Community Guidelines

1 Our purpose

Architectena is a place where architects share their work, learn from each other, and find professional opportunities. Whether you are an established practitioner, a student, or somewhere in between, we want Architectena to be a space where good work is recognised, hard questions get serious answers, and constructive disagreement is welcome.

2 What's encouraged

• Share your own projects, sketches, drawings, and writing — with proper credit to collaborators and contributors
• Give constructive critique: specific, fair, and focused on the work rather than the person
• Ask and answer questions in good faith — junior members and experts both belong here
• Collaborate across borders, offices, and disciplines
• Contribute in either English or Arabic — both languages are first-class on Architectena
• Cite sources when discussing buildings, architects, or scholarship

3 What's not allowed

Harm and harassment

• Targeted harassment, threats, or intimidation of any user
• Hate speech based on religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or any other protected characteristic
• Doxxing — publishing private information about another person without consent
• Incitement to violence against individuals or groups

Misinformation and deception

• Impersonating another person, office, or organisation
• Fake credentials, fabricated experience, or invented qualifications
• Sockpuppet accounts — multiple accounts used to manipulate discussion or votes
• Manipulated or fake reviews, ratings, or endorsements

Spam and manipulation

• Scraping the platform or any of its content
• Mass-messaging users with unsolicited offers or links — this one is rate-limited automatically, and identical messages sent to many people are held for review
• Follow/unfollow churn or other artificial engagement tactics
• Off-topic promotional content — the platform is not an advertising channel

Only mass-messaging is caught automatically. The rest of this list is enforced when we see it or when you report it, which is worth saying plainly rather than implying a filter that is not there.

Copyright and attribution

• Posting work that isn't yours without clear credit to the original author
• Lifting another architect's portfolio, drawings, or photographs
• Claiming authorship of a building, project, or design you did not lead or contribute to

NSFW and illegal content

• Pornographic or sexually explicit content. Images are scanned automatically: on most upload forms the scan runs before the file is accepted, and for posts and projects it runs immediately after publishing, so explicit content can be visible for a short window before it is taken down. Attachments and files inside a private office workspace are not scanned, and end-to-end encrypted messages cannot be scanned by anyone but the people in the conversation. None of that makes the content allowed — it means we rely on you reporting it.
• Content advocating violence, terrorism, or self-harm
• Any content that is illegal under applicable law

4 Quality standards

• Write clearly in English or Arabic — both are welcome; broken or auto-translated text degrades the conversation
• Tag content correctly — use the right categories, scopes, and topics so others can find it
• Use real photographs of real work — avoid stock-image dumps or AI-generated decoration passed off as your own
• Don't bait engagement — vague clickbait, rage-bait, and engagement farming are unwelcome

5 How to report

Posts, projects, profiles, offices, groups, jobs, Q&A answers, Situ pins and office reviews each carry a Report button. Comments and direct messages do not have one yet — for those, email us with a link and we will act on it the same way. Reporting does not remove anything by itself: a report puts the item in front of a person, and once enough people have reported the same item it is escalated automatically for priority review. Nothing is deleted and nobody is suspended because of report volume alone — that is deliberate, so that a coordinated group cannot take down work it simply dislikes. We review reports as quickly as we can and treat safety cases first; we would rather not publish a fixed number of hours than publish one we cannot honour every time. For anything sensitive or urgent, email info@architectena.com directly.

One consequence you should know about before you press it: reporting someone hides the two of you from each other. They stop appearing in your search results, listings, suggestions and notifications, and you stop appearing in theirs, until the report is cleared. Blocking does the same. We think that is the right default — you should not have to keep seeing someone you just reported — but it is a real change to what you can see, so it should not be a surprise. An item reaches priority review at 25 reports.

We publish what our moderation actually did — how many appeals were approved, rejected and are still open, and whether we met our own deadline — on the transparency report. It is public and it is not curated.

6 Consequences

We apply enforcement in graduated steps, matched to the severity and history of the violation:

• First, minor violation — a warning on your record, and the content is removed from public view.
• Repeated violations — temporary suspension. The length escalates with each one — 10, 20, then 30 days — depending on pattern and impact.
• Severe violations or repeat offenders — permanent termination, which is where the ladder ends after 5 suspensions. You are not permitted to open another account after a permanent termination.
• Illegal content — immediate removal, account termination, and where appropriate a report to law-enforcement authorities.

"Removed" usually means removed from public view rather than erased: the item stops being visible to everyone else, and we keep the record so the decision stays reviewable and so an appeal can be judged on what was actually there. Where the law requires deletion, or where the content is illegal, it is deleted.

Two things happen without a person deciding, and you should know both. Explicit images: each one the scanner catches is a strike, and 3 strikes suspend the account automatically. Blocking: if 20 different members block you, a formal warning is recorded on your account. Everything else on this page — including anything triggered by other members reporting you — is decided by a person.

7 Appeals

If you believe an enforcement decision was wrong, you can appeal. If your account is suspended, an appeal form is shown to you when you sign in — that is the route to use, and you may submit one appeal per suspension while it is still in effect. We aim to decide appeals within 14 days. For anything else, email info@architectena.com with your username, the content or account affected, and why you believe the decision should be reconsidered. There is no deadline for asking us to look again, though the sooner you write the more context we still have. One limit worth knowing: the in-app form is available while the suspension is in effect, so if you wait for a suspension to expire the form is gone — email us instead and we will still look.

For formal warnings, you can also dispute the decision directly in-app from your account's warnings page.