Oneira IRL community guidelines

What belongs here.

Oneira IRL is a public gallery. Anyone can open it, including people who never agreed to appear in it. These rules exist to protect them first, and you second. They are short on purpose.

Every photo is reviewed before it appears.

Nothing you upload goes live on its own. Every photo arrives in a review queue and waits for a person to decide. Comments are held the same way — nothing a stranger typed shows up under someone’s photograph until a human has read it.

There is no setting that skips this and no way to ask for it to be skipped. If your photo takes a while to appear, that is the reason.

People in your photos.

If someone is recognisable in your photograph, you need their permission to publish it. If they are a child, you need their parent’s or guardian’s permission.

“I took it in public” is not the same as “I may publish it.” Standing on a pavement usually makes a photo legal to take. It does not make the person in it agree to being on a public website, in a printed book, indefinitely, beside a place name. Those are different things. Ask.

If you cannot ask — they walked on, you never spoke — then do not post a frame where they are identifiable.

When you upload, you have to confirm that anyone identifiable has given you permission. The upload is refused outright if you do not, and your answer is stored alongside the photo so a later dispute can be answered from the record rather than from memory.

Photographing children.

Be more careful than you think you need to be. This is the one place where we would rather you posted nothing at all than guessed.

• Get permission from the parent or guardian. Every time, including for a child you know.
• Never post a photo that shows where a child is, where they go to school, or the route they take to get there.
• Never post a photo of a child alone in a place where they could be found.
• No swimwear, no underwear, no bathing, no changing. Even innocently. Even your own child.
• No school uniforms, name badges, house numbers, or team kit with a name on it.

A report about a child’s safety jumps the queue, and the photo is pulled out of the gallery straight away — before a moderator has read the report. That will sometimes hide a harmless photo for a few hours. We are fine with that trade.

If you are under 18.

You have to be at least 13 to have an Oneira IRL account. Under 13 we refuse the signup outright — there is no cut-down junior version, because a child that age cannot meaningfully agree to a public gallery.

If your profile says you are under 18, two things are true no matter what you pick in your settings:

• No location is shown on your photos. The server drops it before the page is built, so the preference cannot be turned back on.
• No city is shown on your profile.

This is not a punishment and it is not a comment on your judgement. Publishing where you take photographs is a decision with consequences that arrive years later, and it is deliberately not left as a checkbox for a 15-year-old to tick on a Tuesday.

What the labels mean.

Nothing in this gallery is labelled a verified capture, and nothing can be yet. Verification means the camera signs the frame at the moment it is taken, and that firmware has not shipped. Until it does, we have no way to prove a file came off an Oneira.

So every photo here reads “Shot on Oneira — Metadata Unavailable”. That label means we do not know. It is not a soft yes. EXIF text can be typed into any file in ten seconds, and a serial number is printed on the hardware, so neither one proves anything — and a badge that claimed otherwise would be a false statement about someone else’s work.

If you used AI, say so when you upload. Declared AI work is labelled as AI work. Presenting a generated image as a photograph is a reportable violation.

Location and EXIF.

Exact coordinates are never published, in any form, to anyone.

• The image a visitor sees — and the file they can download — has its metadata stripped. Open it in an EXIF viewer and there is no GPS in it.
• The most a photo shows publicly is a coarse place name, like “Portland, OR”, and only if you chose to show one. Never for a creator under 18.
• Your original file, metadata intact, is kept in a private store that is never served to the public. A moderator can open it briefly to answer a safety question.

We keep precise coordinates privately rather than discarding them because a child-safety report sometimes turns on where a photo was taken. They are never part of a public response and never reach the gallery.

Reporting a photo.

If you have an account, use the report control on the photo and pick the reason honestly — the reason decides how fast it moves.

Five reasons hide the photo immediately, before any human has read the report: a child’s safety, sexual content, someone who did not consent to being in it, exposed private information, and illegal activity. Everything else goes into the queue for review.

Removal is real removal. Gallery images are served through short-lived links rather than permanent addresses, so a photo that comes down stops loading — it does not keep serving from a URL somebody saved.

If you break these rules.

• First, the photo comes down.
• Then, if it happens again, your account is suspended.
• Then a permanent ban, for repeat violations or for a severe one.
• Anything involving a child is severe the first time.

Every moderation decision — who hid a photo, who published one, and why — is written to a log that cannot be edited or deleted afterwards. Including by us.