Community Guidelines

You must be at least 13 years old to create a Kohana account or use Kohana's online community features.

Grooming, sexual solicitation of minors, sextortion, requesting sexual images from a minor, or facilitating the exploitation of a minor is prohibited. This includes attempts to move a minor to another service for an inappropriate or exploitative purpose.

Kohana may immediately remove content, disable access, ban accounts from the platform, preserve relevant information, or report suspected exploitation to the appropriate authorities when required by law or considered necessary to protect someone.

• Malicious or abusive content or comments toward creators or other users, including bullying, targeted harassment or encouraging others to target someone.
• Credible threats, stalking, intimidation or coercion.
• Hateful content or comments that promote or encourage violence, or whose main purpose is to incite hatred toward individuals or groups based on race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, political orientation and similar characteristics.

• Sharing another person's private or identifying information without permission, including their real name, contact information, address, precise location, identification documents, financial information or private communications.
• Non-consensual intimate imagery, including threats to create or share it.
• Using a real person's face, voice, name or likeness in sexual, deceptive or harassing content without their consent. This applies whether the content is real, edited, generated or fabricated.

Content hosted, displayed or shared through Kohana does not allow:

• Explicit descriptions or depictions of nudity or sexual acts, including pornography.
• Explicit descriptions or depictions of non-consensual sexual acts, or content that promotes sexual violence, including rape, sexual assault, kidnapping for sexual purposes and sexual slavery.
• Explicit descriptions or depictions of illegal sex acts, including but not limited to bestiality, necrophilia and incest.
• Sexualized nudity or explicit sexual content involving a character who is, or appears to be, a minor. This applies regardless of a character's stated in-story age.

Age-appropriate romance, discussion of mature themes, artistic or sensual imagery, implied intimacy and fade-to-black scenes may be allowed when they are suitable for a general audience aged 13 and older. Context matters, and the review team makes the final decision.

• Brutal, extreme, extended or graphic acts of violence.
• Depictions of sadism, or glorification or promotion of inflicting harm on others.
• Content that threatens, encourages, instructs or meaningfully facilitates serious real-world harm, including dangerous challenges or instructions for violent acts.
• Terrorist recruitment, praise or material support.
• Content that encourages, instructs or glorifies suicide or self-harm.
• Attempts to sell or distribute illegal drugs, weapons or other prohibited goods.

Fictional stories may address violence, crime, addiction, suicide, self-harm or other difficult subjects when the treatment is appropriate for a 13+ audience and does not promote or instruct users to cause real-world harm.

• Phishing, fraudulent offers, malicious links or files, fake giveaways and other attempts to deceive, defraud or compromise another person.
• Impersonating Kohana staff, another creator or another real person in a deceptive or harmful way.

Clearly identified parody or fictional representation may be allowed at the moderators' discretion.

• Using third-party content, including art, music, sound effects, fonts or writing, without permission and without crediting the source.
• Any copyrighted content you are not allowed to use.

Only upload work you made yourself or have permission to use, and credit your sources in the novel's Credits. If you believe your own work is being used without your permission, contact the team with a link to it.

Kohana supports human-created work on its services. Novels containing AI-generated creative content are not eligible to be hosted or shared through Kohana. This includes writing, art, voices, music, sound effects or scripts produced by an AI tool, such as generated backgrounds, character art, dialogue, scenes or stories.

This does not restrict what you may create with the Kohana app. You may make a novel containing AI-generated content, keep it on your device or export and host it elsewhere; Kohana simply may not host or distribute it through its own services.

AI assistance is allowed in content hosted through Kohana when it supports your own work without generating the creative content that appears in the novel. Examples include:

• Using AI to translate a novel you wrote into another language.
• Using AI to check spelling, grammar or clarity in text you wrote.

The story, art and other creative content must still be your own work, or work you have permission to use. Having an AI tool draft or substantially rewrite passages, scripts or other creative content counts as AI generation, even if you edit the result afterward.

You must disclose every use of AI when you submit a novel for publication. Answer Yes to Does this novel contain AI-generated content? if an AI tool generated any content or assisted with any part of the novel, including permitted translation, spelling, grammar or clarity help. Describe the tool, what you used it for and how much of the novel it affected. This information is not shown to players.

Disclosure does not automatically disqualify a novel: permitted assistance may be approved. However, disclosing AI-generated creative content does not make that content eligible to be hosted by Kohana. Private shared novels do not go through publication review, but the same AI rules still apply and a violating share may be disabled or removed.

Relevant links to a creator's portfolio, website or social accounts may be allowed when they are not deceptive, disruptive or repeatedly posted.

The following are prohibited:

• Unsolicited or repetitive advertising, links or self-promotion.
• Referral spam, pyramid schemes, fraudulent fundraising or misleading commercial content.
• Attempts to sell illegal or age-restricted goods, sexual services, accounts, stolen content or anything else that creates a safety risk for the community.

• Creating or using another account to evade a warning, suspension, restriction or ban.
• Coordinating harassment or encouraging others to target a creator or user.
• Manipulating comments, follows, reports or other engagement.
• Knowingly submitting false or malicious reports, fabricating evidence, or repeatedly abusing the reporting system.

Reports must be made in good faith. A report that moderators ultimately reject is not automatically considered abusive.

Novels containing sensitive but permitted material must give players a clear warning before that material appears. Warnings should identify the general subject without unnecessarily revealing the story.

Include warnings where applicable for:

• Non-graphic violence.
• Abuse or domestic violence.
• Discussion of suicide or self-harm.
• Substance use.
• Discrimination.
• Implied sexual themes.
• Strong language.
• Flashing lights or rapid visual effects.

Content warnings do not make otherwise prohibited content acceptable. Moderators may require a warning, change how a novel is presented, or remove it when its warnings are missing or inadequate.

Depicting a harmful act is not always the same as promoting it. Moderators may consider context, framing, explicitness, artistic or educational purpose, the age of the intended audience and the likelihood of real-world harm. This does not guarantee that content will be accepted or remain available.

Before you upload a novel from the app, make sure you have:

• A Kohana account. You need to be logged in to upload.
• An icon for your novel.
• The estimated minutes of gameplay, at least one genre and at least one language.
• For every language you select: a title, a synopsis and between 1 and 3 banners (16:9 images).
• Your answer to Does this novel contain AI-generated content? Answer Yes for any AI generation or assistance, and describe the tool, purpose and extent of its use.
• A clear warning before any sensitive but permitted content listed under Content warnings.

• Every novel submitted to the public Homepage library is reviewed by the Kohana team before it is published.
• You can follow its status (In review, Accepted or Denied) under Settings > Homepage Upload Status, and turn on Submission status notifications in Notification Settings to be told when it is approved or denied.
• Reviewers see your AI answer and description and use them to distinguish permitted assistance from generated creative content.
• Novels containing AI-generated creative content, or otherwise breaking these guidelines, can be declined or removed after publication.

• In the app: use Report on a novel's page or on a comment.
• By email: to report an account, a private share link or anything that cannot be reported in the app, write to [email protected].

Include a link, the reason for the report and any relevant evidence. Do not retaliate against someone for making a good-faith report or participating in a moderation review. Kohana may keep the reporter's identity confidential.