Safety Center

Talking to strangers online should feel exciting, not risky. Gibbur is built so you can stay anonymous to the people you meet — but anonymous doesn’t mean unaccountable. This Safety Center explains the rules, how moderation and reporting work, the automatic protections running in the background, and what you can do to stay safe. If you only read one section, make it staying safe.

Our rules in a nutshell

Every person on Gibbur ticks a box agreeing to our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines before their first chat. The short version:

• Adults only. You must be 18 or older. No exceptions.
• Nothing involving minors. Any sexual content involving minors, or any attempt to contact a minor, gets you banned and reported to the authorities.
• No harassment or hate. Threats, slurs, bullying and targeted abuse aren’t welcome.
• No spam, scams or bots. No advertising, phishing links or automated messages.
• No doxxing or blackmail. Don’t ask for, share or threaten to share anyone’s personal information or images.
• No illegal activity. Full stop.

The full list, with examples, is in the Community Guidelines.

18+ only

Gibbur is for adults. Before chatting, every visitor must confirm “I am 18 or older and agree to the Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.” If we learn that someone under 18 is using Gibbur, we’ll remove them. If you meet someone in a chat who seems to be a minor, end the chat and report it straight away — that’s exactly what the Report button is for.

How moderation works

Gibbur is a moderated platform. That’s a big part of why our chats are encrypted in transit but not end-to-end encrypted: our moderators need to be able to see what’s going on to enforce the rules.

• Moderators can view live chats and recent messages to investigate reports and spot abuse.
• Recent messages live in memory only. Message text is never written to our database or to disk. A copy is held in the chat server’s memory for up to 2 hours for moderation and spam fighting, then discarded.
• Moderators can ban by IP address, by browser or by account, depending on what’s needed.

Moderation isn’t about reading over your shoulder for fun — it exists so that when someone breaks the rules, there are real consequences.

Reporting, and what happens next

If someone breaks the rules, hit Report in the chat. You’ll pick a reason, and the report goes to our moderation queue. You can then skip to a new chat — you never have to keep talking to someone who made you uncomfortable.

What a report contains

When you report, we store the report metadata: the reason, the time, the chat ID, and the IP addresses and account IDs (if any) of the people involved. We don’t copy the message text into the report — moderators review recent messages from the chat server’s short-lived memory instead.

What happens after

• Moderators review reports and can view the recent conversation while it’s still in memory.
• People who are reported repeatedly can be automatically banned temporarily, even before a human looks.
• Serious or repeated violations lead to longer bans by IP, browser or account.
• Anything involving the exploitation of a child is escalated to the appropriate authorities.

For anything that can’t wait for the Report button — or that happened outside a single chat — email abuse@gibbur.com.

Automatic protections

A lot of bad behavior is stopped before a human moderator ever needs to step in:

• Rate limits on sending messages, skipping and connecting, so nobody can blast through hundreds of chats.
• Link blocking at chat start. Links are blocked in the first few seconds of a conversation — the favorite trick of spam bots.
• Flood detection catches the same message being pasted over and over.
• Message length limits (1,000 characters) keep walls of spam out.
• Connection caps per IP address and per browser.
• Automatic temporary bans for people who rack up reports.

Under the hood, the server — not your browser — decides who you’re paired with, and each chat has its own ID so messages can never leak into another conversation. Read more in How Gibbur works.

Start a safe chat

Staying safe: practical tips

Our tools help, but your own habits are the strongest protection. A few rules of thumb:

• Never share personal info. Your full name, address, school or workplace, phone number, social handles and photos can all be used to find you. Your partner sees you as “Stranger” — keep it that way.
• Don’t move to other apps. “Add me on…” is the most common first step in scams and blackmail. Off Gibbur, our moderation and reporting can’t protect you.
• Be skeptical. People lie about who they are. Someone who seems too perfect, or who pushes hard for pictures or private details, is a red flag.
• Don’t click unknown links or download files from strangers.
• Leave whenever you want. You don’t owe anyone a conversation. Skip, then report if they broke the rules.

Sextortion: what it is and what to do

Sextortion is when someone gets intimate images or video of you (or claims to) and threatens to share them unless you pay or send more. It often starts with a friendly stranger who quickly moves the chat to another app. If it happens:

1. Don’t pay. Paying rarely ends it — it usually leads to more demands.
2. Stop responding. Don’t send anything more. Block them everywhere.
3. Keep evidence such as usernames, profile links and screenshots of messages on other platforms.
4. Report it — on Gibbur with the Report button or at abuse@gibbur.com, and on any other platform involved.
5. Get images taken down. If you were under 18 in the images, NCMEC’s Take It Down can help remove them. If you were an adult, StopNCII.org helps stop intimate images being shared on participating platforms.
6. Tell the authorities. In the US, you can report to NCMEC’s CyberTipline, and to your local police.

Help for parents and guardians

Gibbur is for adults 18 and over. It is not designed for, and not permitted for, children or teens. If you believe a minor is using Gibbur, or that a child has been contacted or harmed through Gibbur, please email abuse@gibbur.com with as much detail as you can (for example the approximate date and time, and any chat details you have). We take these reports seriously and act quickly.

It also helps to talk with young people about the risks of random chat sites in general: strangers may not be who they say they are, and nobody legitimate will ever pressure them for photos or secrecy. If a child is being threatened, the sextortion steps above — especially Take It Down and the CyberTipline — apply.

Law enforcement requests

Law enforcement and legal requests should be sent to legal@gibbur.com. Because Gibbur is designed to keep very little, the data we may have is limited:

• Message text is never stored in our database or on disk. It exists only in chat server memory for up to 2 hours, and is lost on server restart.
• Reports: reason, time, chat ID, IP addresses and account IDs if any.
• Bans: IP address or browser ID, retained until the ban expires.
• Accounts (only if the user created one): email, display name, birthday, gender, interests and timestamps — deleted when the user deletes their account.

Given the short retention windows, requests involving an ongoing emergency should be sent as quickly as possible. See our Privacy Policy for more.

If you’re in crisis

Safety FAQ