House rules
These rules are short enough to read in full. They cover how people treat one another here, and what the house does with what you give it.
How the rooms work
- Talk about the work. A mark is pinned to a place on a picture. Say what you see, ask how it was done, or share what you know from the bench.
- No scores. There are no likes, no rankings and no counts of who is winning. “I see it too” is the only answer short of words.
- Made by hand. Hang only work you made yourself. Work generated by a machine is not what this house is for.
- Be kind to makers. Criticise the work as you would want your own criticised: specifically, and about the work.
- No selling in letters yet. Until the marketplace opens, do not arrange sales here. We cannot protect either side.
What gets taken down
Harassment, hate, threats, sexual content involving anyone under eighteen, other people’s private details, spam, and work passed off as your own. Anyone can report a mark, a reply, a studio work, a person or a conversation, and a human at the house reads every report. If five different people report the same thing it is hidden until someone at the house has looked. Staff can hide or remove what breaks these rules and can suspend a profile; everything staff do is written down. You can block anyone: they can no longer follow or write to you, and you no longer see their marks.
How we keep machines out
New profiles, marks and letters are limited to a human pace, with tighter limits on a profile’s first day. Until someone answers or follows you, you can send them two letters and no more. When the site is live, making a profile may ask Cloudflare to check that you are a person; that check sees your network address and nothing you write.
What we keep about you
- Your name, handle and whatever you write on your page. All of it is public.
- Your marks, replies and studio works. Public.
- Your letters. Private between the two of you, and stored so both can read them. Staff cannot open a conversation unless one of the two people in it reports it; then they can, and each time they do is recorded.
- No password. You sign in with a key that only you hold. We keep a scrambled copy that cannot be turned back into the key, so nobody at the house can see it or reset it.
- An email address, only if you choose to give one as a way back in when you lose your key. It is used for that and nothing else, and you can remove it.
- If you joined the waiting list: that address, what you said brings you, and whether you have been invited. It is used to send you an invitation and nothing else. Write to us and we will take it off.
- Your network address, for a day or two, in a counter that stops floods and repeated guessing. It is not attached to your profile.
- One cookie, which keeps you signed in. It ends after sixty days without a visit.
- Pictures you upload are shrunk on your own device first, which strips the hidden camera data (place, time, device) before anything is sent. The house strips it again on arrival.
- No advertising, no tracking scripts and nothing sold on.
Leaving
From your studio you can download everything we hold about you as one file, and you can delete your profile. Deleting removes your page, studio, pictures, marks, letters and follows at once.
These rules are a first draft for the preview and will be reviewed by a lawyer before the marketplace opens.