Tell it the way it happened

1. 01

   Write from your own experience

   Write about something that happened to you, or something you were directly part of at work. Not what you heard from someone else, and not something you read about. First-hand accounts are what make this useful; second-hand ones make it a rumour mill.

2. 02

   Give context that helps

   Your role, the part of the industry, the country, the year, how the arrangement was supposed to work, what happened afterwards. Details are what let one story connect to another. Include the ones you are comfortable making public, and leave the rest out.

3. 03

   Protect yourself

   Think about what your details add up to. An exact date, one specific venue, an unusual job title, a project nobody else worked on — separately they mean nothing, together they can point straight at you. Identification usually happens by combination, not by name. Take out anything you do not need.

4. 04

   Think before naming people or companies

   You can describe what happened without identifying who did it, and a story is rarely weaker for it. Submissions that name identifiable people or companies go to additional review; details may be removed, and some are not published. Naming someone does not make an account more credible.

5. 05

   Keep private information private

   Do not include anyone's home address, private phone number, private email, financial account details, government identification or login credentials. That information will be removed, and its presence can stop a story from being published at all.

6. 06

   Use content warnings

   You can flag harassment, sexual content, violence, mental health, discrimination, threats, or other sensitive material. A warning lets readers choose their moment. It does not hide your story or make it count for less.

7. 07

   Say what happened

   Separate what happened from what you think it meant. Describe the words, the actions, the agreement, the sequence of events — then, if you want, what you took from it. Readers can weigh an account they can picture.

• Threats, or encouragement of violence against anyone.
• Targeted harassment.
• Hate speech.
• Private personal information about another person.
• Spam, advertising, or anything selling a service.
• Impersonation of a real person or organisation.
• Substantial copied content published without permission.
• Accounts that are mainly second-hand rumour.
• Submissions made in obvious bad faith.

These guidelines cannot anticipate every situation. Publication decisions sometimes come down to moderator judgment, particularly where privacy, safety or serious allegations are involved.

When you submit, your story enters the moderation queue. It is not public at that point, and nothing about it appears anywhere on the site. A person then reads it against these guidelines, and one of four things happens:

• It is published.
• It is published with edits or redactions to the public version.
• It is held for additional review.
• It is not published.

We do not promise a turnaround time. Stories involving named people or companies take longer, and we would rather be slow than careless.

When your submission is received you get a reference like AA-000027 and a private recovery code, shown once. Keep both. Together they identify your submission in our system and are what you need to ask for a correction or a withdrawal later. We only keep a one-way hash of the code, so we cannot look it up or send it to you again. A reference is not a legal filing and it is not a certificate that anything has been verified.

You are not required to display your legal name. There is no field for it in the submission flow. You choose how you appear on a published story:

• Anonymous — nothing about you is shown.
• Anonymous with your role — for example, an anonymous touring engineer.
• A pseudonym — a name you invent, shown instead of yours.

Published stories show only the identity information you chose to give, subject to moderation. We aim to keep the personal information needed to submit a story to a minimum, but no online platform can promise that anyone is technically untraceable. How the site handles technical data is described in the privacy policy.

Artists Against is a place to put an experience on the record. It is not an emergency service, a crisis line, or a legal service, and nobody here is monitoring submissions in real time. If you are in danger, contact emergency services or a support organisation where you are first. The Record will still be here afterwards.

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