Community Guidelines

Last updated: September 2026. These apply to every community and every member on Deeply Health.

Deeply Health is a room full of people who already have enough to deal with. These rules exist so that a tired person can post a real question at 2am and get a real answer. They are specific on purpose: vague rules get enforced unevenly, and uneven enforcement is what makes people leave.

1. Reporting something

• Any member can report a post or a reply. The report control is on the content itself.
• You pick a reason - medical misinformation, harassment, spam, or other - and you can add detail. The detail is the useful part.
• Reports go into that community's moderation queue, where a human reads them. There is no point in reporting something just to be told it vanished.

2. What gets removed

We remove content that does any of these things:

• Medical misinformation that could hurt someone. Telling a member to stop prophylaxis or another prescribed treatment, giving dosing instructions, pushing an unproven cure, or arguing that someone does not need a doctor.
• Harassment. Insults, slurs, threats, cruelty aimed at a person, sexual harassment, or posting someone else's private information.
• Spam and scams. Advertising, referral and affiliate links, unapproved promotion, sob stories that end in a payment link, crypto pitches, and multi-level marketing.
• Someone else's health information posted without their consent - including a family member's.
• Impersonation, including claiming clinician credentials you have not verified with us.
• Encouraging self-harm. Methods, amounts, or pressuring someone who is already in crisis.
• Anything illegal, or any sexual content involving minors.

What does not get removed: disagreeing with a doctor, describing what did or did not work for you, criticising Deeply Health, asking hard questions, being angry about your own situation, or saying you are struggling. Talking about suicidal thoughts while looking for support is welcome here - what we remove is instructions and encouragement, not pain.

3. Who decides

A person decides, every time. Nothing is removed automatically and no keyword deletes a post. Reports are reviewed by a moderator of that community - usually a member living with the same condition - or by a platform admin. Moderators only have power inside the communities they moderate; community A's moderator has no say in community B.

If a community does not have a moderator yet, a platform admin picks up its reports.

4. What can happen

• A report is dismissed and the content stays up.
• Content is removed.
• A member is muted in that community for a set period, or banned from it.
• In serious cases, including threats and repeat harassment, a member is banned from the platform.

Every report keeps a record of who resolved it, when, and why, and pod-level actions like mutes and bans are logged with the moderator and the reason given.

5. How fast

Reports that describe a threat, someone in crisis, or advice that could hurt someone go to the front of the queue and can be acted on within minutes. Everything else we aim to review within 24 hours, and usually sooner. Deeply Health is a small team and most moderators are community volunteers, so we would rather say that plainly than promise you an exact hour and miss it.

If someone is in danger right now, do not wait for us. Get help now has crisis numbers, including 988 in the US, and the emergency-services line for your country.

6. How to appeal

If your post was removed and you think that was wrong, email pk@deeplyhealth.org with a link to the post, or enough detail for us to find it. Tell us what you think we got wrong. We will look again and reply with what we decided and why. If we made a mistake, we will say so and put it right.

The same address works if you see a moderation decision you think was unfair to someone else, or if you want to report something that the report control does not cover.

7. Moderating, if you want to

Moderators are members of the community they moderate, and additional moderator and community champion roles are given per community. If you want to help run a room you are part of, email pk@deeplyhealth.org and say which community and why.

These guidelines sit alongside our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.