The rules we are starting with

Since this opened this morning I have been asked three times what the rules are, so let me put them where they can be pointed at rather than repeated.

We will not publish anything that identifies a private person. No full names of people who did not agree to be in a story, no hostel or room or department plus a description that narrows it to one human being, no photographs of somebody else, no phone numbers or handles. If you send a piece and the identifying detail is the whole point, that is not a story we can run — and I say that as a person who reads plenty of pieces where the identifying detail feels necessary.

We will not publish a threat, a pile-on, or a piece whose purpose is to make a named group smaller. Rage is allowed. Contempt for a category of people is not, and neither is the version of it that pretends to be a joke about how things are.

We will not publish fiction as fact. If a piece is imagined, say so in the piece and we will label it. A reader giving you their evening is trusting you about what is real, and that trust is the entire product.

We will not run advertising dressed as a story. Sponsored things will be labelled if we ever take money for them, and today we do not.

And the one thing we will always do: we will tell you when we are not going to publish something, in a sentence you can act on. Not silence, not a form rejection pasted from a template. A reason, so you can decide whether to change it or send it somewhere else. An editor who cannot say why is not editing, they are filtering.

Two more notes on how this works in practice, because they matter more than the list above. First, moderation runs on every submission, including the ones we like, and a piece that trips it stays private with a note to you. Second, and this one is unusual: you can ask us to take a published story down at any time, and we will, without an argument. A publication that holds your story hostage is not anonymous, it is just a promise with an extraction problem.

That is the whole rulebook. Four refusals and a removal route. If you think we have got one of them wrong, write to us at the address on the contact page and I will read it myself — the inbox is small enough for that today, and I hope it stays that way for a while.