Community & Content Guidelines
These Community & Content Guidelines are a working draft published in good faith and pending final legal review. We may revise this text as that review completes; the Effective date above will change when we do.
What Mazedly’s shared spaces are for
Mazedly’s galleries and shared maze pages are for beautiful, creative mazes — the kind of thing you’d be proud to send to a friend or hang on a classroom wall. When you publish a maze, share a link, or upload an image to shape one, you’re adding to a space other people see. A few simple ground rules keep that space welcoming for everyone, and honestly, most of it comes down to a single idea: share your own creative work, and keep it something anyone could stumble onto without harm.
These guidelines are the friendly, human version of the rules. The enforceable detail lives in our Acceptable Use Policy, and formal copyright complaints go through our Copyright & DMCA Policy. All three sit under our Terms of Use, which bring them together. This page is here to tell you, plainly and without a wall of legalese, what belongs in Mazedly’s public spaces and what doesn’t.
Where these guidelines apply
These guidelines cover anything you make visible to others: mazes you publish, mazes that are curated into a gallery, the share links you generate, the descriptions you write, and the image masks you upload to shape a maze. Work you keep entirely to yourself and never share is just yours — our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy still apply to it, but the community rules below are specifically about what you put into shared spaces.
Mazedly gives you three deliberate, opt-in ways to make a maze public, and it helps to know which one you’re choosing:
- Share creates a private-feeling link. Anyone who has the link can open the maze, but it isn’t listed in our galleries, isn’t findable through search, and search engines aren’t invited to index it. A share link is unguessable, but it isn’t a secret — treat it like a link you’d text to a friend.
- Publish is the all-in, fully public choice. A published maze lives openly on mazedly.com: search engines can find it, it turns up in Mazedly’s own site search, and it becomes eligible for our galleries. Publishing is also the affirmative step that gives Mazedly permission to display, feature, and include your maze in galleries — we don’t take that right from a private maze, and a plain Share link doesn’t grant it. Only when you choose to Publish do you invite your maze into that public, featurable space.
- Embed is Publish plus a small snippet you can drop into another website to show your maze there.
Whichever you pick, these guidelines apply to what the public can see. And you can change your mind: mark a maze private again in your saved mazes, or delete it, and it leaves the public surfaces.
Your image mask is an image — and image rules apply to it
This one is worth saying slowly, because it’s the part people miss. A mask is an image you upload, and Mazedly uses its shape to draw the outline of your maze. Even though the finished maze is line-art, the picture you uploaded is still a picture: we process it and store it as one. That means every rule on this page applies to the mask itself, not only to the maze it produces.
So you can’t use a mask to smuggle in something that wouldn’t be allowed on its own. If the source image would break these guidelines — because it’s explicit, hateful, infringing, or otherwise off-limits — then uploading it as a mask breaks them too, whether or not the final maze looks tame. When you’re deciding whether an image is okay to upload, ask the question about the image, not the maze.
What’s welcome here
Let’s lead with the yes, because most of what people make is exactly right. Welcome here:
- Mazes you designed yourself, in whatever shape delights you — playful, weird, intricate, or beautifully simple.
- Masks built from art, photos, logos, or characters you created or have permission to use.
- Puzzles for classrooms, newsletters, party favors, events, games, and gifts.
- Portfolios and experiments — the stuff you make just to see what the engine can do.
If it’s your creative work and it’s safe for a general audience, it belongs. You don’t have to be an artist or aim for perfection; you just have to bring something that’s yours to share and that a stranger could happen upon without being harmed or blindsided.
What’s not welcome here
Here are the hard lines. We’ve kept the tone kind, but these are firm — for content you publish, share, curate into a gallery, or upload as a mask, please don’t bring:
- Illegal content, or anything that promotes or helps carry out illegal acts.
- Content that infringes someone else’s rights — this is the big one for masks. Don’t turn a photo, drawing, logo, or character you don’t have the rights to into a mask or a published maze. If it isn’t yours and you don’t have permission, keep it out.
- Sexual or explicit content. And to be completely unambiguous: child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is never tolerated, under any circumstances. We remove it, preserve what the law requires, and report it to the appropriate authorities and to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
- Hateful, harassing, threatening, violent, or extremist content — including imagery that demeans or attacks people based on who they are.
- Graphic gore, cruelty, or shock content meant to disturb.
- Deceptive, spammy, or misleading uploads — impersonating someone, flooding galleries with bulk duplicates, or using a maze page or mask to advertise unrelated products or funnel people elsewhere.
And because a mask is an image, none of these can be sneaked in through the mask you upload — a maze whose outline is fine doesn’t excuse an image that isn’t. When you’re unsure, picture a stranger coming across your maze in a public gallery. If they’d be harmed, or caught off guard in a way that isn’t okay, leave it out.
Only share what’s yours to share
The shortest way to stay on the right side of these guidelines is to only upload and publish content you created or have the rights to use. That photo you traced, the logo you turned into a silhouette, the character you love — it needs to be yours, or something you have permission to use. This matters most for masks, since an uploaded image is the easiest place to accidentally borrow someone else’s work.
If you believe your own work has been used on Mazedly without your permission, our Copyright & DMCA Policy explains exactly how to send us a formal notice and how we respond. A valid copyright notice has to include some specific, sworn statements, which is why that path lives on its own page rather than in a quick report form.
How we enforce this
When something crosses these lines, we try to respond in proportion to the harm, and we lean toward the lightest step that fixes the problem.
Most of the time, enforcement means we take a maze down from public view without deleting your work. In practice that looks like this: the maze is withheld from galleries, feeds, and search, and its share link shows a short placeholder instead of the maze. We don’t have to erase what you made in order to make it non-public — and if we got it wrong, we can put it back at the very same link. That’s very different from deleting your account, which is an irreversible cascade that erases your saved mazes, their masks, your share links, and your account itself.
For serious or repeated problems, we may warn you, suspend your account, or close it. The full enforcement ladder and the rights behind it live in our Acceptable Use Policy and Terms of Use. For the clearest, gravest harms — CSAM above all — we may skip straight to the strongest response. Throughout, our aim is to be fair, proportionate, and reversible wherever we reasonably can be.
How to report something
See a maze that doesn’t belong? Please tell us — it genuinely helps keep the galleries welcoming, and you don’t need an account to do it.
The simplest way is the “Report this maze” control on any shared or published maze page. It opens a short popup where you pick what’s wrong — Sexual or explicit, Hate or harassment, Violence or gore, Illegal content, Spam or misleading, Copyright/IP, or Other — and you can add a sentence of your own. Your report goes straight to our moderation team.
Copyright is the one exception. Because a valid copyright complaint has to include specific sworn statements that a quick popup can’t collect, choosing Copyright/IP sends you to our Copyright & DMCA Policy, where you can file a proper notice through our designated copyright agent. If you’d rather email us about a safety or abuse concern, you can also reach us at abuse@mazedly.com.
Reporting in good faith never counts against you. We review the reports we receive and take whatever action these guidelines and our Acceptable Use Policy allow — we just don’t promise a specific turnaround time.
A quick note on forks
Mazedly lets people build on published mazes — a maze you publish can become the starting point for someone else’s creation. Once a fork exists, it stands on its own. Short of a formal copyright action, unpublishing or deleting the original maze doesn’t reach back and change a descendant someone else has already made; a fork is independent from the moment it’s created. So if you’d prefer your work not become the seed for other mazes, the choice not to Publish is the moment that matters. (The one exception is a valid copyright takedown, which is handled under our Copyright & DMCA Policy.)
A quick note on how mazes are made
One thing worth saying plainly, since content-upload products invite the question: Mazedly’s mazes come from a deterministic, algorithmic engine — not generative AI. We don’t train any model on your mazes or on the images you upload, and we never will. So the “AI-generated content” rules you see on other platforms simply don’t apply here. The guidelines on this page are entirely about what you choose to share, not about anything a machine dreamed up.
These guidelines can change
We’ll update these guidelines as Mazedly grows and as we finish legal review; when we make meaningful changes, we’ll update the Effective date at the top of this page. They sit under our Terms of Use, which incorporate them by reference alongside our Privacy Policy, Acceptable Use Policy, and Copyright & DMCA Policy. Questions about anything here? Email support@mazedly.com — we’re a small, Seattle-based team, and we read what you send.