Publishing guidelines

Explore is where people publish the systems they actually planned here, so that other people can see what a real build looks like and start from it. Publishing is entirely optional and always per build: nothing you save is public unless you publish that particular build, and you can unpublish it again at any time.

What gets published

A published build shows its name, the handle on your account (or “Anonymous”, if you choose that for this build), what you wrote about it, the parts you picked, the room size if the build has one, and the date you published it. It does not show your email address, your display name, or anything else from your account.

Before it goes live

A person reads every build before it appears on the site. Until then it is not public: you get a private preview link that only your account can open, and the public address is reserved but does not resolve yet. We review these by hand, so it can take a few days — we would rather say that than promise a turnaround we cannot keep.

What we ask

• Publish a real build. At least 3 parts, and an optional description of up to 500 characters saying why you picked them. The description is the part other people actually read.
• Don’t claim to be someone you aren’t. Names and handles that read as official — a brand’s, a retailer’s, or ours — are refused automatically. Naming the gear in your build is fine and expected; “Denon Official Support” is not.
• Don’t publish someone else’s build as your own. An exact copy of a parts list that is already published is refused. Importing someone’s build and changing it is the whole point of the feature; re-publishing it unchanged is not.
• No advertising, and no contact details. A build page is not a classified ad. Descriptions that look like an email address or a phone number get a warning before you publish, because a published build is public and stays that way in other people’s caches after you remove it.
• Keep it civil. Slurs and abuse are refused by an automatic word list, which is a coarse first line and not a claim that the site is moderated by machine — the human review is the actual control.
• 10 published builds per account. Unpublish one to make room for another.

Reporting a build

Every build page has a “Report this build” link. Reports go to a queue a person reads. We do not show a report count and we do not take anything down automatically when it reaches some number of reports — a counter like that is trivially gamed, and it would be a tool for silencing builds rather than for flagging them.

If a build is taken down

If a build does not meet these guidelines, it comes off Explore and you will see that on your Saved list. Its address does not break: it sends visitors back to Explore instead. Addresses are permanent here on purpose — once a link has been shared, letting it die is a worse outcome than keeping it pointed somewhere useful. The one exception is a build removed because of its name: in that case the address is retired outright rather than redirected, so the name does not keep living on our domain.

Removing your own build

Unpublishing is immediate and is always yours to do, from the build itself or from your Saved list. Deleting a published build removes it from the site and clears what you wrote, and keeps the address resolving back to Explore for the same reason. If you need something removed that you cannot reach yourself, email support@hometheaterbuilds.com.