Moderation policy

Every rule is an offense in one catalogue, and each offense has a ladder of punishments. When a staff member punishes you, they pick the offense. The server picks the step, from your history:

• Your step is how many earlier punishments you have for that same offense, not counting revoked ones or ones older than its window.
• Past the last step, the last step repeats.
• Staff can't skip a step or pick a lighter one. The same offense gets the same punishment whoever is on duty.
• For serious cases, senior staff can ban or mute for a set time off the ladder. These are rare, need a reason, and are logged like everything else.
• Staff can only punish players ranked below them.

Warnings are messages on your record. Mutes stop you chatting. Kicks disconnect you. Bans stop you joining. A ban or mute without a time is permanent. An IP ban also blocks every account seen on the same connection.

1. Account sharing

   Counts for 180 days

   Letting someone else play your account, or playing someone else's.

   1. Warn
   2. Ban 7d

2. Advertising

   Counts for 180 days

   Promoting other servers, sites or services.

   1. Mute 1d
   2. Ban 7d
   3. Ban permanent

3. Ban evasion

   Counts for 180 days

   Playing on another account while banned.

   1. Ban permanent (IP)

4. Chat spam

   Counts for 180 days

   Flooding chat, repeated messages, caps or character spam.

   1. Warn
   2. Mute 1h
   3. Mute 1d
   4. Mute 7d

5. Cheating

   Counts for 180 days

   Hacked clients, mods, macros or auto-clickers that give an unfair advantage. Refusing a staff screenshare counts as cheating.

   1. Ban 30d
   2. Ban permanent

6. Child safety

   Counts for 180 days

   Grooming, or anything sexual involving a child: asking a player for photos, personal details, secrets or to talk somewhere private.

   1. Ban permanent (IP)

7. Doxxing

   Counts for 180 days

   Sharing someone's real name, address, school, photos or other personal details without their consent.

   1. Ban 30d
   2. Ban permanent

8. Exploiting

   Counts for 180 days

   Abusing bugs or glitches instead of reporting them.

   1. Ban 30d
   2. Ban permanent

9. Illegal content

   Counts for 180 days

   Terrorism or extremist groups, selling drugs or weapons, and anything else illegal the terms list.

   1. Ban permanent

10. Inappropriate name

    Counts for 180 days

    An offensive or impersonating username or skin.

    1. Warn
    2. Ban 1d
    3. Ban 7d

11. Lagging the server

    Counts for 180 days

    Builds, item spam or tricks that lag or crash the server.

    1. Ban 30d
    2. Ban permanent

12. Lying to staff

    Counts for 180 days

    False reports, faked evidence, or lying to staff in a case or an appeal.

    1. Warn
    2. Ban 1d
    3. Ban 7d

13. Mute evasion

    Counts for 180 days

    Talking while muted through an alt, reports, gang names or anything else.

    1. Mute 7d
    2. Ban 7d
    3. Ban 30d

14. Real-money trading

    Counts for 180 days

    Selling or buying in-game items or currency for real money.

    1. Ban 30d
    2. Ban permanent

15. Scamming

    Counts for 180 days

    Deceiving players out of items or currency.

    1. Ban 7d
    2. Ban 30d
    3. Ban permanent

16. Season boosting

    Counts for 180 days

    Feeding value from alts or other players into one account or gang to climb Cell Top or a season leaderboard.

    1. Ban 7d
    2. Ban permanent

17. Sexual content

    Counts for 180 days

    Sexual messages, links, names or builds. Banned for everyone, whatever their age.

    1. Mute 1d
    2. Ban 7d
    3. Ban permanent

18. Staff impersonation

    Counts for 180 days

    Claiming to be Pickfall staff, or using a name or message made to look like staff.

    1. Mute 1d
    2. Ban 7d

19. Toxicity

    Counts for 180 days

    Harassment, slurs, threats or targeted insults.

    1. Warn
    2. Mute 1d
    3. Mute 7d
    4. Ban 7d
    5. Ban permanent

Real-money trading and leaderboard cheating can also mean losing what you gained: staff roll back the transactions involved and can remove both accounts from the season's rewards.

• The reason you're shown on the ban screen, with your mute message or with a warning, and how long is left.
• Warnings given while you're offline are still on your record.
• Expired bans and mutes simply stop applying; you don't need to ask.

Staff tools show, each to the ranks that need it:

• your username, UUID, when you first and last joined, and whether you're banned, muted or frozen;
• your punishment history, and staff notes and evidence links about you (notes are staff-only);
• other accounts that joined from the same connection (by comparing hashed IPs), and whether they're banned or muted;
• what you said in public and gang chat and in private messages, and private messages sent to you, in the last 30 days, including messages a filter, the spam limit or a mute stopped, and chat as it happens;
• your balances and economy transactions, and the audit log of staff actions on your account;
• your inventory and where you are, while you're online.

Staff never see your IP address, your password or your Discord tokens. Every staff action is written to an audit log, with who did it and why. See the privacy policy for everything we keep.

Report a player, a message, a name, or anything illegal or harmful:

• In game: /report <player> <what happened>, or /report on its own, then pick what kind of report it is. You can also click a player in the Online menu. Muted players can still report.
• On the website: pickfall.com/report. You don't need an account, and you can choose not to be contacted about it.
• By email, without giving your name: support@pickfall.com. Say who, what, where and when.

What happens next:

• A report made in game includes the reported player's chat, and yours, from the 30 minutes before it, so staff can see what was said. Staff can also read the last 30 days of public, gang and private chat.
• Staff see every report. Child safety, child sexual abuse material and threats to life are urgent and come first; staff look at everything else within 24 hours. A staff member can pass a report up to senior staff, which is how reports about staff are handled.
• An intimate image of you shared without your consent (or a threat to share one) can be reported on the same form. Staff deal with it within 48 hours.
• When staff close your report, you're told in game whether they took action, or by email if you reported on the website signed out and gave an address. The player you reported never learns who reported them.
• When we act against your account or something you made, we tell you what we did and why, and how to appeal.
• We report threats to someone's life or safety, and child sexual abuse material, to the police and the relevant authorities.
• Never send us child sexual abuse material or a link to it, not even to report it: tell us where you saw it.

Unhappy with how we handled a report, an appeal or anything else about keeping Pickfall safe? Complain on the same form. The operator answers within 14 days.

support@pickfall.com is also our contact for authorities and regulators, including under the EU Digital Services Act and the UK Online Safety Act. We answer in English.

Think a punishment was a mistake? Appeal at pickfall.com/appeal (no account needed), or email appeals@pickfall.com with your Minecraft username, the punishment and why you think it's wrong.

• We answer within 14 days.
• A staff member other than the one who gave the punishment reviews it. While the operator is our only moderator, he reviews it afresh from the evidence instead, and says so in his answer.
• A punishment found to be a mistake is revoked, and stops counting towards your next step.
• A permanent ban can be appealed once every 30 days.

Names other players see, like gang names and tags (and later private mine names and titles), are checked when you choose them. A name is refused if it contains:

• Slurs and hate terms: racial, ethnic, sexuality, gender, disability and political slurs, and hate terms like Nazi slogans and their number codes. Blocked everywhere, always.
• Swearing, sexual words and other insults (religious insults included): blocked in names, because names are shown to everyone, including younger players.
• Staff and server words, like admin, staff, moderator, owner, official and Pickfall, so nobody can pretend to be staff.

The check is automatic, and today it covers gang names and tags. It uses Surge AI's open profanity list plus our own additions. It sees through capitals, swapped letters and numbers (like 4 for a), separators like underscores, and stretched letters, and lets through ordinary words that only contain a bad one, like Scunthorpe or Raccoons. A tag is short, so any three-letter slur inside it is refused. If a harmless name is refused, email support@pickfall.com and a staff member will look at it and fix the list.

Your Minecraft username and skin come from Mojang, so we can't refuse them up front. An offensive or impersonating username or skin is the Inappropriate name offense, and so is a name that slips past the check.