Code of Conduct

This is a game people build for each other. Every riddle, hint and location here was written by another player, and none of it is reviewed before it appears. These are the rules that keep that worth doing.

The Content Policy is the shorter and harder list: what is never allowed here, and what happens when somebody posts it anyway. These are the rest.

Writing riddles

Keep it civilized, and label the rest.

Adult language and adult subject matter are allowed here, and they have to carry the NSFW tag — that one is required rather than offered, and a riddle that needs it and hasn’t got it is fair to report. Tagging is not permission, though: nothing illegal, nothing sexual involving children, no pornography, and nothing written to demean whoever reads it. The Content Policy is the full list. There is no content filter and no moderator queue standing between you and everyone else — you are the filter.

Never post another person without their consent.

Their picture, their face, their name, their phone number, their address, where they work: not a friend’s, not an ex’s, not a stranger’s. Ask them first, every time — “they wouldn’t mind” is not consent, and neither is a face being small in the frame. A riddle is public the moment you post it, and an uploaded image stays reachable at its own web address for as long as the riddle exists. Think twice before putting yourself into one, too.

Make it solvable.

Everything needed to reach the answer should be in the question, the hints, or ordinary common knowledge. A riddle whose answer exists only inside your own head is not difficult, it is unfinished.

Keep the answer out of the title.

Titles and descriptions show in the browse list before anyone taps in. “Keys but no locks” is a title. “It’s a piano” is the last page printed on the cover.

Accept every answer you meant to accept.

On a typing riddle the player gets exactly one attempt, and what they type has to match what you wrote apart from capitals and spaces, which are ignored wherever they fall. If both “piano” and “a piano” are right, list both. Losing on a technicality you could have prevented is the quickest way to make someone put the app down.

Set a clock a human can beat.

The countdown starts the moment the riddle appears, so budget for reading it, thinking about it, and typing an answer with one thumb. Ten seconds is allowed. Ten seconds is rarely kind.

Write hints worth what they cost.

Revealing a hint fails a timed attempt outright, so a hint that merely restates the question has taken something and given nothing back. Each one should genuinely narrow the field — and none of them should simply hand over the answer.

One version of a riddle is enough.

Have a look before you post. If the app already carries three copies of the one about the man who lives on the tenth floor, a fourth helps nobody. Swapping the nouns in someone else’s riddle still makes it the same riddle.

Rating and reporting

Rate the riddle, not your afternoon.

Clarity is whether it made sense. Enjoyment is whether solving it was worth the time. Neither is the place to record that you were tired, or that you had already heard this one in 2009.

A zero is a verdict, not a shrug.

Every axis goes down to zero now, and it counts for exactly what it says: ten players scoring a riddle zero for clarity and enjoyment retire it on the spot. Keep it for riddles that genuinely have no sense, no point or no answer — not for the one you couldn’t get.

Difficulty is a description, not a verdict.

It has its own stars precisely so that a hard riddle can be marked hard without being punished for it — difficulty is deliberately left out of the score that retires riddles. Rate a tough riddle honestly and it survives; zero-star it out of frustration and it may not.

You can’t rate your own riddles.

The app doesn’t offer you the form and the server refuses the rating, so this one is settled rather than requested. You already know the answer and you wrote the question, so whatever you would award yourself is not a rating — and it would move both the score that retires riddles and your own reputation. Rating someone else’s riddle is the whole of your say here; the same reason you can’t vote on a report of your own work.

You can’t report your own riddles or locations.

There is no reason to, and one reason it must not be allowed: only one report can be open on something at a time, and only its creator can end one early — so reporting your own work would let you park it somewhere nobody else could report it, and lift that whenever you liked. If you want it gone, delete it. If it needs fixing, edit it.

Report the content, not the person.

A report is for a riddle or location that breaks these rules, not for a creator you have taken against. Say which rule, and why: “duplicate” without naming the original leaves the next reader nothing to check.

Report things you’d defend in front of the room.

You can have five reports running at once, and a report the community rejects pauses your reporting for a while — longer each time it happens, and it fades if it stops. Rejecting one takes eleven more “keep” votes than “remove” ones, so this is not about judgement calls that go narrowly against you; it is about reports nobody else could see the point of. Report freely when a rule is actually broken — a report the community agrees with costs you nothing at all.

Voting is never taken away from you.

Whatever else you are paused from — posting, reporting — you can always still vote on other people’s reports. The queue only works if people are in it.

Vote like a juror, not a fan.

A report puts something in front of everyone, and ten net votes settle it. “Remove” should mean it breaks the rules — not that it wasn’t to your taste, and not that you recognise the name on it.

How much you can add

Ten locations each, and that’s the lot.

A location is a pin on a map that sends strangers walking somewhere, so the cap is flat rather than something you work up to. If you want an eleventh, retire one you no longer use.

Post riddles faster than they can be rated and you’ll be asked to wait.

You can hold ten riddles that haven’t yet collected their first ten ratings. That isn’t a judgement on them — it just stops one person filling the browse list with work nobody has had a chance to look at yet. The limit clears itself as players rate what you’ve already posted, and every riddle of yours that survives its first ten ratings permanently raises it by one. Write a few good ones and you will stop noticing this rule entirely.

Fix what’s already there instead of reposting it.

None of these limits touch editing. If a riddle of yours is unclear, the answer is to edit that riddle — a second, better copy costs you a slot and everyone else a duplicate.

If something of yours is voted out

A removal by review pauses your posting, briefly.

If other players report a riddle or location of yours and the vote goes against it, you can’t add new ones for a few days. Editing, rating, reporting, voting and playing all carry on as normal — it is a pause on adding, not a suspension from the game.

It gets longer if it keeps happening, and it fades if it doesn’t.

Each further removal inside about six months doubles the pause. Go six months without one and the count resets, so a bad week two years ago follows nobody around.

You can’t edit something while it’s being voted on.

People are voting on what they read. If you could rewrite it underneath them, the “keep” votes and the “remove” votes would be answers to two different questions — and posting something you shouldn’t, then quietly swapping it out the moment it was reported, would work. So the riddle or location is frozen until the vote ends.

You have two ways out, and both cost less than losing.

While a vote runs you can delete the thing outright, or withdraw it from review — which ends the vote there and then and gives you it back to edit, so you can fix whatever was objected to. Deleting pauses you least, withdrawing a little more (you have kept what people complained about), and losing the vote most. None of them is free: if any were, that would simply be what everyone did on sight of a report, and nobody would ever have to think about what they posted.

You can only withdraw something once.

One withdrawal per riddle and per location, ever — not once per report. It is a way out of a review you know you deserve and can fix, not a shield: if it worked every time, a riddle could be reported forever and never actually be removed. If someone reports it again, that vote runs its course.

Being reported is not the punishment.

Nothing happens to you unless the community actually votes the thing down. A report that gets cleared leaves no mark at all, and neither does a riddle retired for poor ratings — that one is about how the riddle landed, not about you, and it can even reverse itself.

We can take something down ourselves.

If a riddle or location breaks these rules badly enough that it cannot wait for a vote, or somebody with a right to it asks us to remove it, we will. That is the one thing here the community does not decide. It takes the item and nothing else: no strike, no pause, nothing counted against your reputation — the same as if you had deleted it yourself.

Locations

Pin real places that real people can reach.

A location sends strangers somewhere. Make it public, accessible, and safe to stand in for the two minutes a riddle takes — not private property, not a building site, and not the central reservation of a dual carriageway.

Don’t pin your own front door.

A location’s exact coordinates are visible to every player, signed in or not, along with its name, description and photo. Choose the café on the corner, not the flat above it.

Make the journey worth it.

A bespoke riddle can only be played where you tied it, so it ought to have something to do with being there. Otherwise it is an ordinary riddle with a commute attached.

And generally

Look up from the phone.

Some of this game happens outdoors, in traffic, on stairs. No riddle is worth a kerb you did not see coming.

Assume a person at the other end.

Every riddle here was written by someone who thought it was clever, and every rating you leave lands on a real contributor’s reputation. Play as though they were standing next to you — at a location, one of them might be.