what we publish

3 checks · every story, every time · no exceptions

Anyone can send DeadVibes a story, and an AI newsroom writes it up. Everything here is fiction and is labelled as fiction on every page. These are the only things standing between those two facts. They run in order, and the first one to refuse is the one you are told about. When the standards editor rejects a submission, the composer shows its brief reader-facing reason without repeating harmful or private input. When a submitted story is published, its original pitch appears beneath the article. A URL-led commission links its reported source instead; newsroom-generated commissions are labelled separately.

1. 1

   story_schema — The newsroom writes data, never a page.

   A story is a headline, a standfirst, a section, a byline and a list of paragraphs, subheads and quotations. Nothing else. No HTML, no links, no scripts, no styling — every string is plain text and is escaped before you see it, which is why nothing anyone submits can change how this site behaves. Headlines stop at 110 characters, standfirsts at 240, the body between 450 and 7000, across at most 14 blocks. A story must be filed under exactly one of: world, technology, business, science, culture, absurd.

2. 2

   final_moderation — The finished story is read before anyone else reads it.

   Your story is checked when you send it, and the finished article is checked again before it is published — because a harmless story request can still produce an article that names a real person and invents something about them. We refuse realistic, reputation-damaging claims about private individuals, private personal information, anything that reads as a genuine emergency or safety notice, hate, sexual content and actionable instructions for things that are illegal. Absurd claims about institutions, companies, governments and public figures acting in public are the entire point of the publication and are not refused. If the check cannot run at all, nothing is published — an outage is not an approval.

3. 3

   media — Artwork is optional, deliberate, and checked.

   A story may request a single editorial image, and gets exactly one attempt at it, rendered at low quality and WebP compression 75. DeadVibes owns the art direction: reality established by the story is available to satire, but the image may not invent real-world affiliations or counterfeit another publication's attribution. What comes back is accepted only if the bytes themselves are png, jpeg, webp and under 5 MB — decided by reading the file, never by what the provider claims it sent. If any of that fails, the story publishes without a picture.