Safety and acceptable use

Acceptable Use Rules

Version 2.0 · applies to this release from its deployment

These rules apply to all users, regardless of age, and all content they submit or share on CompositeBid, including profiles, manufacturing enquiries, listings, opportunity responses and private messages. Do not create, upload, share or link to content prohibited by these rules.

Content that is not allowed

• Pornographic content: Material made mainly or solely for sexual arousal.
• Suicide content: Content that encourages, promotes or gives instructions for suicide.
• Self-harm content: Content that encourages, promotes or gives instructions for deliberate self-injury.
• Eating-disorder content: Content that encourages, promotes or gives instructions for an eating disorder or behaviours associated with one.
• Abusive content: Insults, threats, degrading or dehumanising content directed at a person, including because of race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion or lack of religion, sex, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, or gender reassignment. Other threatening or abusive conduct remains prohibited too.
• Hatred: Content stirring up hatred, hostility or violence against people because of any of those characteristics.
• Bullying: Intimidation, humiliation, harassment or other abusive targeting of a person, including repeated unwanted conduct and serious one-off incidents.
• Violent instructions: Content encouraging, promoting or giving instructions for serious violence against a person.
• Graphic human violence: Graphic depictions of actual or realistic serious violence against a person, or of a person’s serious injury.
• Graphic animal or fictional-creature violence: Graphic depictions of actual or realistic serious violence against, or serious injury to, an animal or fictional creature.
• Harmful substances: Content encouraging someone to swallow, inject, inhale or otherwise administer to themselves a physically harmful substance, or a harmful quantity of a substance.
• Dangerous stunts or challenges: Content encouraging, promoting or instructing a stunt or challenge highly likely to seriously injure the participant or someone else.
• Harmful body-stigma content: Content that shames or degrades people because of their body or appearance in a way likely to cause significant harm to children.
• Harmful depression content: Content promoting hopelessness, worthlessness or depressive thinking in a way likely to cause significant harm to children. Describing depression or asking for help is not itself prohibited.

Context matters

These rules do not ban lawful, non-harmful manufacturing discussion, resin or chemical safety information, material data, aerospace engineering, defence procurement, neutral engineering instructions, or legitimate health and safety discussion merely because they mention hazards. They do not ban someone asking for help or sharing non-graphic safety, prevention or recovery information. Reviewers consider the content and context, including whether descriptions provide harmful instructions that can be followed. An educational, technical or recovery label does not excuse material that meets a prohibited category. No exception permits classified, export-controlled or unauthorised confidential material.

Other safeguards

The rules also prohibit child sexual exploitation or abuse, grooming, illegal content, fraud, impersonation, malware, unauthorised disclosure of personal or confidential information, classified or controlled technical data, spam and unrelated marketing. Private messaging is opportunity-specific and text-only; do not exchange personal telephone numbers or email addresses in messages or evade platform safeguards.

Reporting, evidence and appeals

Use Report beside a message or the public Complaints page for any safety concern, including a supplier response. You may report on someone else’s behalf. Do not repeat harmful material unnecessarily. Administrators do not routinely inspect ordinary private messages; reported content and limited nearby context are preserved for restricted review. We do not routinely disclose a reporter’s identity, but limited disclosure may be necessary to assess a complaint fairly or meet a legal duty. Identified breaches may be hidden, accounts restricted and evidence preserved. Complaints are acknowledged on screen with a reference. The Complaints page explains indicative times and possible outcomes. You can opt out of all non-ephemeral complaint communications without stopping the review. Users affected by a moderation decision can request reconsideration through the same complaint/appeal route. We record decisions and corrections and restore content or access where appropriate and possible. We do not promise a particular outcome or disclose another person’s confidential account details.

Report a concern or appeal · Safety information and support · Terms of Use

Acceptance

Before sending a private message, each participant accepts the current rules for that conversation. CompositeBid records the accepting user, conversation, document version and hash, session and time. Earlier acceptances are retained.