Community Principles

Pain is welcome. Harm is not.
That's the whole rule. Everything below is just what it means in practice.

This is a healing space, not a free-speech arena

Plenty of the internet exists for arguing. This isn't that. People come here at two in the morning holding something they can't say anywhere else, and the only thing that makes it possible is knowing what they'll get back. So we protect the tone deliberately, and we'd rather lose a user than lose the safety.

What is always welcome

Anything you feel about your own life, however dark it looks written down:

• missing someone who is gone, or who left;
• heartbreak, loneliness, the kind of night that doesn't seem to end;
• regret, shame, guilt, the thing you never got to say;
• exhaustion, numbness, feeling like a burden;
• fear about the future, and hope for it too.

None of that is "negativity" to be cleaned up. That's a person telling the truth, which is the hardest thing anyone does here.

What is never allowed

The line is simple: expressing your own pain, yes. Aiming something at another person, no.

1. Attacks on a particular person — insults, curses, exposing who someone is, calling for others to go after them. Whether they are a user here or somebody named in a whisper.
2. Mocking or belittling someone's pain — "get over it", "that's pathetic", "other people have it far worse", laughing at what someone just risked saying.
3. Teaching or encouraging self-harm — describing a method, urging someone to end their life, explaining how it is done. Writing that you feel this way about yourself is allowed; telling someone else how to act on it is not.
4. Threats and violence — against anyone, including violent fantasies about a named person.
5. Discrimination based on sex, sexuality, race, nationality, religion, disability, appearance, or class.
6. Advertising, recruiting, asking for contact details — promotion of any kind, pulling people into private chats, leaving a WeChat, an email or a social handle. Contact details are masked automatically.
7. Sexual content that is explicit rather than a feeling. Anything sexual involving a minor: zero tolerance, removed on the first report.
8. Spam — meaningless repetition, gibberish, walls of emoji.

Bullying is the one to name twice, because it can be done without a single banned word: following one person from balloon to balloon, answering everything they write. That is why one device can leave at most three replies on the same whisper.

How to reply well

You don't have to fix anything. Nobody here expects advice, and most of the time advice isn't what helps.

• Say what you'd say if this were your friend, sitting next to you.
• "I read this. You're not alone tonight" is enough. It is often the best reply on the whole page.
• Don't start with "at least…". Don't compare their pain to yours to shrink it.
• If you don't know what to say, leave a light instead of typing. It's a real answer.

One sincere sentence can keep a stranger company for a very long time.

Kindness Guard

We call the protection Kindness Guard rather than "moderation", because its job isn't to police speech — it's to keep this one quality of air. It works in layers:

• Filters. Contact details — email, phone numbers, messaging handles — are masked before anything is saved, and a list of outright slurs is refused outright.
• Something that actually reads it. Every whisper and every reply is read by a moderation model as it is written, in any language. A keyword list only ever covered Chinese and English; this is what covers the rest.
• It fails in your favour, on purpose. The only thing refused outright is content that could get someone hurt: a method written out in enough detail to follow, a threat against a real person, sexual content involving a child. Nothing you write about your own pain can reach that line, however dark it is — and if the model is down or unsure, your whisper goes up. We would far rather review an attack afterwards than refuse someone at three in the morning because a machine misread grief.
• Anything else it flags still goes up — and straight into a queue to be looked at, rather than waiting for a stranger to be hurt by it first.
• Reporting. Every whisper and every reply has its own report button. Each report runs the same check: a confirmed violation is hidden straight away. Independently of that, three reports hide it regardless — so a wrong verdict, or no verdict at all, can't keep it up.
• Replies are short and few. 150 characters, and at most three replies from one device on the same whisper. Length is what a long put-down needs and what a short kindness doesn't; the limit on repeats is there because following someone down a thread is its own kind of harm.
• A hotline that's always there. The crisis numbers sit above the box while you're writing a sorrow — not triggered by what you type, so nobody has to be flagged by a machine to be offered help.
• Hidden means hidden. Once content is hidden it's gone for everyone, including whoever wrote it. Looking your own name up still shows that it existed, and that it was removed.
• Nothing stays forever. Whispers and their replies are deleted a year after they were written — really deleted, row and words, not hidden. A sentence written at three in the morning two years ago is not the same object as the person who wrote it.

What we do, and what we can't

What we do

When you post something that matches crisis-related keywords, we'll show you a support hotline. When content or a reply is reported, we use AI to automatically judge whether it violates our guidelines; confirmed violations or reports that reach a certain count are automatically hidden. This is what we're able to do.

What we can't do

Are you all right? is fully anonymous — we don't know who you are, can't verify anyone's identity, and have no way to contact any user. We don't manually review content post by post; handling is automatic and doesn't mean a person is watching or will reach out.

Your responsibility

You're responsible for what you write and post here. If you're in real crisis, please reach out to a real support line — the hotline numbers on this page are a real course of action, this platform is not. Harmful language toward others will be handled; content that violates community guidelines will be hidden.

Disclaimer

Are you all right? does not provide counseling, medical, or legal services. We do our best to keep this a safe and warm space, but we do not take on responsibility for reviewing or moderating user-generated content.

If you're the one in danger

Why we're strict about this

A place where nobody is ever attacked is much harder to build than a place with lots of users. It's the only thing here that can't be copied, and it exists entirely because of how you answer the next person.

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