Community Guidelines

Horror, crime, war, grief, cruelty, despair: fiction has always explored them, and branching fiction lets readers face them by choice. Depicting something isn’t endorsing it. Write the story you need to write, within the lines below, and rate it honestly.

For now, every published story must be suitable for readers aged 13 and over, because anyone 13 or older can read it. That allows violence, fear, death and sexual themes, handled without graphic detail; it doesn’t allow explicit sex scenes or lingering, graphic gore.

Ratings and age checks are coming. Once they’re here, authors will rate each story, and stories rated Mature will be shown only to adults who have confirmed their age. Mature stories may include explicit sexual content between adult characters, and graphic violence. Until then, those stories can’t be published.

Whatever the rating, a story’s cover, title and description are seen by everyone and must suit all readers 13 and over.

• Sexual content involving anyone under 18, including fictional characters who are, or are presented as, under 18. This is removed at once, the account closed, and it’s reported to the authorities.
• Sexual content that presents rape or sexual abuse as desirable, or involves animals.
• Content that attacks or demeans people for their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, caste, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation, or calls for violence against them.
• Praise of, support for, or recruitment to terrorist or violent extremist groups.
• Encouragement or instructions for suicide, self-harm or eating disorders. Stories may depict them with care; they may not promote them or teach methods.
• Real, usable instructions for serious harm, such as making weapons or explosives, or hurting people, wrapped in a story or not.
• Scams, phishing, malware, spam, and links to any of them.
• Anything that breaks the law, or someone else’s copyright or trademark.

• No sexual content about real, identifiable people.
• No harassment, threats or bullying of real people, in stories, profiles or comments.
• No sharing of anyone’s private information (address, phone number, private photos, documents) without their consent.
• No pretending to be someone else, including another author or Mezzotale.

Criticism is welcome; cruelty isn’t. Talk about the story, not the person. Mark comments that give away a twist or an ending as spoilers. Don’t flood comments with the same message, or with advertising. Authors can remove comments under their own stories, pin them, and close comments.

• Publish only stories, pictures, music and sound you made or have the right to use. Fan fiction is welcome where the original’s owner allows it, credited and not passed off as official.
• If AI wrote a large share of a story, the Studio marks it “AI-assisted”. Keep the mark; don’t hide how a story was made.
• Don’t copy another author’s story and publish it as yours, even reworded.

Don’t make extra accounts to like, read, follow or comment on your own work, or to get around a suspension or the daily reading limit. Don’t buy or sell likes, follows or accounts. Don’t tamper with your reading saves to skip what the rules don’t let you skip.

If you see something that breaks these guidelines, write to contact@mezzotale.com with a link to it and what’s wrong; a report button is coming to stories and comments. We read every report.

When content breaks the rules, we usually act step by step: a warning, then taking the content down, then suspending the account, then closing it. The most serious harm skips straight to closing the account. We always tell you what we did and why, and you can appeal by replying, or by writing to contact@mezzotale.com; a person looks again, and if we got it wrong, we put things back.