Community guidelines

Comments and the live chat on streams are for people who work in and around aviation to add what a story leaves out: experience, context, sources and reasoned disagreement. These guidelines cover both. They say what belongs here, what does not, and what happens when something goes wrong.

Who can comment

You need an account and a display name of 2 to 40 characters. Your display name, and the job area you choose to show, appear next to everything you post. We never take a name from your Google or Apple account without you choosing it. You can change your name once every 30 days. Names that pose as Terminair or its staff (such as "admin" or "moderator") are not accepted.

What is welcome

• First-hand knowledge, with care for anything confidential to your employer.
• Corrections and extra context, ideally with a source.
• Disagreement with the story, a column or another reader, argued on the substance.
• Questions to other readers.

What is not allowed

Anything illegal, including:

• threats of violence, and content that encourages or supports terrorism;
• child sexual abuse material, or anything that sexualises children;
• stirring up hatred on grounds of race, religion or sexual orientation;
• encouraging or assisting suicide or serious self-harm;
• fraud and scams, and offers of illegal goods such as drugs or weapons;
• sharing intimate images of anyone without their consent;
• harassment or stalking.

Also not allowed:

• abuse, slurs and personal attacks, including against a person or group for who they are;
• someone else's personal details, such as an address, phone number or roster;
• security-sensitive information, such as access codes, security procedures or vulnerabilities in a system;
• spam, advertising, and the same message posted again and again;
• pretending to be another person or organisation;
• copying long passages of other people's work.

Checks before a comment appears

Comments appear straight away; no person reads them first. Some simple checks run when you post, and a comment that fails one is not posted and you are told why:

• at most 2,000 characters and 2 links;
• no words from a list of slurs and abuse, in English and Turkish;
• no more than 5 comments in 10 minutes, and not the same text twice within 24 hours.

You can edit a comment for 10 minutes after posting it, and delete it at any time. A deleted comment that others have replied to stays in place as "[deleted]", without your name or text, so the replies still make sense.

Live chat on streams

A stream is a page for a topic or a big event, with its stories and a live chat. Anyone can read the chat; to write in it you need an account with a display name, as for comments. Everything above about what is and is not allowed applies to the chat too. Chat moves fast and is harder to review than comments, so it has tighter limits:

• at most 500 characters and 1 link per message, with the same word checks as comments;
• one message every 10 seconds in a stream, and no more than 30 messages in 10 minutes across streams;
• messages cannot be edited; you can delete your own at any time, and it disappears for everyone watching;
• messages are deleted automatically 30 days after they are posted.

Chat messages are reported, hidden and reviewed exactly as comments are (below). A hidden or removed message disappears for everyone watching at once. An account that is stopped from commenting is also stopped from chatting, and while stopped it cannot edit, vote on or report comments either.

Reporting a comment or a chat message

Every comment and chat message has a report option. Choose the reason that fits best: illegal, harassment, spam or other, and add a short note if it helps. You can report a comment or message once, you cannot report your own, and your account must be at least 24 hours old. The person you report is not told who reported them.

What happens next

1. The first report on a comment or message alerts us by email. Reports of illegal content are looked at first.
2. When 3 people have reported a comment or message, it is hidden from everyone until we have reviewed it. A hidden comment's author still sees it, marked as under review.
3. A person at Terminair reviews it against these guidelines and the law. We aim to do so within two working days. We either restore it, which clears its reports, or remove it.
4. For serious or repeated breaches we stop an account from commenting and chatting, and we may close it under our terms. Where the law requires it, we report illegal content to the authorities.

We keep a record of each decision (what was decided, when, by whom, and the text of the comment or message, also after the message itself has been deleted) to meet our duties under the Online Safety Act. How we handle personal data is in the privacy policy.

If you think we got it wrong

If we removed your comment or message or stopped your account from commenting, or you disagree with what we did about a comment you reported, write to hello@terminair.com with the subject "Appeal". Include a link to the story, column or stream and, if you can, the text of the comment or message. We will look at the decision again and reply within two working days.

Contact

Terminair is operated by AppDragons Ltd, United Kingdom. Anything else about comments or chat: hello@terminair.com.

Last updated 4 October 2026