Forum Rules & Your Moderators

Mark

Your Moderators:

@netrunner
@Shake
@CharlieBear
@cheeseboy
@cudbud64
@JoyfulHeart

They have been given complete freedom in their roles. As independent moderators none of their decisions will require review by me. They will moderate with the principles of maintaining the welcoming and peaceful environment here, acting with equality between the three member types (enthusiast, client, pro), and finally encouraging openness and respect.

The Rules

Personal Attacks: While debating and discussion is fine, we do not allow rudeness, insulting posts, personal attacks.

Baiting: No baiting. Dropping things in the forums just to stir the waters will not be tolerated.

Venting: Regularly using this forum to moan or let out pent up anger is inconsiderate, disrupts the community and causes the same result as trolling.

Adult Content: We prohibit explicit adult content including but not limited to pornographic images, depictions of sexual acts, etc. While it's discouraged, mature and respectful conversations on such topics may be permitted at moderator discretion.

Topics to avoid: religion/religious/proselytizing, politics, MMM schemes, as these topics encourage flame wars.

Language: Please keep the use of offensive language to a minimum.

Spamming: Spam is typically considered to be repetitive posting of the same text again and again or nonsensical posts that have no substance and are often designed to annoy other forum users. Bumping topics in order to keep them near the top of the list is also prohibited.

Professional Cuddling: Please avoid continuous unnecessary negativity about professional cuddling as it is not conducive to open discussion and risks making professionals feel unwelcome on the forum.

While professional cuddling is not rooted in the origins of this website, it has since evolved to play an important role in our community. As an open forum it is acceptable to express an opinion that is negative of the industry but it should be done so in a respectful way. This also goes both ways - professionals should be considerate in expressing their negative experiences in order to avoid other clients feeling criticised or disrespected by association.

Price Discussion: Please avoid creating new threads to complain about the choice of rates by professional cuddlers. These threads are highly repetitive for this community and typically escalate into unpleasant discourse. You may voice your opinion on this subject in the stickied mega-thread here.

Off-Topic: Please try to avoid going off-topic as it's disrespectful to the thread owner and can irritate readers who are expecting on-topic discussion.

Advertising: Advertising to users of this website is not allowed. This also applies to the use of private messages and emails without the recipient's prior consent. This rule does not apply to community events (cuddle parties, etc) and topics which are appropriately posted in the Cuddle Requests forum.

Rubbish: Please refrain from posting meaningless threads and one word (or short) nonsense posts.

Illegal Activities: Discussion of illegal activities such as software and music piracy and other intellectual property violations are not allowed.

Speak English: If you are going to post non-English on these forums, please also post an English Translation of your post.

Privacy: If you are in the position of knowing sensitive information about another member's private life that is currently not public domain then please refrain from posting this without prior permission from the member that the information is about.

Screenshots: We strongly discourage sharing of conversation screenshots. If you choose to do so, it's required that you redact any personally identifiable elements before posting (e.g. usernames). You should also redact any conversational parts that could hint at who that member might be.

Affiliate/Referrals: You cannot post any affiliate or referral links, or post anything asking for a referral. Such posts will be subject to removal.

Gender focused threads: We allow gender focused threads but disallow threads that intend to, or evolve to, prevent contribution based on gender.

Covid-19: Accurate information is critical for something as serious as Covid-19, particularly for a cuddling community. For this reason, we may intervene in response to misinformation, fake news or conspiracy theories on this subject.

Emojis: For the purpose of equality in thread exposure, we ask that you only use one emoji at the end of the title. Anything beyond can be removed at the discretion of the moderators. The same principle applies to dashes.

We reserve the right to remove offensive posts without notice.

Also while these rules cover most common situations, they cannot anticipate everything. Consequently we reserve the right to take any actions we deem appropriate to ensure these forums are not disrupted or abused in any way.

We also reserve the right to ban and/or delete any account for any reason.

Moderator Applications

At any time you can use the following forms to either self-apply or nominate a moderator. The forms will remain active indefinitely and be used as a reference long into the future.

Nominate a member
Apply for yourself

netrunner

Reporting Guidelines

When not to report and how to report more effectively:

When not to report someone:

1. Messaging a member (Pro and non-Pro alike) that never responds or doesn't respond instantly. This does not mean they are a fake account or that it is harassment or discrimination. No member is required to respond to messages as everyone is free to choose whom they wish to respond to. Everyone has lives outside of the site and even Pro aren't monitoring their accounts 24/7 though many generally have regular check-in times once a day, once every other day, or sometimes multiple times throughout the day. Messaging a member followed by stalking their profile to check their last login to see if they've checked for your message is creepy. If you do this and then get upset and report them for not responding after you see they've logged in recently your report will be dismissed. Unless you've booked a session and they are late for it, they will respond when they are able to.

2. Members (Pro and non-Pro alike) that don't respond yet haven't logged in for months are not fake accounts. Some people come to the site to check it out and then never return instead of deactivating or deleting their account. Yes, by default members do get emails when someone has sent them a message on Cuddle Comfort which some will return to check them out while others ignore them.

3. New Pros may get flooded with welcome messages from 1-to-several pages worth of members all messaging within hours or minutes of being listed. That said, established Pros may also have members they regularly meet with or talk with and come back to the site with pages of new messages as well.

4. Creating a new account to report someone followed by then deleting the new account is the fastest way to have a report dismissed. While each report is handled with the same weight as the rest, making a dummy profile to report someone and delete that profile then holds no weight on what's being reported.

5. Getting a rude response from a member after asking inappropriate questions is not harassment on their part. Conversations are kept on the site for a reason and are personally checked by myself or Mark during investigations. If explicit language is being used and site rules are being broken though, please report them for an investigation to be started into the matter.

6. A member visiting your profile is not harassment. Simply viewing another member's profile once or twice is not cause to report someone for harassment. Someone repeatedly viewing your profile yet never messaging you is creepy though.

7. Members not listed with a Professional tag on their profile are not bound by the Pro Cuddler Contract meaning that if you set up a session with them and pay for a motel/hotel to meet and they don't show, while it is rude, we cannot force them to reimburse you.

8. Pros requesting or requiring deposits in advance aren't all scammers. While I won't say all aren't as some do make it that far to get a Professional tag, Pros stating that they require a deposit can be for a number of reasons. For some it's how they ensure a potential Client is serious about holding a session date/time they may otherwise be able to schedule with someone else and don't want to risk losing money if you don't show -OR- they've had issue(s) with you in the past about cancelling and still want to book with you yet are being cautious about booking with you -OR- they could require it of all first-time cuddlers (first time seeing them) or new site members who have no photo and limited-to-no information about themselves filled out on their profile.. again doing so as a precaution to being stood up. When in doubt, best to check for Karma to show they have met with other members as we do not verify or do background checks on any site members. We have seen a trend of scammers though that state requiring half of a typically $100-180/hour session fee paid via iTunes gift cards or the like and these members should be reported as scammers.

When reporting someone:

1. If you are going to report a member that has managed to bypass a ban, please be sure to include what their previous username was or roughly what you think it was to help us out in confirming. We do a number of bans daily and while some faces may look familiar, what username they went by isn't always something that can be recalled and can take awhile to dig through accounts to find this info.

2. If communication does leave the site and a member begins making non-platonic requests or statements or they are sending inappropriate photos to you, please do not delete the messages as screenshots of these will need to be submitted upon request when you report someone. This is why communication should remain on the site as this then takes time to paused the investigation to request and then wait for the evidence to be submitted. Members quick to try taking communication off-site to email, text, kik, snapchat, etc... tend to have non-platonic reasons for doing so and think that by taking communication off-site fast means they can then talk freely. Also, CuddleComfort is a website.. not an app. Any member saying the "app" isn't working for them followed by proceeding to give another means to message is trying to take communication off-site in a way they think is clever. We've had members that try to collect girls' phone numbers and then harassing them by doing this trick or by saying they want to book a same-day session with a Pro.

Finally, false reports, while the site doesn't currently have site guidelines on this topic, I have seen plenty of members report others on a wide range of ridiculously fake to serious allegations simply because another member chose not to respond to their messages or, after multiple messages exchanged, decided they didn't want to speak with them anymore for one reason or another and not all of them where for negative reasons but sometimes for personal ones. Nothing will make a moderator want to ban a member more than someone who deliberately makes false reports thinking they'll get someone banned when none of the site rules have been broken and has therefore wasted our time.

Ending this on a positive note though, thank you to those that do report members who either aren't suited for this site or are otherwise breaking the site rules. All of you are who help keep this site the way it is and for those who strive to use it as intended! So a big thank you to all of you and keep up the awesome work!

Mark

I'm happy to announce that @Sideon has joined the team as a new moderator. On this occasion we were particularly looking for someone who was deeply integrated in our forum community. Also of significance is Sideon's website technical knowledge and an abundance of forum management experience.

As a reminder, moderators are given complete freedom in their roles. They moderate with the principles of maintaining the welcoming and peaceful environment here, acting with equality between the three member types (enthusiast, client, pro), and finally encouraging openness and respect.

Mark

The rules section has been updated to mention our policy on threads that focus on gender:

"We allow gender focused threads but disallow threads that intend to, or evolve to, prevent contribution based on gender."

The spirit of this rule may also apply to other group focused threads.

Mark

The rules section has been updated with our policy on Covid-19 misinformation:

Accurate information is critical for something as serious as Covid-19, particularly for a cuddling community. For this reason, we may intervene in response to misinformation, fake news or conspiracy theories on this subject.

Mark

Added guidance on emojis:

For the purpose of equality in thread exposure, we ask that you only use one emoji at the end of the title. Anything beyond can be removed at the discretion of the moderators.

Mark

@CharlesThePoet has decided to step down as moderator for personal reasons. We completely support him in doing that. He did a great job and will always be welcome to join the team again in the future.

@SuperManCuddles has agreed to join the moderator team. EDIT: He has since stepped down.

Sideon

Behave. Be kind, to yourselves, to each other, and to the moderators here: @Babichev , @netrunner , @Shake49 , @Mark , and @Gary .

This vibrant, diverse, and dynamic community here is what YOU put into it. Gentle reminder that you've heard before, but ya'll are used to me repeating myself:

• please lay off the personal attacks,
• think twice and then one more time before posting,
• and do expect the mods and community to continue their vigilance in keeping CC a safe space for all.

Mark

The team have recently discussed the subject of community events and have arrived at the guidelines below.

Event outreach on the forum:

• Is allowed via a new thread.
• We may move it to the 'Requests' forum if we think it's motivated by self-promotion or a business agenda.

Event outreach via private message is allowed if:

• A selective approach is attempted. Think carefully about whether the recipient is likely to appreciate your message.
• Not sent from a Pro if the event has a financial element involved.
• No links to payment pages until a recipient is aware of that aspect and still expressed interest.

In any case, event outreach is at our discretion and we will assess on a case-by-case basis.

Mark

Covid-19 rule update:

The Covid-19 misinformation rule was introduced when the world was in an emergency state. While it's still important, we are now softening this rule.

Moderators will review any such reports with a focus on the website being linked to rather than a poster's claim or interpretation of source material. Applicable posts may be edited with a note about the linked website. We do not desire to be the adjudicators of truth. While not perfect, Snopes will be our primary reference point.

Mark

Added this rule to specifically cover privacy relating to screenshots:

Screenshots: We strongly discourage sharing of conversation screenshots. If you choose to do so, it's required that you redact any personally identifiable elements before posting (e.g. usernames). You should also redact any conversational parts that could hint at who that member might be.

Mark

@Sideon has stepped down as moderator. I am immensely grateful for his service. It is hoped that he will rejoin the team next year when his circumstances allow for it.

Mark

Please note our current moderator policy on threats:

Threats made to another site member, with clear evidence, will have a zero-tolerance policy and is an immediate ban from the site.

When a site moderator believes there is a risk of public safety or potential harm to individuals, they are allowed to document and report the necessary evidence on behalf of the site to law enforcement to facilitate immediate action for safety.