Community guidelines

What gets you banned

• Harassment, hate speech, doxxing, threats. Permanent ban. No warnings, no second chances. Includes targeted attacks on other players, real-world identification, or threats of physical harm.
• Spam, link farms, affiliate spam. Akismet filters most automatically. The rest get caught in manual review. Repeated offenses move to a permanent ban.
• Rockstar IP infringement. Don't upload copyrighted screenshots, leaked footage, or asset rips. We honor takedown requests and preempt anything that'd endanger the site under DMCA. Hand-traced material, your own gameplay clips, and quoted text within fair-use bounds are all fine.
• Real-money trading. Selling accounts, modded money, RP boosts, GTA$ for cash, etc. Removed on sight. This is what kills account economies and gets us a Take-Two letter.
• NSFW imagery. Tagged mature text content is fine in tagged contexts. Imagery is not. We don't want a moderation problem we can't scale, and frankly the GTA audience deserves a comment thread that loads at work.
• Crew or RP-server promotion in random Codex threads. Plug your crew on /c (the Discover surface) or your own crew page. Don't hijack a Lucia Caminos thread to recruit for your FiveM server.

How moderation works

Every comment posts through Akismet (spam detection) and OpenAI moderation (harassment, hate, threats). Clean comments publish instantly. Borderline comments land in a moderator queue and a human reviews them. Definite spam doesn't appear publicly and the poster sees a "filtered as spam" note — false positives email us and we re-check.

Mods are CJ (the founder) and trusted community members added over time. Mod actions are logged: every approval, rejection, spam-flag, and takedown is recorded with the moderator's identity and a reason. We don't do silent removals — if your comment is taken down, you can ask why.

Rate limits

Thirty comments per minute per account. This is a generous floor for human typing speed. Bot-class behavior (hundreds per minute, same template repeated, etc.) trips the limit and the writes silently fail at the database layer. Human users won't hit this in normal use.

What gates posting

You need a signed-in account with a verified email. Discord OAuth verifies email automatically; the email-path requires clicking the confirmation link. This is the lightest possible spam gate that still meaningfully reduces drive-by abuse.

A reputation system runs on the record: votes on comments feed a public standing score and posting tiers, and higher tiers earn faster publishing. Every verified account can comment.

Reporting + appeals

See a comment that breaks these rules? Email hello@viceatlas.com with the URL and what specifically broke the rules. We respond within 48 hours.

Disagree with a moderation action against your own comment? Same email. Tell us what you intended; we'll re-review. Honest disagreement is a lot more common than people assume.

What we don't do

We don't shadowban without notice — if your comment is hidden, you'll see that it was hidden, who hid it, and the reason (when not a privacy or safety issue). We don't sell your comment data. We don't train AI on it. We don't pre-screen comments for tone unless they trip the automated filter; opinions you'd find on Reddit r/GTA6 aren't in scope for moderation.

Why we have these rules

Wowhead won the WoW database race partly because it kept comment threads readable for two decades. light.gg won the Destiny vendor-roll race the same way. The rules above exist because every successful third-party hub eventually has to answer the same question: "is this thread worth scrolling through, or is it noise?" We'd rather over-moderate in the first six months and earn the right to relax later than ship a comment section that immediately drowns in spam.

Changes to this policy

Material changes get announced in the news feed and on the footer. Typo fixes don't. The canonical source is this page; if a Discord rule conflicts with what's here, this page wins.