Community guidelines for platforms with user conduct and moderation rules

Platform terms and community guidelines usually do different jobs. Terms and conditions often cover the legal relationship, account rules, payments, liability and platform rights more broadly. Community guidelines are usually more practical and behaviour-focused, setting out what users can post, how they must interact, what is prohibited and what moderation action may follow. If your platform relies on user-generated content, messaging, reviews, listings or community features, separate guidelines can make enforcement clearer and easier to communicate to users and moderators.

They often cover acceptable behaviour, prohibited content, harassment or abuse rules, misleading or unlawful content, reporting channels, moderation discretion, repeat breach consequences and complaint or appeal pathways. Depending on the platform, the document may also address seller or creator conduct, impersonation, spam, misuse of ratings, unsafe content and account suspension. The wording should line up with how your platform actually works, including whether users can upload material, message each other, transact, join groups or interact in public forums.

The main factors are your platform features, user types and moderation model. For example, a marketplace, learning community and social platform may each need different rules on listings, comments, messaging, reviews or creator content. How you collect, use and disclose information will shape both the drafting and the advice, so the right drafting and advice depend on For Community Guidelines For Platforms, the wording should follow your real information flows. For Community Guidelines For Platforms, collection points and disclosure practices shape the drafting. information. We also look at how reports are received, who makes moderation decisions and whether you already have platform terms or internal policies in place.

No. This page covers the legal drafting or review of the community guidelines document itself. It does not include technical implementation, building moderation tools, reviewing every user workflow, security remediation or representing you in disputes with users. If you need broader support, that can be scoped separately. As part of the document work, we can still flag where your written rules should reflect your reporting and moderation setup, because the factual process often matters as much as the wording when enforcement issues arise.

Once the service is ordered, we gather the practical details of your platform, such as the user journey, community features, moderation approach and any existing terms or policies. Your lawyer then prepares the guidelines and may ask follow-up questions where the platform setup affects the wording. Timing depends on the complexity of the platform and how quickly instructions are confirmed. This service is for the document and related legal drafting work, not ongoing representation or a full compliance audit across every part of the business.

Just submit an enquiry via this page or click the 'get started' button on our website to submit an enquiry. After you've submitted an enquiry, one of our legal consultants will review your enquiry within 1 business day and get in touch to get a better idea of exactly what you are looking for.

Then your legal consultant will send through an email with a bit more information about the services you need, along with a fixed fee quote setting out costs, scope of the service and timing. Have a read through it, and if you're happy with the scope, you can accept and sign our engagement letter online - easy!

Once you've formally accepted, we'll connect you with a specialist lawyer and they will work with you to complete your project. They will contact you by email or phone if they need to get in touch.

Sprintlaw works on fixed-fee pricing wherever possible, so you can review the scope and cost before you decide whether to proceed. For the Community Guidelines For Platforms service, pricing starts from $900.00.

After you enquire, a legal consultant will confirm what is included, the expected timing and whether any extra work is needed before you engage us.

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Our legal team is made up of experienced lawyers, who are specialists in various areas of law and hold an Australian legal practising certificate. None of our Sprintlaw lawyers are New Zealand qualified lawyers and they do not currently hold a New Zealand practising certificate.

They provide legal services working remotely from Australia via our 'legal consultancy' model, through which (under section 6 and section 35 of the New Zealand Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006) our Australian legal team are permitted to provide legal services to New Zealand businesses provided they do not provide services in certain 'reserved' areas of law. You can read our FAQ page to learn a bit more about our 'legal consultancy' model.

Given the strong similarities between Australian and New Zealand law, and the areas of law in which we practice (being small business and startup law), we do not view the fact that our lawyers have not qualified in New Zealand as having any substantive impact on the quality of our service. We are committed to ensuring that we provide high quality, affordable legal services to all our New Zealand clients.

Our legal team have all trained at leading firms, but have left the traditional corporate law world to join us on our mission to create a new and better way of delivering legal services. They have specialist expertise in technology law, intellectual property law, contract drafting and review, corporate law and commercial law.