Debate Dev Log · Sep 19

Today was all content governance. The heaviest rule: 18+ and adult content is now banned site-wide — previously authors just self-labeled; now pre-publication screening rejects outright. Along with it, criminal-trade words (money laundering, gun purchase, pig-butchering scams), drug words, and hate-organization terms all escalated to hard rejection. The rejection messages got redesigned too: we won't name the specific word (so nobody can probe the wordlist), only the category; get caught a second time within a window and we do name it. Mild profanity in comments now gets auto-replaced and passes; the heavy stuff still bounces. Mid-sweep I caught a hole: tags were never scanned by moderation — you could smuggle banned words into tags and display them publicly. Fixed.

The other thread is ads: fake placeholder ads deleted, real AdSense wired in, and when there's no fill we simply hide — empty beats fake. The trending board finally got real data too; vote counts had been stuck at zero because of a database permission blind spot.