Community roles & trust

• The two ladders

  

  The two scores are mostly separate, with one link: a removed post lowers both your posting trust and your moderation trust. Bad posting reflects on judgment, so it costs −1 moderation trust on top of the posting-trust penalty. Moderation failures (false reports, bad calls) only cost moderation trust — they leave posting trust alone.

  A moderator who's had posts removed also takes a hit on the moderation side: −1 per removed post, plus another −2 if they themselves approved a post that was later removed.

• New Collector

  Collector trust starts at 0. Every post publishes immediately and is checked in the background while it's confirmed — see how moderation works. Other users see the post normally, and you don't need to do anything. Approvals earn trust:

  • +1 when a tagged practitioner approves your Showcase.
  • +0.5 when a community moderator approves a Showcase-without-practitioner or Collection / Model post.

  A rejection at the content-check step (your post enters review and a reviewer rejects it for nudity, violence, hate, AI-generated, off-topic, etc.) costs −1 collector trust and removes the post from public feeds. The −1 is refunded if you successfully dispute the rejection. This is separate from report-driven removals: rejections are a reviewer's call before the post settles in, while reports happen on already-published posts. The two paths use different penalty scales:

  • Rejection at review (any reason): −1, refunded on a successful dispute.
  • Removed post after an upheld report: −2 for the first, −3 for the second, −8 with a posting suspension on the third. These do not get refunded — the report system is the final word.

• Trusted Collector

  At 10 collector trust you become a Trusted Collector. Your posts skip review and publish straight to the feed with no background check. They can still be reported once live, like anyone else's.

  If your trust falls back below 10, you lose the Trusted Collector title until you earn it back.

• Member (the starting position on the right ladder)

  From day one, anyone can report posts. Moderation trust is a reporting-credibility score for everyone, and a moderation-accuracy score for practitioners specifically. Every collector, practitioner, or studio earns and loses moderation trust whenever they report. An upheld report earns +2 for the reporter. A false report costs −1 for a regular user, or −3 for a community moderator, senior moderator, or moderation admin — the people whose job is calling moderation accurately are held to a higher standard. Admins are exempt from both directions.

  For collectors and studios, moderation trust only ever functions as a reporting-credibility gate: at −5 the report button is paused until trust recovers. It does not unlock review work — the moderator queue work below is reserved for practitioners, with one administrative exception (Moderation Admin, see Non-practitioner moderators below).

  Practitioners have one extra source: approving a Showcase post that tagged them earns +1 moderation trust for the validation work.

• Community Moderator

  At 10 moderation trust a practitioner becomes a Community Moderator. This adds two queues to their account:

  • Discipline-matched Showcase reviews — Showcase posts without a tagged practitioner, in their discipline only (a tattoo moderator only sees tattoo posts).
  • Collection / Model reviews — multi-practitioner or full-body posts. Any community moderator can pick these up.

  It also routes reports to them. First-to-act decides keep-or-remove; a Senior Moderator confirms. A confirmed call earns +1 moderation trust; an overturned call costs −2.

  If a moderator approved a post that later gets removed by report, they lose −2 moderation trust. This applies whether they approved as a tagged practitioner or as a community moderator.

  Collectors and studios do not pick up moderator queue work even at 10+ moderation trust — see the next section.

• Senior Moderator

  At 35 moderation trust a practitioner becomes a Senior Moderator. Two responsibilities come with the role:

  • Confirming moderator decisions on reports. When a community moderator decides keep-or-remove, a Senior Moderator (or admin) confirms or overturns the call.
  • Resolving collector disputes. When a collector challenges a rejection, the senior moderator reviews the case fresh and decides whether to overturn or uphold it.

  While the platform is young and the senior pool is small, the admin team handles overflow at this tier directly.

• Non-practitioner moderators

  Moderator and Senior Moderator are reserved for practitioner accounts because reviewing post content well requires domain expertise — a tattoo artist can tell whether a tattoo post is real work, a piercer for piercings, etc. Collectors and studios consume the content but don't have that practitioner-level lens to judge reports reliably.

  The escape hatch is Moderation Admin — an administrative role granted out of band by the InkMap admin team to hired or trusted operators (community managers, ops staff, etc.). A Moderation Admin can be any account type and bypasses both the discipline filter and the practitioner-only gate, picking up every queue across every discipline. It's not earned through the trust ladder; it's awarded explicitly.

  If you're a collector or studio and want to help with moderation, the path is to reach out to the admin team for a Moderation Admin grant — building your moderation trust through accurate reports won't auto-promote you because the organic ladder is practitioner-only.

• Studios

  Studios can report posts and earn moderation trust through valid reports — the report system is open to every account, and the −5 reporting suspension applies to studios just like everyone else.

  A studio also takes the −1 moderation cross-penalty on every one of its own posts that gets removed by report, same as collectors and practitioners. The studio's posting-trust drops on the studio_posting ladder (see next section) and its moderation trust drops by an additional −1 per upheld report — so a studio whose own posts keep getting taken down can lose the report button just like any other account.

• Studio posting trust

  Studios run a separate posting-trust ladder from the collector one — the two scores never touch. A studio is trusted by default: there's no "Trusted Studio" tier to climb to, and the score only ever goes down. Studio posts publish immediately and skip community-tagging review entirely. If something is wrong with a studio post, the report system handles it: reports against a studio post route straight to a moderator (no tagged-practitioner step), and the moderator's decision is final.

  When a studio post is removed after an upheld report, the studio's posting trust drops by the same offense ladder collectors use, and the studio also takes the cross-mod hit on its moderation trust:

  • First removed post: −2 posting trust + −1 moderation trust (cross-mod).
  • Second removed post: −3 posting trust + −1 moderation trust (cross-mod).
  • Third removed post: −8 posting trust + −1 moderation trust (cross-mod) + posting suspension. While suspended, the studio cannot create new posts; existing studio posts stay visible.

  Recovery. While posting trust sits below 0, the studio earns +1 posting trust per week automatically, all the way back up to 0. So a studio whose posting trust was slammed to −8 is restored to clean over roughly eight weeks of no further removals. (Collectors and practitioners follow a different rule — for them the weekly tick stops at −4 because they also have organic ways to climb back through approved posts. Studios don't have an organic path, so the weekly recovery carries them the full distance.)

  Offense counter resets in two situations:

  • 60 days clean since the last removed post. A background job checks every day; once 60 days pass, the counter clears and — if the studio's posting trust is still negative from a stale suspension — it's nudged back up to 0 at the same time. The reset shows up in Settings → Warnings & Trust → History as "60-day offense counter reset" so the studio can see it landed. If posting trust is already at 0 or above, only the counter clears (positive scores are never overwritten).
  • Posting trust climbs back to 0 or above (for example after a successful dispute on the latest removal, or admin adjustment). The counter resets at the same moment.

  Either way, after a reset the studio walks onto the offense ladder at the first rung on the next removal, not the slammer. Studios don't earn posting trust upward beyond the default — there's no "Trusted Studio" tier to climb to — so the focus is simply to avoid the offense ladder.

• Losing standing

  Moderation trust goes down for:

  • False reports — −1 for a regular user, −3 for a community moderator, senior moderator, or moderation admin. Admins skip the penalty entirely.
  • Bad moderation calls (overturned by a Senior Moderator, or by an admin on a report-driven dispute) — −2.
  • Bad validations (a post you approved was later removed by report) — −2.

  At −5 moderation trust the report button is suspended until your trust recovers. Recovery is +1 per week automatically, up to 0.

  Sock-puppet cap. Only the first two upheld reports against the same person per month pay out the +2 reward. Further reports still remove the offending post; they just don't increase your moderation trust.

• When an earlier call gets flipped

  Sometimes a call gets reversed later — an upheld report is overturned on dispute, or a dismissed report comes back and sticks the second time around. When that happens, every party who was scored on the first call gets that score wiped, and then takes the opposite-side hit they would have taken if the second call had been the first. Your audit history (Settings → Warnings & Trust → History) shows both rows: the original delta, and the reversal, so you can trace what changed.

  Concretely: if you reported a post and got +2 for an upheld report, and that post is later republished on dispute, your +2 is removed and you take the false-report penalty instead. If a moderator earned +1 for a confirmed call and that call is later overturned, the +1 is removed and they take −2 for the overturned call. Same in reverse for dismiss → re-uphold. The principle is the same across all roles — reporters, community mods, senior mods, validators, and the post creator themselves.

• When the system is being refined

  InkMap is still pre-launch. The trust system as documented above is the live behaviour — no open refinements at the moment. If you hit a case that doesn't match what's documented above, that's worth flagging — write to the support team and we'll fold it into the next refinement pass.

Frequently asked questions

I'm a collector. Can I become a moderator?

Not through the organic moderation-trust ladder — the Moderator and Senior Moderator tiers are reserved for practitioner accounts (tattoo artists, piercers, laser, body mod, PMU). Building your moderation trust as a collector still matters as a reporting-credibility score (false reports drag it down toward the −5 suspension), but it won't auto-promote you to review work. If you're a trusted collector who wants to help with moderation, the path is a Moderation Admin grant from the InkMap admin team — that's the canonical path for non-practitioner moderators and bypasses every filter (see "Non-practitioner moderators" above).

I'm a studio. Can I become a moderator?

Same answer as the collector question above — the organic ladder is practitioner-only because moderation is discipline-matched and a studio can host practitioners from any discipline. Studios who need moderation powers take the Moderation Admin path.

Is there a moderator pay or perks system?

Not at launch. The roles are voluntary.

Can I refuse review work once I'm a moderator?

Yes. Items in your queue stay there until you act on them; if you don't, they escalate to a different reviewer automatically.

What does "discipline-matched" mean?

A tattoo moderator only sees tattoo posts in their Showcase-without-practitioner queue, a piercing moderator only sees piercing posts, and so on. Matching is automatic based on the discipline of your practitioner account.