How Staffroom moderation works

Nothing anyone writes in the Staffroom is public until a person has read it and said yes. This page says what happens to a comment on the way, what is never published, and what we keep.

Who can post

Grown-ups with a Peabody account, signed in with their password, who say they are 18 or older and agree to the house rules. You post under a pen name chosen from suggestions, such as “Quiet Heron 41”, and a role you choose (shown as “says they are a classroom teacher”; we don’t check it). Your email and your account stay private. Reading needs no account.

What happens to a comment

1. In your browser, as you type. A word check tells you what can’t be sent (swearing, sexual words, emails, phone numbers, social handles, links that aren’t to Peabody, street addresses, student numbers) and what to look at again (what looks like a name, a school, injuries, drinking, selling). Then you check how it will look and confirm before it’s sent.
2. On our server. The same word check runs again, with limits per account and per connection, and a cap of 50 new comments a day across the whole Staffroom, 5 a day per pen name (2 for a pen name with a comment that came back in the last month). When the day’s cap is reached, the box says so.
3. An AI screen. An AI model (Anthropic’s Claude Haiku) reads the comment against a strict list: anything that could identify a child, detailed violence, self-harm, a child at risk, threats, sexual content, drink and drugs, harassment, accusations, selling, and dodged swearing. It only sorts the moderator’s list and highlights words. It never publishes anything, and a comment it couldn’t read waits like the rest.
4. A person. A moderator reads every comment, with what the checks found highlighted, and either publishes it, publishes it with a phrase replaced by […] (you get a note saying so), sends it back to you with a reason, or doesn’t publish it. Every decision is logged: who, what, when and why.
5. After it’s published. Anyone can report a comment. When three different people have reported it, it’s hidden until a moderator looks again.

We aim to read the list at least twice a day, morning and evening (Mountain time), so most comments are decided within a few hours, and anything urgent within an hour while someone is awake.

What is never published

• Anything that says you may hurt yourself. You see support lines straight away. A moderator reads it and may leave you a private, kind note on your Staffroom page.
• Anything that says a child may be at risk. You see what to do instead: your school’s safeguarding lead, child protective services, or Childhelp (1-800-422-4453). A comment can’t help a child; those people can.
• Threats of violence. A moderator is alerted at once.

These are kept for the moderator and can never be published: our database refuses it, whoever asks. When we would share anything with the authorities, and how long we keep these messages, is being set with our lawyer before the Staffroom opens.

What we keep

• Your pen name, your role, when you said you are 18 or older and agreed to the rules, tied to your Peabody account.
• Each comment as you sent it, the version shown (if a phrase was replaced), what the checks found, and the decision with its reason.
• For a report: the reason, and a one-way scramble of the reporter’s account or connection, so one person counts once. Never the account or the address itself.
• The moderation log, even after a comment is deleted, because it is our record of what we did and why.

The comment and the page it was about are sent to the AI model for the screen, and to nobody else. How long we keep comments that weren’t published is being set with our lawyer before the Staffroom opens; our plan is to delete them 90 days after the decision.

Taking a comment back

You can delete any of your comments from your Staffroom page, published or not. A message about someone’s safety stays with the moderator.

If you disagree with a decision

Write to hello@peabody.kids with your pen name and the page. A person will read it. You can also send the comment again in other words.

Why it’s this careful

Peabody Teach lives at teach.peabody.kids. The .kids registry’s rules cover the whole domain, and anyone can complain to it; a complaint about one comment could put the children’s site at risk. So nothing goes up without a person’s yes, the house rules are the registry’s rules written for teachers, and if a complaint ever reaches us we can hide every comment at once while we look.

No ads, no selling, and nothing about you is sold or shared for marketing. See also privacy.