Chat, Reporting & Conduct

Taro Bay has four chat channels — Global, Trade, Help and, once you join one, Guild. They are the bay's town square, and like any town square they work because most people behave. This page is about the small number of rules that hold that together, what to do when someone breaks them, and what happens if you are the one who broke them.

The channels

Channel	What belongs there
Global	Anything, in moderation — the general room.
Trade	Buying, selling, price talk. Keep the shouting here.
Help	Questions from newer divers, and answers to them.
Guild	Your guild only. Nobody outside it can read a word.

Two limits keep the rooms readable: a message is 1 to 500 characters, and you can send one message every 2 seconds, up to 10 per minute. Hit either and you get told; nothing is lost, you just wait a moment.

The Guild channel is genuinely private to the guild. It is not merely hidden in the interface — messages in it are never handed out to anyone who is not a member.

The rules, short version

The binding text is the Rules page linked in the footer of the site. The version you need in your head while typing is this:

• Nothing illegal. That is the hard floor, and it has no exceptions.
• No harassment, no hate, no going after who someone is.
• No spam, no advertising, no scam attempts — including "trade" offers that are not trades.
• No sexual or gratuitously violent content.
• Don't hand out other people's personal details.

Nothing you write in chat is checked before it appears. There is no word filter, and no automatic system decides anything about your messages, your character name or your account. A person looks at each case. That is a deliberate choice, and if it ever changes you will read it on the Rules page first.

Reporting a message

Every message somebody else wrote carries a small flag next to the timestamp. That is the report button.

1. Click the flag on the message you mean. The form quotes it back so you can see you picked the right line.
2. Pick what is wrong with it — illegal content, harassment or hate, spam or scam, sexual or violent content, or something else.
3. Add a sentence if it helps. Optional, but context makes a decision faster.
4. Send.

You get a confirmation on the spot that the report arrived. A person then reads it and decides, and you are told the outcome by email to the address on your account. Reporting the same message twice does nothing bad — you simply get the same confirmation again.

The flag is not the same button as "Report" in the sidebar. That one is for bugs and ideas and goes to our bug tracker; it is the right door for "the market page broke" and the wrong one for "this person is threatening me". If you would rather write to a human directly, hello@tarobay.io reaches us either way.

You cannot report your own messages, and you cannot report the little system lines that announce level-ups and achievements — those are written by the game, not by a player.

If a decision goes against you

Two things can happen to you, and both come with a reason.

A message is hidden. It disappears from the channel for everybody. You are told which rule it ran into.

Your chat is paused. You can still read every channel and play everything else — the pause is on writing, and only on writing. It has an end date, and where the composer normally sits you will see the date and the ground the decision rests on. Repeat cases get longer pauses; the worst cases can end an account.

In either case you are told what happened and which rule it was based on, by email to your account address. If you think the decision is wrong, write to hello@tarobay.io — a person reads it, looks at the case again, and answers you. Your right to take the matter to a court is untouched by any of this.

A note on tone

None of the above is the interesting part of the bay. The interesting part is that the Help channel answers questions within a minute, that people call out good market prices in Trade, and that a guild chat is where a diving run stops being solitaire. The rules exist so that keeps working — not the other way round.