Getting hold of a person

Where to write, and what to put in it

sharedwork37@gmail.com, for all of it. The subject lines suggested further down this page are how the mail gets sorted, so using one is a favour to you rather than to us — but a message with the wrong subject still gets read.

There is no form to fill in, so a few lines of context save a round trip:

• Your handle, or the email address on the account if the handle is the thing you have forgotten.
• Which door you use. A password, Google, or Steam. For a locked account this changes what can be done more than anything else in the message.
• What happened, and roughly when. What you were doing, what you expected, and what appeared instead.
• The full link to anything you are pointing at. An address is unambiguous; “the comment on that Souls game” is a search.
• A screenshot, if it is easier than describing it. Crop it the way you would crop it for a public room.

Never send a password — not yours, not anybody else’s. Nobody here will ask for one, and it would not help: support cannot sign in as you, and a password written into an email sits in two mailboxes for as long as either of them exists. The same goes for anything copied out of your browser to prove who you are. A session cookie is a working key to your account, and pasting one into a message hands that key to everyone the message passes through on its way here. When we need to be more certain an account is yours, we will ask you something only its owner would know instead.

If you cannot sign in

This site sends no email at all. No verification message, no newsletter, and — the part that matters here — no password reset link. That keeps a great deal of machinery out of the way, and the price is that a forgotten password has no automatic way back.

One thing to try first: if you have ever signed in with Google or Steam, use that button. It is the same account rather than a second one, and it will let you straight in. The password box takes your handle or your email, either one.

Otherwise write to sharedwork37@gmail.com, with the handle, which sign-in you were using and roughly when it last worked. What can be done next depends on how much of the account can be tied to you: a Google or Steam link is something you can prove by using it, while an email address on a password account was never verified by anybody, so on its own it is a claim rather than proof. Expect to be asked for something else — the month you joined, games on your shelf, a handle you had before you changed it. That awkwardness is deliberate. An account that can be handed over on the strength of a convincing paragraph is an account anybody can take.

Deleting your account

This one is a button rather than a request. Settings, then Delete account: type your handle to confirm, and the account goes at once. What survives it, and why, is set out in the privacy policy.

If you cannot reach that button because you cannot get in, write to sharedwork37@gmail.com from the address on the account and it will be done for you. Say in the same message if a particular comment or rating has to go as well: once the account is gone nothing left behind is attributed to you, which also means nobody can work out afterwards which of it was yours.

A copy of your data, and correcting it

Most of what is stored about you is already on your screen — your profile, your ratings, your comments, your settings. For the rest, ask sharedwork37@gmail.com from the address on the account and you will get one machine-readable file with the account row, your content and any linked accounts, within 30 days.

The same address handles correcting something that is wrong, asking where a piece of information came from, objecting to a use of it, and erasing an account without touching the button. Your rights lists them properly, including the right to complain to a data protection authority rather than to us, which needs neither our permission nor our agreement.

Appealing a moderation decision

A timeout expires on its own, and waiting one out is usually faster than arguing about it. For anything longer — a removal you think was wrong, a suspension, a handle taken away — write to sharedwork37@gmail.com from the address on the account, saying what happened and what you think the decision missed.

It is read by a person, and by a different person from the one who made the call wherever there is more than one of us. The guidelines have the rest. The report button is for reporting something you have found; it is not a way to appeal, and a report written as an appeal joins the same queue as everything else.

Copyright, impersonation, and personal information

These have their own page, because they need different evidence from each other and one of them has a legal shape:

• Material that is yours, used without permission. Subject Takedown notice, and what a notice should contain is listed there.
• An account pretending to be you, or to be your studio. Handled as a rules matter, which makes it faster than a formal notice.
• Your address, phone number, workplace or private photographs, posted by somebody else. Write to sharedwork37@gmail.com or use the report button on the message itself. This category comes down on sight, and you do not have to explain yourself to get it removed.

Security problems

If you find a way to read something you should not be able to read, or to act as somebody other than yourself, write to sharedwork37@gmail.com before you tell anybody else, with enough detail to reproduce it. Good-faith reports are welcome and are not treated as an attack on the site — the terms say so. Please do not use somebody else’s account or data to demonstrate the problem; describe it and we will reproduce it ourselves.

Something is broken, or wrong, or missing

A page that will not load, a game in the catalogue with the wrong details, a feature that would obviously help: the same address, subject Support. Say which page and which browser. This is a small site, and the person reading the mail is usually the person who would fix it.

What happens after you write

A reply from a person. There is no ticket number, no queue position and no automatic acknowledgement, because there is no ticketing system — and a page claiming otherwise would only be teaching you to wait for a message that is never coming.

Anything urgent — personal information already published, threats, anything involving a child — is acted on before it is answered, so the fix can arrive ahead of the reply. If a week passes with nothing at all, send it again. Mail goes missing, and nothing here is watching for a message that never arrived.