What is decided by a machine, what is decided by a person, and what nobody here can do at all.
Contact details in chat. Every message is checked before it is stored, and the database refuses one carrying a digit, an address with an @ and a dotted domain, an @handle, or one of eight named apps — WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, Instagram, Messenger, Skype, Viber, WeChat. It also joins your own recent messages together, so a number spelled across a few messages inside about ten minutes is refused as well. Spread over a couple of hours it is not refused: it arrives, and it is marked for the house without either of you being told.
That check is blunt in both directions. It cannot tell a phone number from a time of day, so “meet me at 8” is refused too — and it is a pattern match rather than an understanding, so “at gmail dot com”, a handle without the @, an app it does not name, and a number spelled out in a language other than English or Hindi all go through. Do not read a delivered message as a checked one.
Nothing else on this site is automatic. No system reads your messages for tone, abuse, threats or pressure. No system looks at what a photograph contains.
The house does not watch conversations as they happen. It reads one when there is a reason to — most often because somebody reported it.
Since a report is the thing that starts all of this, please use it. Not reporting is the single most common reason a bad account keeps going.
It is worth being blunt about this, because most sites are not. An administrator here can open any thread on the site at any time. Chat is private between the two of you in the sense that no other member can see it — not in the sense that nobody can.
Reading a thread leaves no mark, so an admin looking at a conversation cannot be mistaken for the other person having read your message.
Take chat away from a member’s account, which stops them talking without touching the rest of it, and is reversible — where a paid membership is running we cancel that too, because a membership grants chat on its own. Suspend an account, which stops it sending, seeing photographs, opening the Collection or unlocking a number; it does not sign the person out and they can still read what was already said. Take a listing down — and on safety grounds that also withdraws every phone number bought from it and returns the credits to the people who paid.
Every one of those is recorded, with the administrator who did it named against it.
We cannot verify that anybody is who they say they are. We cannot promise a response time — a person reads reports, nothing alerts anybody, and that person is not on duty at four in the morning. We cannot stop somebody suspended here from opening a new account with a different address, and suspension does not even sign them out of the one they have.
We are also not in the room. Nothing on this site can help you while you are actually with somebody, which is why the tips page is written the way it is.
If something on this site involves a crime, go to the police. We will help where we properly can — but a report to us is not a report to them, and we would rather say that plainly than let anybody assume otherwise.