Community Guidelines

Last updated 27 July 2026

Lunatechs is a community of tech enthusiasts. Some of us build things, some sell or design or write about them, some invest, some teach, some are switching careers, and some just find this stuff genuinely interesting. You don't need to write code, work in the industry, or have anything to demo. Curiosity is the whole entry requirement.

These notes cover everywhere with our name on it: comments on talks and recordings, popstops, the talent board, events and chats. They're less rules than a description of what makes this place worth showing up to.

What we're about

Six things, and everything below is really just these in practice.

• Be nice to everyone. Not "be polite when it's easy" — everyone. Argue with the idea, never the person, and remember text flattens tone: a lot of us are writing in our second or third language, and most things that read as rude are just brief.
• Help each other. Something that cost you two days saves someone else two days, if you write it down. Answer the question you know the answer to.
• Learn together. Ask the "obvious" one — it almost never is, and three other people were wondering the same thing. Nobody here knows everything, and the ones acting like they do are usually bluffing.
• Dig deeper. The interesting part is under the headline: how it actually works, why it broke, what it cost, what nobody's saying out loud.
• Try things out. Half-finished experiments and things that didn't work are welcome here — often more useful than the polished version, because they show the bit everyone else edits out.
• Aspire to change the world for the better. Slightly grand for a lunch talk, and still the reason any of this is worth doing. Build things you'd be happy to explain to the people they affect.

And look after whoever just walked in not knowing anybody. Everyone here was that person once.

Sharing links and news

Dig deeper, in practice. Everyone's phone is already full of links. Big news reaches most of us three times before lunch, so a bare URL dropped into a group of a few hundred people is mostly noise — and every one of those makes the next one easier to scroll past.

So add the part only you can add: what you make of it, what it changes for your work or your plans, the bit you think is wrong, or the question it left you with. Two sentences is plenty.

That's the difference between "here's a link you've already seen" and something nobody else could have posted — and the second one is what people actually reply to. If you haven't formed a view yet, say so and ask what everyone else thinks. That's a good post too.

A few hard lines

Short list, and it exists to protect the people in the room rather than to catch anyone out. These get content removed, and — if it's serious or repeated — the account too.

• Don't make it unsafe for someone. Harassment, or attacks on who someone is: race, nationality, gender, sexuality, religion, disability, age.
• Don't share someone's private details — address, phone number, employer — without their say-so.
• Don't sell at people. Sharing your project because it's relevant is welcome and always has been. Blanket promotion, recruiting sprees, token shilling and "DM me for the alpha" are not the same thing.
• Nothing designed to take money off a member. Investment schemes, fake roles, phishing.
• Don't pretend to be someone else — another member, a speaker, a company, or us. It's why handles are unique and why near-identical ones (@adm1n beside @admin) can't be claimed.
• Keep it work-safe. Sexual content and graphic violence aren't a fit for a lunch talk crowd.

The recordings are a trust thing

When someone stands up and talks for an hour, they're agreeing to be recorded for us — not for the whole internet. That's the only reason we can put talks up at all.

So: don't re-upload one, don't pass the link outside, don't lend your account. If that trust breaks, the next person we ask says no, and the loss lands on everybody.

Quote it, write about what you learned, tell people it exists and how to join. That's all welcome — it's how the room grows.

Popstops

A popstop is just a member saying "I'm at this café for two hours, come say hello". Anyone can join one; members are the ones who call them.

• Turn up if you said you would, and drop a note if you can't.
• Be good to the venue and the people working there.
• It's a coffee, not a sales funnel.
• Whoever called it is a member being friendly, not an organiser in any formal sense — see the Terms.

The talent board

Real roles, real gigs, real availability. Say what the work is and who it's for.

We don't vet listings or the people answering them, so do the same homework you'd do anywhere else before money or contracts change hands.

What to expect from moderation

Better you know how this works than run into it and wonder.

• Comments get an automatic check before they appear. It's looking for the hard lines above. It has no opinion on whether your take is any good.
• If it stops you, rewording to slip past won't work — repeated blocks add a short wait that grows. One clean post clears it, and a day without any resets it.
• You can edit your own comment for five minutes. A typo window, not a way to rewrite something people already replied to.
• Anyone can report something, and nobody sees who reported what.
• Admins can remove anything, and will step in properly for the serious stuff.

Automated checks get it wrong in both directions. If yours was blocked and shouldn't have been, tell us — that's genuinely how we fix where the line sits.

If something isn't right

Report the comment, or just email us. If it's about how someone behaved at an event, say so and we'll deal with it quietly and take it seriously. If anyone's in immediate danger, call local emergency services first — we're a community, not an emergency service.

And if you're new and this all feels like a lot: it isn't. Say hi, ask your question, we're glad you're here.