---
title: Moderation guide
description: The pre-live gate, what it blocks, and what is still coming.
---

Every deploy passes the pre-live gate before it can serve anything. There
is no after-live crawl and no self-serve appeal yet — both are coming.

## The pre-live gate

The gate reads what visitors can read: JSX text, string literals and
template parts in `.ts/.tsx/.js/.jsx/.mjs` (imports, URLs, CSS classes,
comments and identifiers are skipped), `.html`/`.md`/`.txt` files, JSON
strings under `public/`, SVG text, SQL string literals in migrations and
seeds, the prerendered `dist/` HTML, and the slug plus app name.

Only new text is checked: each string is hashed, and chunks cleared for
the app before are skipped. Caps: 3000 files, 256 KiB each, 8 MiB of
text — over the caps the deploy is blocked as `too_large_to_review`.

New chunks go to Jev (`typesafe/jev-1.14.0` on Workers AI via AI Gateway).
Jev's decision, per chunk:

| Signal | Result |
| --- | --- |
| `profanity ≥ 0.5` | block (`profanity`) |
| `minors > 0.3`, `phishing > 0.9`, or `round(severity) == 3` | block (`harmful`) plus admin queue |
| `hate ≥ 0.5` | recorded for the admin queue, never blocks |

Mild words ("damn", "hell", "crap") pass. Masked spellings, leetspeak
and other languages are read by the classifier itself — there is no
wordlist to evade or allowlist to join.

A blocked deploy keeps the commit on `main` and the previous version
keeps serving. `commit` returns `blocked` with the file, the line, the
score and an excerpt — the excerpt is the chunk's own first 100
characters, unmasked — so fix those lines and commit again. It counts as
a code change, and it is never a rollback target.

When Jev is unreachable, the deploy fails **closed**: nothing goes live
and `commit` returns `failed` with `review_unavailable`. (On localhost
dev without the Cloudflare pair the gate logs a warning and passes —
production always classifies.)

## Coming

- **After-live crawl**: rendered pages are not re-checked yet, so
  visitor-written text that only appears at runtime is not covered.
- **Appeals**: there is no `request_review` tool and no self-serve
  override yet. When a human disagrees with a block, relay the
  `user_message` verbatim instead of inventing a workaround.

## Sources

- Gate decisions and caps: `crates/outer/src/moderation/gate.rs`,
  `crates/outer/src/moderation/extract.rs`
- Jev client and fail-closed behavior:
  `crates/outer/src/moderation/jev.rs`,
  `crates/outer/src/deploy/pipeline.rs` (`review_gate`)