Home Ward Community Guidelines
What Home Ward is for
Home Ward is a place for wards, congregations and families to share ordinary good news. It is for adults 18 and over, in the United States. ⚠️ Once a post is published, any signed-in Home Ward member can see it, except a member you have blocked or who has blocked you; while your account is banned, it is hidden from other members. Choosing your ward or your friends changes what you see, not who can see you.
Home Ward is independent, and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
What is not allowed
- Harassment and abuse. Targeting, demeaning or intimidating another person.
- Hate speech. Attacking people over race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.
- Sexual content. Nudity and sexually explicit imagery.
- Violence and gore. Graphic violence, or threatening or encouraging it.
- Sexual content involving minors. Absolutely prohibited, without exception. We report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
- Other people's private information. Contact details, financial details, credentials or identifiers belonging to someone else.
- Harmful falsehoods. Claims that are demonstrably false, presented as fact, that could cause real-world harm — for example to someone's health, or to an election.
- Scams and spam. Fraud, deceptive schemes, and bulk unwanted posting.
- Impersonation. Presenting yourself as someone you are not, including using a photograph of another person as your profile picture, or a display name that presents you as someone you are not (see Display names).
- Content you have no right to share, including other people's copyrighted work.
- Intimate images shared without consent — whether or not the person shown is a member, and even if the image was first shared privately. An intimate image of a minor is treated as sexual content involving a minor.
Writing about your own distress is not a rule violation. See If someone may be in crisis.
Display names
Your display name must not present you as Home Ward staff, as the Home Ward brand, as a named leader of the Church, or as deity. A named leader is a current general leader of the Church, or a past prophet named with a title. These are not impersonation on their own:
- a name you share with someone else — names are shared, and a real name from any language or culture is never a violation because part of it, or its meaning in another language, looks like something else;
- a church title beside an ordinary name, such as "Sister Jensen" or "Elder Smith", or beside a surname alone;
- a past leader's name without a title, a well-known person's name, and scriptural or devotional given names, such as Nephi, Moroni or Alma.
The other rules on this page apply to names too: a name that is sexual, hateful, harassing, or used to advertise or to share contact details breaks them, and a profane name may be held for a person, as profane posts may. A name suggesting someone may be at risk of harming themselves is not a violation. A name using certain reserved words, such as "Home Ward", "admin" or "moderator", is refused when you type it.
⚠️ When name review is on, a new name you choose is seen only by you until a review accepts it. It is judged as a name, in whatever language or script it is written. A machine never declines a name: a name the review is unsure about is held for a person to decide, and so is a name suggesting someone may be at risk of harming themselves.
How review actually works
No post, reply or attached photo is visible to anyone else until review has cleared it. A new post or reply is created hidden, visible only to you, and enters the feed when review clears it. A post with photos publishes only when the text clears and every photo is approved.
- Some clear violations are removed or blocked automatically, with no person involved — for example explicit nudity, or text our review judges to be clearly hateful or harassing.
- Borderline content is not. It is held for a person, who may decide to publish it. Profane content may be held for a person in the same way.
- Posts and replies whose language is not English, or can't be worked out, are not decided by a machine. They wait for a person.
- If review breaks, nothing publishes. Content stays hidden rather than going out unchecked.
- Editing a post sends it back through review and hides it until the new decision lands.
- Content that is already visible can later be removed — by a person, or by review that looks at it again — and a person can put a removed post or reply back.
- At times we may send more content to a person before it publishes.
- We limit how often an account can post, upload photos, file reports and act on friend requests.
We do not publish a target response time for reviewing content or reports, because we do not yet measure one and would rather not promise something we cannot show.
What we can do
For content, a person at Home Ward can remove a post or a reply and put it back, reject a held photo — which removes its post, and a post removed that way cannot be put back — and reset a display name that breaks these Guidelines to a neutral one. A reset is not a penalty on your account, and we do not promise to tell you when it happens.
For accounts there are exactly three states — active, suspended and banned. A suspension or ban withdraws posting, replying, liking, sending and accepting friend requests, and appearing in or using member lookup and ward rosters. A suspended member can still read Home Ward. A suspension or ban lasts until a person at Home Ward lifts it; neither ends automatically.
⚠️ No restriction ever takes away your ability to block someone, to report someone, to change your email address or password, to contact us, or to delete your account. A ban also hides that account's posts, replies, photos and profile picture from other members, and restoring the account brings back what the ban hid.
We never show one member another member's enforcement status. There is no badge and no marker, and in the app, content hidden because of a ban looks exactly like content its author deleted.
We do not operate a "zero tolerance" rule, and we would rather not claim one: the response is meant to be proportionate to what happened.
Profile photos and verification
⚠️ When profile verification is required, an account whose profile photo a person has not yet confirmed matches a selfie can read Home Ward, but cannot post, reply, like, or send or accept friend requests, and does not appear in or use member lookup or ward rosters. A verified account's profile photo must show only you, and changing it starts the check again.
Reporting and blocking
You can report a post, a reply, or a member, with a reason and a note — including a member who is impersonating someone, by their name or their photo. Reports raising someone's safety, or that a member may be too young for Home Ward, go to the top of the queue. If you report that you are worried about someone's safety, the app also shows you the 988 crisis line.
- Reporting is never taken away from you. A suspended or banned member can still report, and blocking someone does not stop you reporting them.
- Blocking hides each of you from the other wherever content appears, and stops replies and likes in both directions. You can still open the profile of someone you blocked, so that you can unblock them. Muting is narrower — it only removes someone from your feed.
- You cannot report your own content or your own account.
- ⚠️ We do not tell you the outcome of a report you file. That is deliberate: telling a reporter what happened to someone else's account would disclose that person's enforcement status.
If someone may be in crisis
A post or reply suggesting someone may be at risk of harming themselves is never removed automatically for that reason alone: it is held for a person rather than published, and its author is shown crisis resources — in the United States, call or text 988. Expressing distress is not a violation, and nothing is counted against your account for it.
Child safety
Sexual content involving minors is prohibited without exception. ⚠️ When matching against known child sexual abuse material is on, photos and verification selfies are checked against it; a match is blocked and preserved, the account is suspended automatically, and a person reports it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Intimate images shared without consent
If an intimate image of you has been shared without your consent, report it in the app (choose "something else"), or write to legal@home-ward.com — you do not need a Home Ward account to do that. Whether an image was shared with consent is a person's decision; no automated system makes it.
If you disagree with a decision
We do not promise to tell you each time we remove your content, or why. A post of yours that has been removed is marked in the app as needing your attention. You can ask a person to look at a decision about your content or your account again by writing to support@home-ward.com. We promise no particular outcome or timeframe, and a post removed because one of its photos was rejected cannot be put back.
⚠️ We do not promise to warn you before acting, and there is no warning step in the product.