Running a community

1. The short version

If your site has a forum, comments, a wall or live chat, then people are talking to each other on a website you run. That makes it your community, and — under UK online safety law — your responsibility rather than ours.

That is not us stepping back from something. It follows from how the law decides who is responsible: it asks who controls who can use the thing. On your site that is you. You choose whether to switch Community on at all, who joins, who is warned, muted or banned, and what the rules are. We supply the software and the hosting.

We cannot tell you what the law requires of you and nothing here is advice. What we can do is make sure you are not finding this out from somebody else, and not without tools.

2. What you control

Everything about who can be in your community and what happens when somebody misbehaves:

• Whether your site has a community at all — Community is a switch in your project settings, off until you turn it on.
• Who joins, and who stops being a member.
• Warnings, mutes and bans, per person and per site. A sanction on your site is not a sanction anywhere else.
• Deleting threads, posts and comments.
• Your own rules, on top of the acceptable use policy that applies to every site we host.
• Who else can moderate — collaborators you invite, with the roles you give them.

None of that is set from our side, and none of it can be. We do not moderate your community for you.

3. What we have built for you

Because your ability to run a community safely depends on what we ship, not only on what you intend:

• Reporting. Members can report a post, and it comes to you — there is a queue in Forum → Moderation. A reporting route nobody answers is worse than none, so work through it.
• A moderation log. Who did what, and when. It is what lets you answer a question about a decision months later, including when the person asking is you.
• Warnings, mutes and bans, with the reason recorded and shown to the person it is about.
• An acceptable use policy that applies to everybody who writes anything on a site we host, which you can point at without writing your own.
• An age gate on accounts, so nobody holds one without saying they are old enough for where they live.

Some reports do not come to you, and that is deliberate. A report about your community, or about you or your staff, goes to Enderbeam alone — you are not shown it and not told it exists. Handing somebody a complaint about themselves would make the route worthless to the person using it. That route is on our own site rather than in the footer of yours, at enderbeam.com/report — which is also what makes it reachable by somebody who has left your community, been banned from it, or never had an account there.

If something you need is missing, tell us. This list should get longer.

4. Things worth doing, whatever the law asks

Not a compliance checklist — we are not qualified to write one. Just what tends to matter:

• Read your reports. The queue is the single most useful thing on this page.
• Have somebody other than you who can moderate, so a report is not waiting on one person being awake.
• Write down your own rules somewhere members can find them, even briefly. "Be decent" is worse than three specific lines.
• Remember how young your players are. A Minecraft server's community is not an adult forum, and the things that go wrong are usually about contact between people rather than about what somebody posted.
• If something serious happens — a threat, anything involving a child's safety — do not sit on it. Report it to us as well, and if somebody is in danger contact your local emergency services first. We cannot help with that part.

5. Where to read the real thing

The UK's Online Safety Act 2023 is the law in question, and Ofcom regulates it. Ofcom publishes guidance for services, including a route for small ones — most Minecraft communities are small and low risk, and the law is meant to be proportionate to that.

We are telling you this rather than interpreting it. If your community is large, or you are unsure, the honest answer is to take your own advice — and the same is true for us.

Our own reading, and the reasoning behind it, is written down rather than kept to ourselves. Ask and we will send it to you.