Be the person you'd want reading your worst commit.
This whole site runs on people admitting they broke something. That only works if admitting it is safe. So there is exactly one rule, and then some detail about what it means.
Somebody just told you about the worst day of their career. Respond like that cost them something, because it did.
What that looks like in practice
Ask what you'd ask a teammate. "What would have caught this?" is a great comment. "How did you not know that?" is not, and the difference is not tone, it's whether you're trying to learn something or trying to win something.
Add your version. The best threads here are four people going "oh, ours was worse" and then a fifth person quietly posting the config flag that prevents all of it.
Assume the person had less information than you have now. Every disaster on this site looks obvious in hindsight. That's what makes it a disaster and not a mystery.
What gets you removed
Harassment, slurs, sexual content, and threats. Nothing clever to say about these, they're just out.
Identifying somebody. Don't name the company, the coworker, the customer, or the intern. If you can work out who a story is about, keep it to yourself. If you post it, you're gone.
Dunking. Telling somebody their outage was their own fault is both useless and usually true, which is exactly why it isn't worth saying.
Selling things. Your product may genuinely have prevented that outage. Say so once, disclose that it's yours, and move on. Do it in five threads and it's spam.
Feeding threads to a language model and pasting the output. I can tell, everybody can tell, and it wastes the one thing this place has, which is that a real person was there.
What happens when somebody breaks it
There's no committee. It's me. Here's the ladder, and I'll tell you which rung you're on rather than leaving you to guess.
I edit or delete the comment
Usually a first offence, usually somebody having a bad day. You get a note explaining what I removed and why.
I ask you to stop
A direct message, from me, not a bot. Nothing happens to your account. Most of these end here.
You lose commenting for a while
Seven days, then thirty. You can still read everything and your stories stay up.
You are done here
Account closed, comments removed. For harassment, threats, or doxxing, this is the first step and not the last one.
If I get it wrong
Reply to the email. I've reversed moderation calls before and I'll do it again. What I won't do is relitigate a removal in public comments, because that turns somebody's bad week into a thread.
If it's about me
I'm the one who runs this, which makes reporting me awkward. Do it anyway. Email works, and if you'd rather not talk to me at all, say so in the report and I'll have somebody I trust read it first.