Everything you need to know about community chats safety

Patreon can be a space for energized fandoms to thrive only if creators and members feel safe spending time here. That’s why we’re constantly working with creators to improve and refresh our platform-wide Community Guidelines to make them as clear and effective as possible.

We also believe that, as a creator, you deserve to be in control of your work and your fandom – and that includes chats. You know your community better than anyone, and you should have room to craft additional norms specific to the culture of your own unique world.

Here are some of the ways you and your community can build and maintain an even safer environment in chats.

Fan reporting

Your fans are able to flag a message in your community chats as being potentially inappropriate or at odds with your community culture. You’ll be able to review these flagged messages when you visit your moderation hub.

Moderation hub

All creators on Patreon have access to a moderation hub, where you can review flagged messages and decide whether to keep them, delete them, or report them to the Patreon Trust & Safety team.

If you do choose to delete a flagged message, we usually recommend replying first to explain to the member why the message is being deleted (ex. it’s off topic, unkind, etc) so there's a record of the disallowed behavior and moderation action once the deletion happens.

If the message is egregious (spam, repeat offender who has been warned already, significant guideline violation), you can remove a member from your membership entirely to ensure that the chat remains a safe space for the community.

Assigning moderators

You now have the ability to assign up to 10 moderators to help maintain the norms of your community. This moderator should be someone you trust, and can be either a teammate or a fan, as long as they are a paid member with access to all of your tiers.

Moderators will be marked as such with a ‘Moderator’ tag in your chat, and can contribute by monitoring chats, enforcing rules, engaging with members, making announcements, and communicating norms. Moderators also have access to the moderation hub, where they can choose to keep, delete, or report flagged messages.

A good moderator should be someone who deeply understands your community and has an interest in supporting and engaging with your members. It should also be someone you can rely on to stick to the moderation standards you’ve set.

We recommend you set up a dedicated channel where you can be in touch with your moderators quickly and easily. It’s also recommended that you check in regularly to make sure the expectations are clear and that you’re all on the same page about the norms being enforced.

Additional resources

For more details about how Patreon is working to make the platform safer for everyone, check out the Community Guidelines.

For insight into how the Policy team works directly with creators to guide policy-making decisions, check out the first-ever Patreon Transparency Report.