Community guidelines
Rules for professional participation, user-generated content and moderation. Participation should improve professional understanding — not create noise, spam or lead-generation abuse.
This is a current, approved policy rather than a draft. It applies from the point community features are enabled on The Digital Chief.
1. Purpose
The Digital Chief Community is a professional discussion and knowledge environment for digital and marketing practitioners.
2. Who may participate
Reading may be available publicly on approved threads. Posting and replying requires an eligible account. Verified Professional, Expert Panel, Collective, Contributor and staff designations are controlled by us and may not be self-claimed.
3. Acceptable participation
4. Prohibited or restricted content
5. Self-promotion and commercial participation
Relevant professional experience from agencies, vendors and consultants is welcome when it directly answers the discussion and material interests are transparent. The community is not a prospecting database. Commercial members may not use participation status to imply our endorsement.
6. Showcase rules
Showcase submissions must describe real work accurately. Performance claims should be supported where practical, and qualitative outcomes must not be presented as measured fact. Client names, screenshots, data and creative may be used only where you have authority to disclose them.
7. Expert and Collective participation
Expert Panel and Collective designations indicate verified programme status, not endorsement of every statement. Experts and Collective members participate voluntarily and are not required to answer questions. Private group content is not public or quotable unless the relevant attribution and permission process is completed.
8. Moderation
We may use deterministic anti-abuse rules and AI-assisted contextual assessment to prioritise review. Consequential actions are governed by human moderators. We may edit metadata, limit distribution, hide, remove, lock or restrict content and accounts where necessary to enforce these rules, protect users or comply with law.
9. AI-assisted moderation
Approved models may classify content, identify possible spam, abuse or promotion, detect duplicates and summarise discussions. Model output is advisory for consequential moderation, and must never be the sole basis for a permanent ban or an irreversible member-status decision. See our AI policy.
10. Reporting and appeals
Members may report content. Reports are reviewed under the moderation process and logged. We provide warnings, explanations or appeal routes proportionate to the action and the risk. Bad-faith mass reporting may itself be treated as abuse.
11. Editorial use
A community post is not automatically an editorial quotation. We may use community activity as a lead or an aggregate signal, but attributable editorial use respects the stated attribution and permission context. Private or background discussions are not silently converted into public quotations.
12. Privacy and visibility
Normal member profiles are private by default. Public profile visibility and public Showcase attribution are controlled by the applicable product settings and programme rules. Community participation does not constitute consent to unrelated marketing email.
13. Intellectual property
Members retain rights in their original contributions, subject to the licence required for us to host, display, moderate, distribute and technically operate the community. Editorial derivatives are created only under the applicable editorial and attribution rules. Read this alongside the Website Terms and Contributor Terms.
14. Enforcement principles
Enforcement is proportionate, consistent and evidence-based. We distinguish professional disagreement from misconduct, and correction from deception. Serious safety, legal, fraud, impersonation or privacy risks may justify immediate restriction while human review is completed.
