Acceptable use policy for gc.mw short links

This policy covers every link created on gc.mw, including links made without an account. It is short on purpose: the rules that matter fit on one page, and a policy nobody reads protects nobody. The machinery behind it — the checks, the queue and the appeal — is described in the abuse policy; the agreement it sits under is the terms of service.

What you may not link to

• Phishing and impersonation. Pages that imitate a bank, a payment provider, a courier, a government service or any brand in order to collect credentials, card numbers or one-time codes.
• Malware and unwanted software. Drive-by downloads, fake updates, cracked software bundled with installers.
• Fraud. Advance-fee schemes, fake investment and trading offers, fake job offers that ask for a deposit, fake refunds and lottery notices.
• Child sexual abuse material. Reported to the authorities, not merely blocked. There is no appeal.
• Content that is illegal where it is hosted or where it is aimed, including sanctioned-party dealings and the sale of controlled goods to people who may not lawfully buy them.
• Non-consensual intimate imagery, doxxing, and targeted harassment of a private individual.
• Deceptive redirect behaviour. Cloaking a destination based on the visitor — showing a review site or a search crawler one page and a human another — and chaining through other shorteners to hide where a link ends up.

Adult content that is legal, consensual and correctly labelled is not banned. Neither is political speech, criticism of a company, or a link to something we happen to disagree with.

What you may not do with the service

Do not use it to send unsolicited bulk messages, whether email, SMS or WhatsApp. Do not create links faster than a human could use them in order to test which destinations get blocked. Do not use the API to build a competing shortener on top of ours. Do not attempt to guess other people's codes in bulk; the code space is large, the attempt is rate limited, and it is treated as an attack.

How reporting works

Anyone can report a link. The report needs the short link and a sentence about the problem — a screenshot helps.

Reports go to a queue that a person reads. Two independent reports on the same link disable it automatically while it waits for that review, because the cost of being briefly wrong is much lower than the cost of leaving a phishing page live for a day.

Destinations are also checked automatically. Every link is checked against a block list when it is created, and again when it starts getting real traffic. A link that fails is disabled and the owner is notified.

What a blocked link does

It stops redirecting. Visitors see a page saying the link was disabled after a report or a safety check, with a way to report a mistake. It does not silently 404, and it never forwards to the destination while under review.

The link is not deleted and neither is its history — an owner who successfully appeals gets the same code back.

Repeated violations end the account. A single deliberate phishing link is enough, and in that case links are disabled first and questions asked afterwards.

Appeals

Write to the abuse address with the short code and the intended destination. A person reviews every appeal. Automated blocks are wrong sometimes — a new domain with no reputation, a marketing platform that other people have abused, a URL shape that resembles a known campaign — and those are restored quickly, with the destination recorded so the same check does not fire again.

Requests from law enforcement and rights holders

Valid legal process is honoured within the jurisdiction that issued it. Copyright complaints need enough detail to identify the work and the link, and a statement that the complaint is made in good faith. Where the law allows it, the link's owner is told what was requested and by whom.