Trust and safety

Every campaign is read before it goes live

A campaign cannot publish itself. It is submitted, a person reviews it against the rules below, and it is approved, sent back for changes, or rejected with a reason. Nothing on the platform reaches the public without passing through that.

Review is not verification. A reviewer checks that a campaign is what it says it is, is allowed to be funded, and is not somebody else’s work. They are not in a position to confirm that a creator can manufacture what they have drawn — which is why a pledge is described everywhere on this platform as funding an attempt.

What is not allowed

• Prohibited items — things the platform does not allow to be funded at all.
• Misrepresentation — a campaign that states something untrue about itself.
• Work that is not the creator’s own, or that uses somebody else’s intellectual property.
• Offensive material, and content that targets people for who they are.
• Spam, and campaigns that exist to advertise something else.
• Fraud — where there is reason to believe nobody intends to deliver.

Reporting something

A campaign, a comment or an account can be reported by anybody with an IdeaNest account. A report goes to a moderator, not to an automatic filter: nothing disappears because five people objected to it, and a report is a request for a person to look.

Reporting the same thing twice does not add weight — the second report returns the first one. Reports are not public, and the account being reported is not told who reported it.

Your money

Card details never reach IdeaNest’s own servers; payments go through the provider’s hosted fields. While a campaign is running your pledge is an authorisation rather than a charge, and a campaign that misses its goal takes nothing at all.

Every payment operation is idempotent, which is the unglamorous property that matters most: a request that is retried because a connection dropped produces one pledge and one charge, not two.

Your account and your data

• Two-factor authentication is available on every account and required before a payout. Set it up under two-factor authentication.
• Every signed-in device is listed under devices, and any of them can be signed out from any other.
• Shipping addresses are encrypted at rest and are visible to a creator only for the campaign you backed.
• A copy of your data is a download, and closing your account keeps it for thirty days before anonymising it — so a closure made in anger, or by somebody else, can be undone. Both are under data and closure.

What we cannot do

IdeaNest cannot make a campaign deliver. What it can do is keep the record honest: a campaign’s updates, its comments and the way to report it are all on the campaign’s own page, where somebody deciding whether to back it will see them.

A creator can moderate comments on their own campaign, and a removed one does not vanish — the row stays, marked as removed. A comment thread that has been cleaned out therefore still looks like one, which is the point: a page with nothing on it and a page with twelve removals are different things, and a reader is entitled to tell them apart.