Community Guidelines

Version 2.0 · Effective August 25, 2026 · Last updated August 25, 2026

The whole thing in one line. Rova is meant to feel like a good neighbourhood — post like your name is on it, treat people like you will see them at a simcha next week, and if something is wrong, report it and we will look.

What Rova is for

Rova is a place for the Jewish community to share ordinary life — the food, the family, the businesses, the block. It works when people feel safe enough to be themselves in front of their neighbours. These Guidelines exist to protect that feeling, and they apply to everything on Rova: posts, reels, stories, comments, captions, usernames, bios, profile photos, and direct messages.

They are part of our Terms of Service. Breaking them can cost you your content or your account.

Never, under any circumstances

These are the lines that do not move. Content in this list is removed on sight, the account is usually terminated on the first offence, and where the law requires it we report to the authorities.

Anything involving the sexual exploitation or endangerment of a child. This includes sexualised imagery of minors, grooming, soliciting, and any attempt to make contact with a minor for sexual purposes. There is no context in which this is tolerated, no appeal, and we preserve evidence and report it.
Credible threats of violence against a person, a group, a shul, a school, or any place.
Terrorism, violent extremism, or organised hate — including support for, praise of, or recruitment on behalf of any such group or act.
Intimate images shared without consent, and threats to share them.
Content encouraging suicide or self-harm, or that instructs on how to do it.
Human trafficking, or the sale of people, weapons, or illegal drugs.

Treat people decently

No harassment or bullying. Repeated unwanted contact, pile-ons, mockery of someone’s appearance, family, or observance, and abuse in someone’s comments or messages all count.
No hate. Attacking or dehumanising people because of religion, ethnicity, race, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, or serious illness has no place here. This includes antisemitism, and it includes hate directed at any other group — a Jewish space that tolerated the second while condemning the first would be worth nothing.
No outing or doxxing. Do not post someone’s address, phone number, workplace, financial details, identity documents, or private family matters without their consent.
No arguing through someone’s grief. Communal tragedy is not a place to score points.
Machlokes happens. Disagreement is fine and often the point. Contempt is not. Argue with the idea, not with the person’s worth.

Keep it clean

Rova is a mixed community with a wide range of observance, and it is used by families. We ask everyone to post accordingly:

No nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit content of any kind, in any part of the app.
No graphic violence or gore posted for shock. Documenting something newsworthy is different from posting a body — use judgement, add context, and expect us to use judgement too.
Modesty is a personal standard, and Rova does not police yours. We do not remove a photo because a sleeve is short or a head is uncovered, and we are not the arbiter of anyone’s observance. If you want a feed stricter than the community default, the controls that work today are Hidden words and Block. You will also find a Modesty Mode switch in Settings — it currently saves your preference and nothing more. We are still designing what it should filter, with input from across the community, and we would rather tell you that here than let you believe a filter is running when it is not. When it does something, we will say so.
No promotion of illegal activity, and nothing that helps someone break the law.

Be who you say you are

No impersonation. Do not pretend to be another person, a rabbi, an organisation, a business, or Rova itself. Fan and parody accounts must say so clearly in the name and the bio.
No fake engagement. Do not buy followers or likes, run engagement rings, or use bots.
No spam or scams. That covers mass unsolicited messages, deceptive links, phishing, fake giveaways, chain messages, MLM recruitment, and “investment opportunities”.
Ban evasion. If we remove your account, do not come back under another one.
One person, one identity. Multiple accounts are fine — a personal one and a business one, for instance. Multiple accounts used to harass, evade, or deceive are not.

Post what is yours

Only post what you made or have permission to share.
Music is the one everyone gets wrong. A song you did not write or licence belongs to someone — including music playing in the background of a video you filmed yourself, and any clip saved from Instagram or TikTok. The licence those apps hold is theirs, and it does not travel to Rova.
Credit people. Not a legal requirement, just the right thing.
Do not scrape Rova, and do not use what is posted here to train an AI model. What people share with their neighbours is not a dataset.
If your work has been posted by someone else, Terms §10 explains how to have it taken down.

If someone is in danger

If you believe someone is at immediate risk of harming themselves or another person, contact your local emergency services first — in the United States, call or text 911, or reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988. Then report the content to us so we can act on our side. We are not an emergency service and we cannot respond at the speed one can.

Reporting, and what happens next

Every post and every account has a Report option behind the ••• menu — tap it, pick a reason, and you are done. To report a comment, a story, or a direct message, or if something is urgent, email support@rova-app.com with the subject “Safety Concern”. It reaches the same people, it is checked every day, and it is acted on to the same deadline.

Reports are confidential — the person you report is never told who reported them.

We review reports and act on objectionable content within 24 hours, and we prioritise anything involving a minor, a threat, or an imminent risk ahead of everything else.

What we do depends on what happened and whether it has happened before:

A warning, and the content removed — for a first, minor breach.
A temporary limit on posting, commenting, or messaging — for something repeated.
Removal from discovery — for accounts that are technically within the rules but consistently corrosive.
Termination — for anything in the “Never” list, for serious or repeated breaches, and for ban evasion.

How we actually decide — and what we do not do

Two things worth saying out loud, because most platforms leave them vague:

A person makes the call, every time. No account here is suspended by an automated system, and no appeal is answered by one. If we get something wrong, there is a human who got it wrong and a human who will look again.
We do not scan everything before it appears. Rova does not run automated screening over every upload. We rely on these published rules, on the controls in your own hands, and on acting fast when something is reported. We would rather you knew that than assumed a machine was checking.

We also do not read your direct messages in the ordinary course of running Rova — the database itself only lets the two people in a conversation see it. If a message is reported to us and we need it to investigate a serious safety issue, or if we are legally compelled, we may look at that specific message. That is the whole of it.

If we get it wrong

We will sometimes get it wrong, and we would rather hear about it than not. Reply to the notice we send you, or write to support@rova-app.com with the subject “Appeal”. A person — not a machine — will look again and answer you, and we restore anything we removed in error.

Your own controls

You do not have to wait for us to shape your experience. In the app you can block anyone — from the ••• menu on their profile or on any of their posts — make your account private, hide comments containing words you choose, decide who can comment on your posts and who can message you, and turn off notifications you do not want. Blocking is enforced by our servers, so a blocked account cannot reach you, and Settings → Blocked accounts lets you undo it.

Rova offers Block and Hidden words, and deliberately nothing in between. Block is honest and total; hidden words filters content rather than people. We do not build quiet half-measures that limit a specific person invisibly — if you do not want to see someone, block them.

These will change

Communities change and so do the ways people find to be unpleasant in them. We will update these Guidelines as we learn, and we will date every change. If you think a rule here is wrong, tell us — support@rova-app.com. This is your community, and we would rather build it with you.