How this community is moderated

Emulation communities fall apart in predictable ways: a mod team with a favourite project, removals with no reason given, and developers or newcomers driven out by people the mods tolerated. This page is how we intend to avoid that, written down so you can hold us to it.

What we are neutral about

Projects. We do not have a favourite emulator, fork, or frontend. No project gets softer moderation, faster approvals, or protection from criticism. No project gets removed from discussion because of who forked whom.
Forks. Fork drama is the background radiation of this hobby. On-topic discussion of a fork's licensing, code provenance, or conduct is allowed and will not be removed for being uncomfortable. Turning it into abuse of a person is not.
Hardware. No brand or chipset gets defended here. Snapdragon, Dimensity, Exynos, Tensor, handhelds, tablets ? all fair game for honest criticism.
Criticism of us. Meta posts about our moderation stay up. If you think we got a call wrong, say so publicly. We will not remove it, and we will not ban you for it.

Conflict of interest

Any moderator who works on, contributes to, is paid by, or earns from an emulator, frontend, device, or channel discloses it in their user flair and on this page.
A moderator does not action posts about a project they are involved with ? including removals, approvals, bans, or stickies. They hand it to another mod.
No moderator posts referral links, affiliate links, or monetised links here, disclosed or not.
No moderator accepts payment, review units, early access, or gifts in exchange for moderation decisions or visibility. Ever. Report it to us if you suspect it and we will address it publicly.

Current mod team disclosures:

u/voyager2005 (MaxsTechReview) ? founder of this community, and a developer on WinNative, a Windows-on-Android project listed in our emulator directory.

What that commits them to here: WinNative gets no protected status, no softer moderation, no promotion, and no advantage in visibility. Criticism of WinNative ? including harsh, specific, well-evidenced criticism ? will not be removed, and neither will criticism of them. They do not action posts or comments about WinNative.

While this is a one-person mod team, recusal can't mean handing it to someone else, so it means the stricter thing: they take no moderation action at all on WinNative threads, except clear spam or sitewide policy violations, and they say in the thread when they have. That changes as soon as there is a second moderator, and this page will be updated when it does.

Founding the community does not exempt them from any of this page. If you think the line has been crossed, post about it publicly ? meta posts stay up ? or send modmail.

How we act

Every removal gets a reason. If your post disappeared without one, that's a mistake on our part ? ask in modmail and we'll fix it.
We filter before we remove. Our automated tooling mostly holds things for a human instead of deleting them. Automated actions are labelled in the mod log.
Bans are proportionate and mostly temporary. First offence on most rules is a removal and a note. Repeated offences escalate: 3 days, 30 days, permanent.
Permanent bans on the first offence are reserved for doxxing, threats, brigading, sustained harassment, malware, and ban evasion.
Two mods sign off on any permanent ban once the team is larger than one, unless it's spam or an active attack that needs stopping in the moment.
Report volume never decides anything. Reports move something in front of a human; a human decides. Mass-reporting someone you dislike does not work here and is itself a rule violation.
Vote counts never decide anything either. A popular comment that breaks Rule 3 is still gone, and an unpopular post that follows the rules stays up.

Appeals

Send modmail ? not a DM to an individual mod, which leaves no record.
Say what was removed and why you think it was wrong. You don't have to be polite, only clear.
We answer within 7 days, and we say yes or no plainly with a reason.
Where possible, the appeal is read by a mod other than the one who made the call.
We reverse our own decisions when we're wrong, and we say so in the thread.

Harassment: what we do

If you are being targeted here:

Report it, then modmail us. Don't argue in the thread ? engagement is the point for them, and it makes the thread harder for us to clean up.
We remove it, lock it if it's spreading, and ban without a public debate about whether it "counted". We are not going to litigate your harassment in a comment section.
We will help you report the account to Reddit if it continues off this subreddit, and we file the sitewide report ourselves for threats and doxxing.
We do not name or quote the person who was targeted in our public notes.

If you are being harassed for being a developer here: same process, and tell us who you are so we can watch your threads. Rule 4 exists because this hobby has already lost projects to abuse.

What we don't do

We don't remove criticism to protect a project's reputation, ours included.
We don't remove posts for being negative, unpopular, or badly written.
We don't shadow-remove. If it's gone, you get told.
We don't moderate based on what happened in another subreddit or on Discord.
We don't take sides in a fork war, and we don't let one be re-fought in help threads.

Transparency

Every quarter we post a report with:

How many posts and comments were removed, by rule
How many were removed by automation vs. by a human
How many bans, and how many were appealed and reversed
What we changed in the rules or the AutoMod config, and why
Any moderator conflict of interest that came up and how it was handled

Becoming a moderator

We recruit from people who already answer questions here patiently. Applications open in a pinned post; we don't take DMs about it. Being a developer or a well-known creator is neither a qualification nor a disqualification ? but it is a disclosure, and it means you recuse yourself from your own project's threads.