Moderation

Who moderates

Twelve named facilitators, all volunteers, all with peer support training, each holding two or three circles. They are not clinicians in this role and several of them have clinical qualifications they deliberately set aside here. There are no anonymous moderators and no automated removals.

What facilitation actually looks like

The commonest intervention on this site is not a deletion. It is a facilitator stopping a conversation in which nine people are answering at once and asking the person who posted how they are actually doing. The second commonest is naming that a thread has drifted into comparison.

Facilitators are asked to intervene in public rather than by private message wherever possible, once rather than repeatedly, and to follow up with the person afterwards. A correction that is not followed by contact is just a telling-off.

Restriction talk: our working guidance

This is the guidance facilitators are given, published because members should be able to see it.

• What we watch for. Rigidity presented as discipline. Rules multiplying. Secrecy or eating alone by preference. Distress at deviating from a plan. Exercise framed as compensation. Relief at not eating. Preoccupation crowding out other subjects. Numbers appearing where they are not needed.
• How we respond. Name it once, plainly, kindly, in the open. Describe what you noticed, not what you think it means about them. Do not diagnose. Do not remove the post unless it breaks a numbers agreement.
• What we do next. Stay in the thread. Contact the member within a day. Offer support resources without requiring anything. Invite them to the recovery-aware circle if it fits, and accept a no.
• What we never do. Make it a public conversation about that member. Ask other members to weigh in. Frame it as a rule violation. Follow up more than twice unasked.

Two facilitators hold specific eating-disorder peer support training and are the point of escalation for anything in this territory.

What is edited

We edit lightly and we say when we have. Numbers removed from a circle that does not permit them. A supplier link or contact detail removed. A named individual anonymised. A phone number removed. In each case the post stays, an editorial note is appended, and the member is told.

What is removed

Sourcing offers and brokering. Anything selling anything. Advice presented as instruction on dose. Photographs of people. Contempt directed at a member or at a group of people. Content that promotes restriction, purging, fasting as a weight strategy, or any specific numeric target. Anything identifying a member or a member of clinical staff.

Suspension, and it is rare

We have suspended eleven accounts since February 2024. Nine were selling something. One was repeatedly posting numeric targets in the recovery-aware circle after being asked twice. One was persistently contemptuous about members who had stopped treatment.

Suspensions are not announced and we do not discuss individuals. There is no public shaming here, in either direction.

If you think we got it wrong

Email us and say so. It goes to two facilitators who were not involved, and one of them will reply. We have reversed decisions and we have apologised in public for getting a call wrong. Both of those are on the record in the call recaps, which is a slightly awkward way to run a community and the right one.