A penalty is a restriction attached to a member or to a content item. There are four kinds and they are not a single ladder — each restricts a different thing, and holding one does not imply another.
| Type | Applies to | Restricts |
|---|---|---|
FULL |
A member | Creating, editing and reacting |
LIMITED |
A member | Creating only |
CHAT_RESTRICT |
A member | Chat only |
SPY_FLAG |
A server | Nothing the owner does — it flags the listing |
What each one actually blocks
Full
The account is read-only.
| Action | |
|---|---|
| Create a content item | ✗ |
| Edit an item you already own | ✗ |
| Comment, review, rate, favourite, report | ✗ |
Limited
You keep your existing work and can maintain it. You cannot start anything new.
| Action | |
|---|---|
| Create a content item | ✗ |
| Edit an item you already own | ✓ |
| Comment, review, rate, favourite, report | ✓ |
That split is the point of the type: a member being told to stop publishing is not being told to abandon what they have already published, and forcing them to leave it unmaintained punishes their users rather than them.
Chat restriction
You may use the rest of the site normally, but cannot send chat messages or open new conversations.
A chat ban is deliberately not on the ladder
CHAT_RESTRICT is not part of the full/limited hierarchy, and the check
that reads that hierarchy does not see it. That is what stops a chat ban
silently becoming a site-wide content ban.
A chat restriction records the message it was issued in reference to.
When two penalties are active
Only FULL and LIMITED gate a member’s own actions, and when both are in
force the stricter one wins.
Expiry
A penalty may carry an expiry or may not. “Active” means no expiry, or an expiry still in the future — nothing has to run to lift a temporary penalty; it simply stops matching.
Appeals
Every penalty carries a comment thread. That thread is the conversation between you and staff, and it is where an appeal happens. It is the same mechanism a report uses, which is why an appeal behaves like a discussion rather than a form.
Your penalties, and their threads, are under Account → Penalties.
Server flags
SPY_FLAG is different from the other three. It attaches to a server
listing, and it is usually raised by an automated detector rather than by a
person.
A flagged server is not removed. It is moved to the slowest scan tier and excluded from the places a flagged listing should not appear — which means a server that fixes whatever got it flagged is unflagged automatically on a later scan, rather than needing somebody to notice.
Which detector raised it
Each flag records which check raised it, and each detector may only lift its own:
| Sub-type | Raised by |
|---|---|
SCAN |
The scanner’s own filters — bad word, bad IP, bad ASN, master-list import |
DUPLICATE |
Redirect and proxy farms: too many visible servers on one IPv4 |
FAKE_USERS |
Fake player counts: a population that barely moves across thousands of scans |
| (none) | A human moderator, by hand |
Why the sub-type exists
Without it, every detector shared one undifferentiated flag — so whichever ran next reconciled all of them. The scanner re-scans every server eventually, sees nothing wrong by its own filters, reports “not flagged”, and silently lifts a flag raised by a completely different check.
Each detector now owns exactly one sub-type. It may raise and lift its own and must leave the others alone. A flag with no sub-type was raised by a human, and no automated job ever touches it.
The read side does not care which detector raised it: visibility, statistics and scan tier treat every active flag the same.
If your server is flagged
- Check what the flag is. A
DUPLICATEflag means too many of your listings share one address; aFAKE_USERSflag means your reported population does not move like a real one. - Fix the cause, then wait for a scan. The automated flags lift themselves.
- If it was raised by a moderator, or you believe a detector is wrong, use the penalty’s comment thread.
Reporting false statistics
Server statistics feed public rankings. If an integration is found to have reported false or inflated figures we will revoke the credential and penalise the item — for a game server, being flagged, dropped from the server list and excluded from statistics for a period we set, up to and including permanently.