Hey Episode Community!
Thanks for all the great feedback you’ve shared recently on our Content Guidelines survey. We have a much better idea now about your thoughts and feelings about our guidelines, and how they shape your stories.
Based on the survey data, we can tell that you are interested in many different types of content.
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A small, but significant number of readers indicated that you’re interested in reading mostly or exclusively content geared toward a general audience.
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A majority of readers indicated that you’re interested in reading mostly or exclusively content geared towards older teens
However, a meaningful portion of our audience is under the age of 18.
So, how do we keep the content on Episode appropriate for our whole community, while still providing a platform for the stories that interest you?
In the long term, we are considering how to address the interest we are seeing in older teen content. We appreciate the suggestions that you provided through your comments on our survey. One idea we are exploring is creating a new app.
More immediately though, in order to ensure that we keep the content appropriate for our whole community, we‘ve updated our content guidelines and are providing creators with more detail on what that means for your stories.
You can find the UPDATED CONTENT GUIDELINES HERE.
What does this mean? Read below!
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Our revised Content Guidelines are linked HERE. Please read them. It is very important that you are aware that these guidelines also apply your story cards (small and large covers).
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We will be stepping up our enforcement of these guidelines across the platform starting today.
- This applies to our Episode Original content as well. We’ve just completed a review of our ads and are currently in the process of reviewing every Episode Original and story card (small and large story covers) in light of these revised guidelines
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We’ll give you 30 days from today to make the adjustments needed to meet our guidelines.
- If your story card does not meet our guidelines within these 30 days (October 10th, 2019), it will be rejected and replaced automatically with one of our story cards. You’re welcome to submit a new story card at any time after that.
- If your story doesn’t meet our guidelines within these 30 days (by October 10th, 2019), we may suspend and/or remove your story from the platform. If you update your story to be in line with our updated guidelines after that point, you can submit for us to review your changes
- These updated guidelines apply across all art styles: Classic, Ink, Limelight
- As we reach out to you, we’ll provide you with information about the guideline violation and what chapter(s) you should refer to. Note that this may not cover all the guidelines violations.
- Episode can tell you which guidelines your story breaks, but we are not able to provide you with editorial support on how to correct those issues.
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You can, as always, proactively submit your story for review, and we encourage you to do so if you have questions.
- You will need to contact our Review team through the support desk. Send them your author name, portal email address and the title and story ID for the work you would like reviewed. Stories will be reviewed in the order by which we receive the requests.
- We have greatly expanded our review team to help accommodate these requests.
After the 30 days are up, shelves or genres in the app containing community stories will be restricted to content which has passed the new guidelines and will have a limited number of stories or possibly combined with others. In addition, the trending sections will be updated weekly instead of daily.
Over time, as we are able to work through the backlog of stories requiring review, we will expand the number of stories available on the trending section and the frequency at which it updates.
- As we work towards reverting the trending section back to normal, be aware that any story that hits the Top 100 on any trending section will automatically be reviewed.
If you have questions about the guidelines, content in your story, or your story cards please reach out to our review team at our Support Desk. Because the survey also highlighted that less than half of you felt confident in your understanding of the previous guidelines, If you have suggestions on how we can help you better understand the guidelines, we’d also love to hear from you.
With love,
The Episode Team
10/01/19 UPDATE: We’ve posted an FAQ about the revised guidelines here
Seeing consent being directly acknowledged in these new guidelines is so rewarding after waiting for so long. Thank you! 
