Rights & Responsibilities

Remediating a Disputed Record

If your published content is under review or temporarily restricted, your work is not deleted. Here is how our recovery process works, why remediation requires a distinct new record, and how you reclaim your canonical URL.

Guide Hub

This guide explains how content remediation and URL recovery work on TheCrazyGM. It is an operational walkthrough of platform tools, not legal advice. If you face formal legal claims, consult a qualified attorney.

1. A pause, not a penalty

When a rights complaint or inquiry is filed concerning one of your published records, an operator may place the record into Temporarily restricted or Recovering status while the facts are reviewed.

This is a protective pause, not an admission of liability or an account sanction. TheCrazyGM does not run automated takedown bots that wipe out homebrew. Every content action is deliberate, human-reviewed, and reversible. Temporary restriction ensures that potential infringement is not actively distributed to the public compendium while you and the operator examine the source material.

2. The private draft reality (Your work is safe)

Under our content architecture, content under dispute operates under the platform's private draft (homebrew) privacy model:

  • Full Creator Access in The Forge: Your record remains in your Forge account. You can open it, inspect all descriptive text, review numeric statistics, and copy your mechanical design notes.
  • Public Search & Compendium Suppression: The record is automatically hidden from public compendium search results, bestiary lists, and catalog pages. Only you and authorized staff operators can view it.
  • Publishing Gate: While an active dispute is attached to the record, the Forge publish endpoint strictly refuses re-publication. This prevents the reported version from re-entering public circulation before the dispute is resolved.
3. The distinct replacement rule (Why we never silently overwrite)

A fundamental principle of our review system is: The platform never silently rewrites or overwrites a reported version.

If an operator asks you to fix an issue—for example, renaming a creature because its name belongs to a publisher's Product Identity, or rewriting a paragraph of flavor text—“fixing it” does not mean editing the reported record in place.

Silently rewriting a disputed record would destroy the evidentiary snapshot that was reviewed, creating legal ambiguity about what was published when. Instead, remediation requires creating an independent, distinct new record in The Forge.

Our moderation system strictly enforces this: a disputed record cannot be linked as its own replacement (replacement.pk != dispute.record_id). The replacement must be a separate record authored by the same creator.

4. Canonical slug reclamation (Preserving your URL & SEO)

The most common anxiety for creators is: “If I have to create a new record, will all my external links, bookmarks, forum posts, and search rankings break?”

No. TheCrazyGM implements a two-stage slug recovery mechanism to protect your canonical URL equity:

  1. Vacating the Disputed Slug: When your record enters recovery, the operator triggers slug vacating. The historical disputed record's slug is safely renamed to <slug>-disputed-<id>. This immediately frees up the original canonical slug while preserving the historical record privately for review.
  2. Assigning the Canonical Slug to Your Clean Version: Once you create your clean replacement record and an operator verifies that the infringing elements are resolved, the operator runs the Assign canonical slug action. Your replacement record atomically inherits the original URL slug.

The result: your clean, cleared work now lives at the exact same public URL as the original piece. Community links and bookmarks continue to resolve seamlessly, with no SEO loss.

5. Step-by-step remediation walkthrough

Follow these five steps when responding to a dispute notice:

Step Action Details
Step 1 Inspect the Forge Banner Open your record in The Forge. A prominent banner displays your Case ID (e.g. #42) and the current dispute status.
Step 2 Identify the Disputed Material Check your notice email. Did the complaint concern a protected name (Product Identity/trademark) or verbatim copyrighted prose? Game mechanics (AC math, bonus types) are not copyrightable, but names and prose are.
Step 3 Author a Clean Replacement In The Forge, click New [Monster/Feat/Spell/Item]. Recreate the mechanics, but replace proprietary names with original terms and rewrite flavor text in your own words. Keep it as a private draft.
Step 4 Notify the Rights Team Reply to your notice email or contact rights@thecrazygm.com quoting your Case ID and the ID of your new record (e.g. “Case #42: I have created clean replacement record #108”).
Step 5 Verification & URL Transfer An operator links the replacement, verifies that infringing elements are cleared, transfers your canonical slug, and resolves the case. Your clean version is now live at the canonical URL!
Cooperation protects your platform standing: Tabletop homebrew frequently involves complex licensing lines. Engaging constructively with an inquiry to correct citations or rename creatures is a normal, healthy part of participating in an open gaming ecosystem. Your account standing remains completely intact when you work cooperatively with our team.
This is a guide, not legal advice. It's a drafting aid and checklist, not a certified or guaranteed-compliant legal review. Rules and policies (including Paizo's own licensing pages) can change — check the reviewed date below and the primary sources it links to. For anything beyond routine attribution, consult a qualified attorney.
Reviewed by Eco.