r/phishing rules, stats, and what to post

This is a community for phishing identification. People come here to ask whether an email, text, or link is a phishing attempt, to learn how to report phishing, and to talk about phishing scams in general. The description says it plainly: questions about phishing scams, reporting phishing, and general discussion. The rules narrow it further, so this is not a general scam help desk. Romance scams, fake checks, and job listing scams belong in r/Scams, sextortion belongs in r/Sextortion, and identity theft questions belong in r/IdentityTheft. The people posting are mostly regular folks who got a suspicious message and want a second opinion before they click, reply, or pay.

The rule that decides everything for a founder is “No spam/offtopic”, because it bans advertisement or solicitation outright, and it also bans AI-generated posts and comments, memes, and jokes on serious posts. “No personal information” matters the moment you post a screenshot of a phishing email, since full names, any phone number of any type, personal email addresses, social media handles, and physical addresses all have to be censored. “No private messaging” means you cannot ask anyone to DM you or take the conversation to email or social media, and you cannot try to round up people in similar situations. “No personal army or revenge requests” bans asking the community to mass report accounts or websites or to harass alleged scammers, which matters if your product story involves takedowns. “Be civil” sets the tone, so no snark, no victim blaming, and no discrimination even when the question has been asked a thousand times. Finally, “No illegal activities” bans scambaiting and fraud, so do not build your post around baiting scammers.

Be honest with yourself first: this community bans advertisement and solicitation, so there is no safe way to pitch a product here. The only posts that survive are genuine contributions to phishing identification. If you work in security or email safety, you can answer identification questions with plain, careful explanations of why a message is or is not phishing. You can share a real phishing example with every personal detail censored and ask for a second opinion, or post a breakdown of a technique you saw in the wild, written by you and not by AI. If you want to mention what you do for a living in passing, that is different from promoting, but the moment your post exists to sell, it is gone. Keep everything public, keep it on topic, and keep it useful to the person asking.

The fastest removal is promotion, since “No spam/offtopic” lists advertisement and solicitation as banned, and it also removes low effort posts, anything unrelated to phishing, AI-generated posts and comments, meme posts, and jokes on serious posts. Uncensored personal information gets removed under “No personal information”, and that includes phone numbers of any type and photos of people with uncensored faces. Asking for DMs, email contact, or wrangling victims of a similar situation gets removed under “No private messaging”. Requests to mass report something, text or call alleged scam numbers, or harass alleged scammers get removed under “No personal army or revenge requests”. Uncivil behavior, excessive swearing, victim blaming, and discrimination break “Be civil”. Sexual content or graphic images without censoring break “No NSFW content”, and the rules are clear that applying an NSFW tag is not properly censoring. Anything about scambaiting, fraud, or buying and selling accounts breaks “No illegal activities”.

The thing that jumps out at me is the rule against AI-generated posts and comments, which is rare and very telling about how much this community values real human help. I also respect that the mods spell out exactly where off-topic scam questions should go instead of just deleting them. If you build anything in this space, treat that as a signal about the room: real people, real problems, zero tolerance for anything that smells automated.