About this site

What this site is not

It is not a service. Nobody here can contact a platform for you, get something taken down, identify who is behind an account, or intervene in what is happening to you.

It is not a crisis line and it is not legal advice. Where something needs a police force, a lawyer or a support organisation, the honest thing this site can do is say so and point you at the people who do that work.

It is also not neutral about severity. Stalking, doxxing and organised harassment campaigns are a different category of act, not the far end of a spectrum, and they are kept separate on purpose because treating them as continuous with an argument is how real harm gets minimised.

Why it is named after advice it questions

The name is the most repeated piece of advice on the internet, and this site does not simply endorse it.

The guidance began as a rule about amplification, aimed at people with an audience, and it travelled from there into personal advice for anyone being targeted. Those are not the same situation, and the case for it is much weaker in the second than the first. Disengaging is often right; told to someone facing a coordinated campaign, it can also be a way of making their problem their own fault.

The site is named after the phrase because that is what people search for and argue about. What it says about the phrase is set out with its evidence on the page about that advice, rather than asserted here.

Who it is written for

Someone who is being targeted right now, and wants to know what they are looking at before deciding what to do about it.

Someone who moderates a community and needs to tell a bad-faith pattern from a difficult member.

A parent or a teacher trying to understand what is happening to someone younger.

A journalist or researcher who needs a named, sourced vocabulary rather than a folk one.

What this site refuses to publish

Four rules, enforced by the build rather than by good intentions — an editorial standard nobody can bypass under time pressure is the only kind that survives.

No operational detail. Explaining how a tactic works is the point; supplying a usable method for carrying it out is not, and a page that crosses that line does not build.

No naming of private individuals. Cases are described by pattern, never by person.

No legal conclusions in our own voice. Where the law matters, a named authority is quoted saying it, because whether something is unlawful depends on a jurisdiction and on facts this site cannot see.

Nothing coined. Every term here is one people already use, and each page has to state where the term comes from before it can be published. Note the narrower thing that claim is: the term is always someone else's, but the one-line summary at the top of a page is sometimes ours rather than a dictionary's — and where it is, the page says so in as many words.

How anything factual here is checked

Every factual claim carries an exact quote from a named source, and a copy of that source is archived when the claim is published and stored alongside the site's own code. On every build the quote is checked, word for word, against the archived copy. If it stops matching, the site does not build.

That is a higher bar than checking whether a citation link works. A link that resolves proves a source exists. It does not prove the source says what the sentence citing it claims, and that is the failure that actually misleads people.

Every quote is also read by a person against the surrounding text before it is published, because a quotation can be accurate and still mean the opposite of what it is offered for.

Who writes it

The site is published without a byline, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

Cataloguing the tactics used to harass people, in public, under a real name, invites the exact behaviour the site documents. Several of the pages here describe what organised harassment does to the people who write about it.

Anonymity costs something, and the cost is that you cannot weigh this site by its author. What is offered instead is stronger than a biography: every factual claim is traceable to a named source, quoted, archived and checkable by you without taking anything here on trust. Judge it on that.

How it is paid for

It is not. There are no advertisements, no affiliate links, no sponsored placements, nothing for sale, and no reader data sold or shared with anybody.

That matters more on this subject than most. A site about manipulation that quietly had something to sell you would be demonstrating the problem rather than explaining it.

What is here so far

The tactic table names 58 tactics and 4 red lines. Of those, 11 tactics and 3 red lines have a full page written so far. There are also 3 pages on responding and on the psychology behind it. Together they rest on 38 checked claims drawn from 20 archived sources.

Everything else in the table is defined where it sits — in the table itself and on its escalation-level page — rather than given a page of its own, because a stub exists to fill a grid rather than to help anyone.

This is an incomplete reference and will be for a long time. Every page has to be sourced before it can be published, which is slow on purpose. See how that works.

What is collected about you

This site uses Google Analytics on every page, including the pages about stalking and harassment. It records things like which pages are visited, roughly where in the world from, and what kind of device — the ordinary aggregate traffic measures.

You should know that before you decide how to read a site on this subject, particularly if the device you are using is not fully your own. A browser's private mode, or a browser extension that blocks analytics, prevents it.

Nothing is loaded that tracks errors or behaviour inside your browser session, and there is no advertising network on any page here.