Acceptable Use Policy

This policy sets out specific behaviours that are prohibited on FishTale. It supplements our Community Guidelines (which cover the spirit of the place) and our Terms of Service. Breaching this policy can result in your content being hidden, your account being suspended, or — for serious or repeated breaches — permanent ban.

1. Don't post illegal catches

• Stay within the recreational fishing rules that apply where you caught the fish — catch limits, size limits, closed seasons, method restrictions, and any species-specific protections.
• You are responsible for checking the official source. In New Zealand that is the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) for saltwater and Fish & Game New Zealand for freshwater. In other jurisdictions, your local authority. Rules change without notice — we don't maintain or enforce a copy of them inside the product.
• No protected, threatened, or endangered species. No commercial-quota species caught outside an active commercial permit.
• No prohibited methods — dynamite, poison, banned nets, undersized spearfishing, etc.

2. Don't post non-fishing content

• FishTale is for fishing. Memes, selfies without a catch, screenshots, stock photos, AI-generated "catches" — out.
• Our automated moderation runs on every photo and video upload from newer or previously-flagged accounts. Established accounts — those with a clean record, a meaningful catch history, and some account age — bypass the upload-time check but remain subject to community reports and admin review. Section 5 of the Terms explains how this works.

3. Don't post unsafe or harmful content

• No nudity, sexual content, or adult themes.
• No graphic violence beyond what's naturally part of fishing.
• No content that glorifies unsafe practices that could get other anglers hurt (drunk boating, dangerous shore stunts, etc.).
• No harassment, hate speech, slurs, or threats — in any field of your profile, your username, your bio, your gear tags, anywhere.

4. Don't infringe other people's rights

• Only post catches you actually caught. Don't pass someone else's fish off as yours.
• No copyrighted content you don't own — no scraped images, no third-party photos used without permission.
• No doxxing — no real names, addresses, phone numbers, employers, or schools belonging to anyone (including yourself).
• Don't expose someone else's favourite fishing spot if they've chosen to hide it.

5. Don't spam, scam, or sell

• No personal sales, bulk listings, or shop links in your catches or bio.
• No affiliate spam. We may roll out a sanctioned gear-link feature later — until then, no.
• One human, one account. No bot networks. No impersonation.
• No coordinated mass-reporting of other users.

6. Don't mess with the platform

• No scraping, crawling, or bulk extraction of catches, profiles, or media.
• No reverse-engineering, decompiling, or probing FishTale for vulnerabilities outside a coordinated disclosure (email support@fishtale.app if you find something).
• No attempting to defeat automated moderation, repeatedly creating new accounts to evade suspension, or otherwise gaming the trust system.
• No interfering with anyone else's use of FishTale — flooding, abuse of features, malicious payloads.

7. Don't falsify catches

• Accurate species. Accurate weight. Accurate catch date.
• Don't re-post the same fish under different species, dates, or accounts to game streaks, badges, or PB charts.
• Where FishTale exposes any automated assistance (for example, a future weight or species estimator), the value as displayed at the time of posting is the figure that stands; if you over-ride it manually, the manual figure should reflect what you actually measured.

What happens if you breach this policy

See section 5 of the Terms of Service and section 8 of the Community Guidelines for the graduated enforcement ladder and the three-strike auto-suspension threshold. Egregious breaches — illegal acts, cruelty, hate speech, doxxing — skip the ladder and go straight to suspension or permanent ban.

Last updated: May 2026