Acceptable Use Policy | The Blog Story

This policy covers how you may use the platform itself — accounts, uploads, automation and our systems. What you may publish is covered by the Content Policy; how to behave towards other people is covered by the Community Guidelines.

1. Accounts and access

Keep your credentials to yourself. Do not share an account, and do not sign in to an account that is not yours.
Do not create accounts to evade a suspension or ban, or to make it look like more people support something than actually do.
Do not attempt to obtain administrator, editor or moderator powers you have not been granted, or to reach admin or studio areas you are not entitled to.
Do not register a handle that impersonates another person, a publication, or a member of our staff. Some handles are reserved and cannot be registered.

2. Automated access

Do not scrape the site at a rate that burdens it, and do not attempt to bypass the rate limits that protect sign-in, registration, publishing, commenting, reporting, search and the contact form.
Do not use bots to publish, comment, clap, like, rate, bookmark or follow.
Public feeds and the sitemap are there for well-behaved automated clients. Use them rather than crawling pages, and identify your client honestly.
Do not use the platform's email features — subscriptions, digests or notifications — to send unsolicited bulk mail.

3. Uploads and storage

Upload only supported formats: JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF or AVIF images up to 15 MB each, and video or audio up to 100 MB each.
Each account has 500 MB of media storage. Use the Studio media library to review your usage and clear files no post refers to.
Do not use the media library as general file hosting for material unrelated to your writing, and do not upload executable or malicious files disguised as media.
Do not deliberately upload files crafted to break image processing or consume disproportionate resources.

4. Publishing limits

New accounts have a short trust period with a daily publishing cap and a limit on outbound links per post. These lift automatically. Do not try to work around them, for example by spreading a campaign across several new accounts.

5. Security

Do not probe, scan or test the security of the platform without written permission, and do not attempt to breach authentication, session handling, permissions or rate limiting.
Do not attempt to inject scripts, styles or markup through posts, comments, embeds or metadata in order to affect other users' browsers.
Do not interfere with or disrupt the service, its infrastructure, or anyone else's use of it.
If you discover a vulnerability, report it to us privately using the contact details below and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before telling anyone else. Do not access, modify or keep other people's data while investigating.

6. Third-party links and embeds

You are responsible for what you link to and what you embed. Do not link to malware, phishing pages or scams, and do not use embeds to load code intended to track or attack readers.

7. Advertising

Advertising on this site is run by the operator. Do not attempt to insert your own ad code into posts, comments or embeds, and do not generate artificial impressions or clicks on the ads that appear here.

8. Enforcement

Breaking this policy can lead to content removal, loss of access to specific features, suspension, or a permanent ban — and, for anything unlawful, referral to the authorities. Where we act against your account we aim to tell you why, and you can appeal from your appeals page.

Contact us

To report abuse of the platform, or to disclose a security issue privately, contact us:

Contact form: send us a message — you will get a reference number to quote in any follow-up.

1. Accounts and access

Keep your credentials to yourself. Do not share an account, and do not sign in to an account that is not yours.

Do not create accounts to evade a suspension or ban, or to make it look like more people support something than actually do.

Do not attempt to obtain administrator, editor or moderator powers you have not been granted, or to reach admin or studio areas you are not entitled to.

Do not register a handle that impersonates another person, a publication, or a member of our staff. Some handles are reserved and cannot be registered.

2. Automated access

Do not scrape the site at a rate that burdens it, and do not attempt to bypass the rate limits that protect sign-in, registration, publishing, commenting, reporting, search and the contact form.

Do not use bots to publish, comment, clap, like, rate, bookmark or follow.

Public feeds and the sitemap are there for well-behaved automated clients. Use them rather than crawling pages, and identify your client honestly.

Do not use the platform's email features — subscriptions, digests or notifications — to send unsolicited bulk mail.

3. Uploads and storage

Upload only supported formats: JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF or AVIF images up to 15 MB each, and video or audio up to 100 MB each.

Each account has 500 MB of media storage. Use the Studio media library to review your usage and clear files no post refers to.

Do not use the media library as general file hosting for material unrelated to your writing, and do not upload executable or malicious files disguised as media.

Do not deliberately upload files crafted to break image processing or consume disproportionate resources.

5. Security

Do not probe, scan or test the security of the platform without written permission, and do not attempt to breach authentication, session handling, permissions or rate limiting.

Do not attempt to inject scripts, styles or markup through posts, comments, embeds or metadata in order to affect other users' browsers.

Do not interfere with or disrupt the service, its infrastructure, or anyone else's use of it.

If you discover a vulnerability, report it to us privately using the contact details below and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before telling anyone else. Do not access, modify or keep other people's data while investigating.