Ability to report harmful content

[rubenwardy]

Just passing on a message from Discord

Hello,

I’m not sure if this is the right place for this, but I was looking for a suggestions channel or something similar.

Recently, I came across a European server promoting violence, drugs, and other illegal activities or highly controversial figures (to put it politely). I don’t come across servers like this every day, but when I do, I think it’s serious. There should be a “report” button to alert the Luanti community when a server promotes illegal or harmful activities.

I don’t know if it’s possible for you to prevent such a server from being listed, or to report it to European authorities or other legal entities if the situation is severe. This functionality is really missing. It’s the kind of feature I would love to see in 2026.

Protecting the community and ensuring that such servers are at least not registered in the Luanti community should have been addressed long ago.

I understand that you all work hard to improve the game, but what’s the point if servers are promoting truly harmful things like pedophilia, drugs, mass violence, or figures like Hitler?

Luanti should now tackle this issue, which affects both the reputation and the future of the community.

It’s time to protect players — children and adults alike, wherever they are. Luanti has strong European roots with developers like celeron55 and rubenwardy, but the responsibility goes beyond that. Let’s not look the other way. Let’s face this issue!

Luanti needs a way to alert or remove a server from the list if it violates European or international laws regarding child protection, glorification of crime, terrorism, or other extremely harmful content.

This is not about reporting a TNT prank — this is about genuinely serious matters.

Thanks for your consideration on this

rubenwardy: The servers page here contains a contact link that you can use to get in contact with the hoster https://servers.luanti.org/

Hi rubenwardy,

I understand that the server list is technically separate and that contacting the hoster is an option. However, the server list is part of the core game itself — it appears in the formspec when players open Luanti. It’s not an add-on, plugin, or optional package that users have to seek out. This means that every player sees these servers by default, including children and new users.

Because of this, I feel the community and core developers have a responsibility to ensure that obviously harmful or illegal content does not appear in the default list. Providing a “report server” function or some moderation mechanism inside the game would be a practical and meaningful step.

Directing players to GitHub is not a sufficient solution. Many users, especially children, don’t have emails or GitHub accounts, and casual players may never even know that platform exists. An in-game reporting system is the only way to make reporting accessible to everyone who encounters harmful content.

It’s not about taking legal responsibility for what the hoster does — it’s about protecting the player community and ensuring that Luanti does not inadvertently expose players to extremely harmful content.

I hope the team can consider implementing a system to alert or remove servers from the default list if they clearly violate laws or community safety guidelines. This is urgent for the reputation and future of Luanti.

[rubenwardy]

One thing to consider with a built-in report mechanism is the number of "but they banned me?!!!" or "someone griefed my build" reports you'll get. I'd be inclined to have a rules page (#54) and just list an email address and make it more discoverable

[loki0jma]

One thing to consider with a built-in report mechanism is the number of "but they banned me?!!!" or "someone griefed my build" reports you'll get. I'd be inclined to have a rules page (#54) and just list an email address and make it more discoverable

That's also what im kinda worried about, i guess having a link to a form with a note which makes clear in which cases you should submit a report and when not.

[sfan5]

The same users who would submit low-quality reports are unlikely to read or follow such instructions.

I'd be inclined to have a rules page (#54) and just list an email address and make it more discoverable

Yeah that sounds workable. We could also have a page in the mainmenu that provides some general explanations and guidance regarding the server list.
This page could then link to the rules website and the rules page would contain an email address.

[appgurueu]

One funny thing I've seen some platforms do is a report dialog that gives you some options, some of which lead straight to the trash bin (but the reporter doesn't know that, of course). So if the reporter answers truthfully, they'll discard their own report. Because this necessitates action by the reporter, it hopefully won't result in "this sign won't stop me because I can't read".

For example we could have: Report > select reason

• "The server moderation unjustly banned me" -> straight to trash
• "The server harbors harmful and potentially illegal content (please specify)" -> real report
• "The server is trash" -> straight to trash

[olivia-may]

My concern whoever sets the code of conduct for the serverlist could potentially abuse this to ban things they don't like personally, like for example calling servers that have lgbtq themes "child abuse". Not saying anyone here would do that but I feel like it should be considered. We should try to put our biases aside and ban things that are explicitly proven harmful like promoting terrorism, pedophilia, that kinda stuff.

[appgurueu]

We probably need separate lists / a good filtering mechanism at some point. At least an NSFW / SFW split, probably, ideally even a curated sublist for family-friendly / kid-friendly servers. I've considered writing a very simple filtering proxy for this.

Obviously the hardcore illegal and harmful stuff has to be banned on all lists, but that is not sufficient e.g. to deserve a "kid-friendly" label.
Trying to find some consensus for what is appropriate for everyone is doomed to fail. Either we are too strict, and then we piss off more mature audiences that rightfully see their freedom restricted (e.g. servers on which flirting / dating is allowed), or we are too lax, and then we piss off those who want to give their kids a safe selection of servers to choose from. ¹

See also luanti-org/luanti#16341.

Footnotes

1. Of course "watching your kids" is the responsibility of parents, but we should be giving them the tools to facilitate that. Parents should be able to "drop off" their kids in (online) safe spaces with strict moderation. ↩

[olivia-may]

Honestly I feel like servers where dating is explicitly encouraged are terrible places for children, especially with a game that both children and adults play. You see where I'm going with this? I feel like that's a common opinion.

Edit: not saying those servers should be banned. I like the idea of separating servers into SFW and NSFW, or kid-friendly and adult only. Ofc some really bad servers should be banned.

[appgurueu]

Honestly I feel like servers where dating is explicitly encouraged are terrible places for children

Well yes, nobody disagrees about that. That's exactly my point: Such cases are currently a lose-lose situation. If we ban those servers, we annoy the adults that clearly exist that want to run and play on them. If we don't ban them, parents are rightfully worried about their children landing on the wrong servers. Hence why I think that we really need a separation.

Ofc some really bad servers should be banned.

Obviously.

Really we're a bit lucky that so far there haven't been terribly many "gray area" cases. So far it's pretty much servers (a single server, even?) with little to no substance besides trying to be somehow "bad" so not much is lost when they're banned.

[rubenwardy]

So there's a few things here:

• Illegal content (under the laws of the server list jurisdiction) should be banned completely.
• Content above the age rating of the Android app (eg: USK 12) should be labelled as such in the server list and hidden on Android.
• You may want to hide certain labelled content from UK visitors completely
• There should be clear rules and a process for reporting content. Once Luanti staff has actual knowledge, there should be policies to process this within a "reasonable" timeframe. I usually interrupt this as 48 hours

Dating is likely not to be covered by this at all. That's more of a moderation sort of thing rather than a content sort of thing. We should recommend that children play online only with adult supervision

Before we add labelling support, you may want to remove content above the age rating of the app completely as a temporary thing

[rubenwardy]

One interesting thing we could do is allow mod.conf to contain content flags and then autoreport this to the serverlist. We should allow servers to self declare

[olivia-may]

I agree. Servers should self declare if they're appropriate for all ages (ex: i had an anticurse mod enabled on my server) or teen/adults only. (ex: dating servers). Maybe you could make tiered content flags, like "all ages", "teens and adults / adult supervision", and "adult only", but i'm also fine with just two flags, "all ages" and "adults only".