Safety and moderation

Text chat only, on purpose

There is no voice chat on Galatrix. That is a design decision, not a missing feature.

Voice is the hardest thing on any social platform to keep safe. It cannot be filtered as it happens, it cannot be reviewed after the fact without recording everyone, and it is where the worst behaviour towards younger players tends to happen. Text can be filtered, muted and looked at afterwards when someone reports it. So the communication channel here is text, in-room, with moderation applied to it.

Practically, that means the trade-off is real and we accept it: coordinating a team is clumsier by typing. It is worth it.

What keeps chat usable

Three layers, from automatic to human.

Filtering. Chat runs through a profanity filter before it reaches other people.

Mutes. Moderation can mute an account so it can no longer post. That is enforced on the server, not in the sender’s own client, so a muted account cannot talk its way around it.

Guests cannot post. Anyone playing without an account can read chat but not write to it. It removes the throwaway-identity problem from the text channel entirely: to say something to strangers, you have to be someone.

Blocking, and reporting

These are two different tools and it is worth knowing which one you want.

Blocking is for you. You block an account and you stop having to deal with them — they cannot message you and you are no longer exposed to them. It takes effect immediately, it does not require anyone to agree with you, and nobody reviews it. Use it freely; it costs nothing.

Reporting is for the platform. You file a report with a reason (inappropriate content, spam, harassment, hate speech, cheating, impersonation, copyright violation, or other) and a box for the details. That report goes into a queue a human works through.

Report the thing you want acted on rather than the person you are annoyed with, and put the specifics in the details box. “They were being rude” is much harder to act on than what was actually said, where, and when.

What happens to a report

A moderator reviews it and resolves it. Depending on what they find, the outcome can be a mute, a temporary ban, a permanent ban, or action against a published world rather than an account. Bans have an appeal status, so a decision is not necessarily the end of the conversation.

Moderation is a limited role, separate from full administration. The people reviewing reports have the powers the job needs and not the run of the platform, and their actions are logged.

What we will not do is narrate the outcome of someone else’s report to you. If you reported a player, you will not get a case file back. That protects the person on the other end from being harassed over a report, and it protects you from the same.

Every published world is reviewed

This is the part most platforms do not do, and it is the biggest single safety difference here.

A creator cannot make a world public by themselves. Publishing submits the world; a moderator opens it and either approves it, which puts it in the lobby, or rejects it with written feedback explaining what needs to change. A rejected world can be fixed and resubmitted.

The effect is that the worlds you can find on the platform have each been looked at by a person at least once. It is not a guarantee. Review catches what review can catch, and a world can change after approval, so worlds can also be suspended after the fact when something is reported.

If you find something in a live world that should not be there, report it. That is the mechanism that covers the gap between “reviewed once” and “fine forever”.

Younger players

You must be at least 13 to create an account, and we ask you to confirm your age when you sign up. Some countries set a higher minimum age for online services, and where that applies it governs instead. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use Galatrix only with a parent or guardian involved — the terms of use set out what that means for them.

If we become aware of an account belonging to someone under 13, we close it and delete the personal information attached to it. If you believe one exists, report it. What we collect and how long we keep it is in the privacy policy, including how to ask for your data to be exported or deleted.

For a parent deciding whether this is suitable: the useful facts are that there is no voice chat, that text chat is filtered and moderated, that a player with no account cannot talk to anyone, and that every published world has been through review.

The honest limits

No moderation system catches everything, and one that claimed to would be lying. Filters miss things. Review is a person with finite time. Bans are per account, and accounts are cheap to make.

What that means for you is that the tools worth using are the immediate ones: block first, then report. Blocking works instantly and needs nobody’s permission. Reporting is how a pattern gets seen — and patterns are what actually get acted on, which is why reporting something that already stopped happening is still worth doing.

Where to go next

Playing on Galatrix covers the practical side — guests versus accounts, what carries between worlds, and how joining works.