Community rules

Introduction

Every day, people come to Byzans to share their passion for books, see the world through the eyes of others and connect with friends and causes. The conversations that happen on Byzans reflect the diversity of a community communicating across countries and cultures and in dozens of languages.

We recognize how important it is for Byzans to be a place where people feel empowered to communicate, and we take our role in keeping abuse off our service seriously. That’s why we have developed a set of Community rules that outline what is and is not allowed on Byzans. Our rules apply around the world to all types of content.

Spoilers is also an important theme. Byzans has some spoiler-free zones and some spoiler-allowed zones. The spoiler rules are explained at the end, after the stuff that relates to abuse.

Our Community rules, which we will continue to develop over time, serve as a guide for how to communicate on Byzans. It is in this spirit that we ask members of the Byzans community to follow these guidelines.

Safety

Suicide and self-injury

In an effort to promote a safe environment on Byzans, we remove content that encourages suicide or self-injury, including real-time depictions that might lead others to engage in similar behaviour. Self-injury is defined as the intentional and direct injuring of the body, including self-mutilation and eating disorders.

We remove any content that identifies and negatively targets victims or survivors of self-injury or suicide seriously, humorously or rhetorically. People can, however, share information about self-injury and suicide to draw attention to the issue and allow for discussion so long as they do not promote or encourage self-injury or suicide.

Sexual exploitation

We remove content that depicts, threatens or promotes sexual violence, sexual assault or sexual exploitation, while also allowing space for victims to share their experiences. We remove content that displays, advocates for or coordinates sexual acts with non-consenting parties or commercial sexual services, such as prostitution and escort services. We do this to avoid facilitating transactions that may involve trafficking, coercion and non-consensual sexual acts.

Bullying

Bullying happens in many places and comes in many different forms from making statements degrading someone’s character to posting inappropriate images to threatening someone. We do not tolerate bullying on Byzans because we want the members of our community to feel safe and respected.

We will remove content that purposefully targets private individuals with the intention of degrading or shaming them.

Harassment

We do not tolerate harassment on Byzans. We want people to feel safe to engage and connect with their community. We encourage people to report such behaviour and content.

Privacy breaches and image privacy rights

Privacy and the protection of personal information are fundamentally important values for Byzans. We work hard to keep your account secure and safeguard your personal information in order to protect you from potential physical or financial harm. You should not post personal or confidential information about others without first getting their consent.

Objectionable content

Hate speech

We do not allow hate speech on Byzans because it creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion and in some cases may promote real-world violence.

We define hate speech as a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics – race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity and serious disease or disability. We define “attack” as violent or dehumanising speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation.

Sometimes people share content containing someone else’s hate speech for the purpose of raising awareness or educating others. Similarly, in some cases, words or terms that might otherwise breach our standards are used self-referentially or in an empowering way. When this is the case, we allow the content, but we expect people to clearly indicate their intent, which helps us better understand why they shared it. Where the intention is unclear, we may remove the content. Violence and graphic content

We remove content that glorifies violence or celebrates the suffering or humiliation of others because it may create an environment that discourages participation.

Cruel and insensitive

We believe that people share and connect more freely when they do not feel targeted based on their vulnerabilities. As such, we have higher expectations for content that we call cruel and insensitive, which we define as content that targets victims of serious physical or emotional harm. Spam

We work hard to limit the spread of commercial spam to prevent false advertising, fraud and security breaches, all of which detract from people’s ability to share and connect.

Intellectual property

Byzans takes intellectual property rights seriously and believes that they are important to promoting expression, creativity and innovation in our community. You own all of the content and information that you post on Byzans. However, before sharing content on Byzans, please make sure that you have the right to do so. We ask that you respect other people’s copyrights, trademarks and other legal rights. We are committed to helping people and organisations promote and protect their intellectual property rights.

Spoilers

Want To Read clubs

Spoilers are not allowed in the Want To Read clubs (café ans salon).

Currently Reading clubs

If you want to discuss spoilers in the cafés, you have to ‘mark them as spoilers’. To do so, highlight some text you are about to post, and select ‘mark as spoiler‘. Once posted, the text will appear with a black background, and will only be visible for the users who tap on the text. You will need to indicate to the other users what part of the book your spoiler refers.

Alternatively, you can also use the salon to discuss the content of a book in a Currently Reading club. You create a post called “Chapter 1”, “Chapter 2”, or “Chapter 1-5″… whatever chapter or section of the book you want to discuss. Then you add a comment to your own post, with your thoughts on the chapter. Other users of Byzans will only see the comments if they tap on the post. So for a post called “chapter 5”, they will only tap on it if they have already read chapter 5.

Read clubs

Discussing the content of the book is fully allowed in the Read clubs, as they regroup only readers who have finished the book.