Welcome to the Oriel Community — Guidelines

Welcome to the Oriel Community

This forum is a place to ask questions, share setups, and help shape Oriel. We keep it small, kind, and useful.

What this forum is for

  • Getting help with setup or unexpected behavior
  • Asking “how do I…” questions
  • Sharing how you use Oriel — what works, what doesn’t
  • Suggesting features or improvements
  • Talking with the team

Three ground rules

1. Be kind to people

Disagree with ideas, not with people. We’re all here because we care about cameras and family. If a thread starts feeling sharp, take a breath before replying. Reports go to the team, not the person you’re disagreeing with.

2. Keep it on-topic

Posts should be about Oriel, your camera setup, related home-tech topics, or the kind of conversations these naturally lead to. Promotional posts for unrelated products, crypto, AI tools, etc. will be removed.

3. Don’t share private information

Don’t post:

  • Other people’s photos or video without their consent
  • Personal details about other forum members
  • Your own login credentials, payment info, or session tokens (we will never ask)

If you need to send something private to the team, use direct message or email [email protected].

What gets you flagged or banned

In rough order of severity:

Behavior First time Repeated
Off-topic spam, ads Post removed Account suspended
Personal attacks, harassment Post removed + warning Suspended → banned
Sharing someone’s private content Post removed + warning Banned, no exceptions
Linking to malware, phishing, illegal content Banned immediately
Multiple accounts to evade moderation Banned immediately

We err on the side of warnings for first-time mistakes. We don’t argue with bans for the rules above.

How moderation works

  • Active moderators: the Oriel team, a small staff for now (we’re a tiny company)
  • Trust levels: Discourse’s built-in TL0–TL4. The longer you participate constructively, the more permissions you get (editing wiki posts, creating tags, etc.)
  • Flagging: anyone can flag a post. Three flags auto-hide the post pending review
  • Appeals: if you think a moderation action was a mistake, message the team

Privacy

This forum is hosted on infrastructure we control. We collect what Discourse collects (email, IP, posts you write). We don’t sell anything to third parties. The Oriel privacy policy at Privacy Policy — Oriel applies; the forum-specific notes:

  • Your email is never shown publicly unless you choose to add it to your profile
  • IP addresses are visible to staff for moderation purposes only
  • You can delete your account at any time — Discourse anonymizes your posts (replaces username with “user1234” but keeps content for thread coherence)

A note from the founder

I (Steven) read every post in this forum personally for now. That’ll change as the community grows, but for the first few hundred users I’m here. If something’s broken, frustrating, or just a question I haven’t answered well — DM me.

— Steven, founder