow-up. Second, images attached to community posts, journals, boards, cards, and groups are added by link (URL), not uploaded to us — so we never receive their original camera metadata, but we also can’t strip it for you. As a good habit, remove location data from any photo before you share it publicly.

Provider directory and vet-volunteer reviewers

Clinic and sitter listings are submitted by providers and reviewed by KinStation staff before publishing, but inclusion in our directory is not an endorsement or a recommendation, and reviews are peer experiences, not verified facts. Encyclopedia and care content reviewed by a volunteer veterinarian carries their byline and credentials, but remains general information, not individualized advice for your specific animal.

Minors

You must be at least 13 to create a KinStation account. Sign-up requires you to actively check a box agreeing to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and confirming you are 13 or older — the account cannot be created without it, and the time, the Terms version, and your age confirmation are recorded on the account. This is a single self-attestation: we do not currently collect a date of birth or verify age beyond it. KinStation has no direct-messaging feature today, so there is currently no minor-to-adult messaging exposure to guard against. If a messaging feature is ever added, an age-appropriate messaging safeguard will be built before that feature launches.

Account access after death, incapacity, or legal process

KinStation has a process for memorialization, executor data export, guardian access, and law-enforcement or court-order production. Every request requires certified proof of identity and authority, is manually reviewed with a cooling-off period, and high-authority requests require legal-counsel review and a two-person sign-off. KinStation will never reveal a password or transfer login access; outcomes are limited to memorialization, data export, deletion, or legal hold/production. Start a request at our account access request page.

What we’re still building

In the spirit of “every claim maps to a mechanism,” here is what this page does not claim, because it is not true yet:

• A committed report-response-time target.
• Automated severity-based fast-tracking of the most dangerous reports.
• A designated copyright agent registered with the US Copyright Office — our DMCA policy is published, but the agent registration is a pending owner action.
• Server-side or native-app stripping of GPS/EXIF location data — web uploads to Habitat Lab are already stripped in your browser, but a server-side pass that also covers non-web uploads is not built yet.
• Date-of-birth collection or stronger age verification beyond the 13+ self-attestation checkbox collected at sign-up.
• A self-service subscription-cancellation flow.

Contact

Questions about safety or moderation? Email [email protected]. Until forwarding is in place, you may also reach the operator directly at [email protected].