Experiences pass through a communal moderation for three main reasons:

1. To discard fake, fraudulent, or unfixable experiences.
2. To return problematic experiences to their writers with suggestions to be resubmitted.
3. To select the best experiences for featuring.

I'll talk about rejecting experiences last because it's the longest, so I'll start with featuring, as well as the mechanics of the experience engine.

What about features?

Experiences should be featured if they contribute something special for that section. One of the most common mistakes people make is featuring anything they find interesting -- the end result of that is that certain types/sections of experience get featured more often... Try and feature about one in ten experiences that you approve in any given sections.

What about comments?

Comments serve the purpose of allowing you to communicate with the writer of an experience. The end result of that communication should be productive... Which means that if you are rejecting the experience, any comment left should help the writer correct their errors. Remember that you are not just rejecting an experience, you are attempting to give the writer the information they need to correct the experience so they can resubmit it and become a member.

Positive comments are important as well -- they add a personal "thank you" to the writer and if they are new, it welcomes them into the IAM community as well. While negative comments are kept anonymous, positive comments (on approval or featuring of an experience) will include the IAM name of the person who left them. Outside of anything else, they're also a great way to get to know people.

What about all the CRAP?

I'll first go over the various reasons that an experience should be denied. When you reject an experience, you will have a list of common reasons that you can check off. Below is an explanation of each of them.

Fake Experience

Select this if the experience is unsuitable for posting on BME, even if problems are corrected. There are four main types of fake experiences:

• Experiences made up of nothing but "asdf asdfkj lfjwel sdfdsf" or "blah blah blah". Often these people will start out writing a normal experience, but won't make the word count, and will then fill in the rest with this.
• Experiences made up of pasted in text, often wholly unrelated to body modification. Sometimes this error is coupled with layout problems because of the way it was pasted in. Sometimes they'll do a search and replace -- for example, if it's an article about apple farming, they might replace every instance of the term "apple farming" with "body modification", so if you're just skimming the experience you'll miss it.
• Stolen experiences. Some people paste in experiences from BME and change some of the data so it appears to be from them. These are difficult to catch, but many regular reviewers still do catch these quite consistently because they know BME so well, especially when it comes to recent experiences.
• Doubled experiences. Some people, instead of making the word count by writing, just write a short experience and paste in some paragraphs/sentences more than once. Obviously, this is unacceptable.

Massive Spelling or Grammar Errors

Please note the word "massive". The grammar and spelling in experiences is by no means required to be perfect. That said, experiences must be easy to read and understand. Deny an experience if grammar or spelling problems actually make it difficult to read.

There are however a couple cases where an experience can be denied for minor errors:

• The title should be spelled correctly and be legible.
• "Essential words" must be spelled correctly -- the names of the piercings involved (deny an experience that uses "tounge" or "naval"), as well as words like gauge, piercing, etc.

Make sure you check the section at the top of the experience, and ensure that it matches the content of the experience. If an experience is filed in the wrong section, leave a comment for the author letting them know where it should go. Normally people do this by mistake, but sometimes people don't see where they're supposed to file something and seem to pick a section almost at random.

Layout problems

Experiences should be denied if there are problems in the layout that make the experience difficult to read or view. These problems include:

• All one paragraph. This is the most common problem. If an experience is made up of all one paragaph (or paragraphs so large that it might as well be), it should be rejected. Same goes for an experience that has no paragaphs (ie. a paragraph break after every line).
• Strange font choices. If the person chooses a very large or very small font, or difficult colors, or other problems that make the experience difficult or unpleasant to read it should be rejected.
• Weird paragraph breaks. Watch for breaks in the middles of sentences and things like that.
• HTML errors. If the person includes images, they must work. If the person includes links, they must work.
• All caps. If a person types IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS all or most of the time, the experience should be rejected.
• Punctuation errors. This applies both to improper punctuation usage that makes the experience hard to read (for example, putting exclamation points after every sentence), and to translation errors. Sometimes when a person copies an experience from some word processors, it includes odd characters instead of apostrophes and quotes.

There are three scenarios in which experiences should be rejected in this category:

• Sometimes people will write a short experience, and pad it with utterly unrelated junk -- talking about their family, their friends, the music they like, their school, whatever. If it relates to the experience (for example, past experiences that lead up to the experience, or reactions from people afterwards), that's fine, but don't accept unrelated filler that's just there to make the word count.
• Quite regularly people will submit erotica to the fiction section of bme/HARD that has nothing to do with body modification. Stories in bme/HARD must still have body modification as a central point of the story; simply mentioning that some of the people have piercings doesn't cut it. In addition, BME/HARD does not accept eunuch/castration fiction -- if people are interested in that they should be directed to www.eunuch.org.
• Sometimes people will submit editorials and experiences that are more of a teenage-rant than an experience about an actual body modification event. If you feel the person is doing this, or is writing primarily to further a political goal, or promote a website, or any other non-BME goal, the experience should be rejected.

With the exception of the bodmod erotica fiction section of bme/HARD, BME does not accept fictional experiences (obviously). By fictional experiences, I mean where a person reads a bunch of stories on BME and then writes a fake one. These are difficult to catch, especially if you're not that experienced with body modification, but there are a couple things that tend to run common in fake experiences:

• Details inside the experience may not match properly, and may not match with the "at a glance" box.
• Specific details of the piercing and aftercare will probably be quite hazy.

Misinformation

There are two categories where an experience should be denied in this section:

• Sometimes a person has a bad experience at a studio (and not always the one the experience is about), and chooses to slander them in their experience. I don't mind when people talk about their experiences if they discuss them fairly and with a level head, but most of the time, it's not much better than insults. These experiences don't generally provide any valuable information, and open BME up to lawsuits.
• More often, a person does stupid things, most often related to self-piercing, and encourages them and leaves out the "bad points" of an experience. If an experience is honestly written and anyone reading it can tell that it's a bad idea because of the described result, then it can be posted as is. However, if the experience ignores the pitfalls, and encourages readers to -- in effect -- harm themselves, then the experience should be denied along with a note that the write should add a disclaimer. Remember though, you're not supposed to stop people from telling their story. We're just trying to make sure the experiences aren't hurting people.

If an experience is not actually one story, but a number of stories patched together to meet word length, it should be rejected. For example, if a person describes both their nipple and navel piercings in a single experience submission, they should be directed to submit it as separate stories. It should be noted that there are many exceptions to this rule, including:

• Sometimes a person needs to include BRIEFLY prior experiences to put this one into context.
• If the person got all the modifications in a single session, then it makes sense to discuss it in a single experience.
• If the modifications are connected (for example, an ear piercing experience followed by stretching, or a series of tattoo experiences making up a sleeve, or a two separate nipple piercings, or a genital ladder) the person can legitimately choose to write them up in a single experience.

If an experience is so poorly written that it becomes difficult to read, or violates basic rules of writing, it should be denied. Experiences must be clearly written in the selected language, and not be written using Net/IRC or textmessaging slang. For example:

• Use of the lower case "i" to represent I (as in me). I don't mind if one or two slip through, but if they are the norm in an experience it should be rejected.
• Use of slang such as 'lol', 'neway', 'ppl', 'b4', 'cuz', 'b/f', 'j/k'.
• Overly "teen" writing -- lots of unrelated interjections and tangents, lots of comments on friends, etc.

There are of course many other reasons that an experience could be rejected, including:

• Material that's offensive to BME. This includes anti-body mod articles, or including terms such as "gay" or "retard" and similar speech.
• Experiences that promote (or link to) businesses opposed to BME.
• People complaining about the word count. Writing things like "Well, I have to write 127 more words, so let me tell you about..." don't count and should be rejected.
• People who append their experience with a copied FAQ section, "Tips" section, or a copy of the aftercare they were given. If they have personal insight they'd like to add, that's great, but simply repeating well-known information doesn't accomplish anything.