Community rules
Last updated 16 September 2026
Draft. BiteBooks has not launched, and this page still needs the company details and the registered copyright agent before it is binding on anyone.
BiteBooks is for complete short stories. Horror, romance, science fiction, fan fiction, things that happened to you. The rules below exist so that writing here is worth doing and reading here is safe.
Ratings
| Label | What it covers | Who sees it |
|---|---|---|
| Everyone | Most stories, including ones with swearing, a fight, or a death. Fiction is allowed to use everyday language. | Everyone. |
| Mature 16+ | Two or more of: a lot of strong language, sexual references, violence, drug use, suicide or self-harm as a subject. Or any one of: sexual violence, sexual acts described in words, sustained gore. | Only readers who turned it on. Off for guests and off by default. |
Explicit sexual content is not allowed. Sexual themes without explicit description are allowed under Mature 16+ with the matching content warning.
Never allowed
- Sexualisation of anyone under eighteen, in any form, including fiction.
- Harassment of, or private information about, a real person.
- Hatred directed at people for who they are.
- Encouraging suicide or self-harm.
- Passing off someone else's writing as your own.
- Pretending to be someone you are not.
- Spam, and stories written to game the feed rather than to be read.
These are removed on sight and repeat offenders lose their accounts. There is no warning ladder for the first item on that list.
Labelling your own work
You choose the rating, the genres, the tags and the content warnings. An automated check runs when you publish, on our own servers, and nobody reads your story to do it. It can raise a rating that was set too low. It never lowers one and never edits your words. Swearing on its own changes nothing. A few things are held for a person to look at while the story stays visible to your followers: slurs, instructions for self-harm, and explicit sexual description.
If you used AI to help write a Bite, say so with the disclosure switch. We cannot prove it either way, so this one runs on trust and on readers noticing.
Reporting
Every story, writer and series can be reported, blocked or muted. A story you report disappears for you straight away. Reports are reviewed within 24 hours. The outcomes are: leave it, hide it, remove it, or close the account.
Blocking hides everything that person writes from you, and hides you from them. Muting only hides their work.
Duplicates
Publishing the same text twice is refused. A story very close to one already here by the same writer is marked a repost. One very close to another writer's work goes to a human to look at.
Credits
The automated check usesobscenity by Joseph Liu (MIT licence), and the Turkish word list from theList of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words, © Shutterstock, Inc., used underCreative Commons Attribution 4.0.