Community Rules

Envato is a community of creatives who come together to share ideas and help each other succeed.

We invite you to join in, but do have a few rules. The rules and values below exist to help you understand what it means to be a member of the community and cover all aspects of community interaction on Envato forums, blogs, contests and events. We’re committed to upholding them, and we hope you will be too.

We believe when the community succeeds, we succeed.

We love healthy competition, but feel we’re all better off when we’re sharing ideas, knowledge and skills and helping one another. We come to give back, not shamelessly self-promote.

We’re a global community of many types of people.

We are from all corners of the earth and a glorious melting pot of creative fields, skill levels, cultures, religions and more. We think the opportunity for anyone to achieve success no matter where they come from leads to a more meritocratic and equal world.

We celebrate individuality and embrace diversity.

We encourage different viewpoints as long as they’re presented in a way that’s constructive and respectful. Personal attacks as well as any behavior that is hateful or offensive based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender or sexual orientation are not okay.

We’re excited about and inspired by collaboration.

By collaborating with people from different backgrounds, we are exposed to new ideas and perspectives that fuel the creative process and innovation.

We’re always learning because we’re hungry and curious.

We’re all students and teachers. Our world moves super fast and we stay ahead of the pack by pushing and pulling each other forward. We don’t follow the trends, we make them.

We believe all ideas can (and should) be scrutinised, constructively.

We value and preserve the right to be critical on our forums, but that criticism must be directed at ideas (never people or groups), and be delivered in a way that endeavours to be respectful and constructive.

Hard rules

We follow a few hard rules. Please DON’T:

  • Discuss the pricing of items/services governed by Author-Driven Pricing (Envato Market), or on Envato Studio. Strict rules preserve each author’s right to independently set their prices. See this Help Center article on Setting Prices Responsibly for more details.

  • Participate in or encourage personal attacks, call out other community members, or sabotage another user’s item. This includes purposely disrupting the conversation, and being aggressively critical without making any constructive contribution.

  • Discuss politics, pornography or religion.

  • Spam, blatantly self-promote or solicit for any kind of material support, donations or aid. Note that two specific exemptions to this rule exist: for details, see A Note on Self-promotion and Fundraising for Natural Disaster Relief below.

  • Link to free items or products that compete with items sold through Envato.

  • Talk about or link to piracy, warez, illegal activity of any kind.

  • Link to competitor sites or items. Mentioning website names is fine in the context of a discussion, but don’t link directly to those sites here.

  • Request or post personal (or identifying) information about any user or any other person.

  • Post anything that would infringe on another person’s intellectual property rights.

Also, everything on these forums should be considered PG rated or below. Please keep avatars, profile header images, forum images and videos clean.

A Note on Self-Promotion
We want our authors and our customers to succeed on Envato, and we see the forums as being a key tool in helping them to do just that. To that end, we permit self promotion of your Envato items in a context where it is clearly providing value to both of these groups. Such contexts might include:

  • Topics in which Envato Staff are asking items to be nominated.
  • Topics in which forum members have expressed a desire for item recommendations or services.
  • Note that these forums are not a job board, and we would like to help customers within our Envato offerings. You are welcome to post links to your Market item or profile. Any posts requesting that people contact you directly outside of Envato (email, Skype etc.) will be removed.

Please note that the decision as to whether or not your self promotion is providing value and context appropriate is ultimately at the discretion of the Moderators and Envato Staff. If they feel your post or topic violates these guidelines, they reserve the right to remove it.

Fundraising for Humanitarian Crises
Due to community requests, we’ve decided to trial an exception to our usual rule against soliciting donations. There are a few caveats to this:

  • This only applies if explicit permission is given by Envato Staff before posting about any fundraising activity on the Envato forums.
  • Fundraising organisations must be officially verified NGO or non-profit organisations - for example, Red Cross.
  • We’ll consolidate all related requests into a single thread per event, which will contain details on how you can support the relevant organisations.

We value and preserve the right to be critical of decisions made, but that criticism must:

  • Be directed at ideas, never people or groups.
  • Be delivered in a way that endeavours to be respectful and constructive.
  • Be professional: use clear, accurate and polite language. Remember that you may be dealing with someone from a different culture.

Community moderation by the community

Our forums are designed so that the community plays a large role in their moderation. Forum tools enable the community to determine where the awesome content is and what content doesn’t belong. The power is in your hands so please use these tools to improve your experience as well the experience of the entire community.

Our moderation approach
We can’t, and don’t, review all posts on the forum. We don’t authorise any posts and we aren’t responsible for their content (including text, images, and any external links). Every community forum user is responsible for their own posts - please be mindful of your words and please think carefully about what you post.

Actions against our community rules may lead to deletion of your posts, comments, contest submissions or account with or without warning. We won’t edit posts or comments; even if only part is a problem, the whole thing may be removed. All actions and decisions taken by our moderators are final.

We reserve the right to remove, ban, suspend or block an account as we see fit. Envato may terminate your access to the forums at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately.

And to keep our lawyers happy
To post on the community forum you have to be an Envato member, and 13 years or older. We don’t knowingly collect any information from anyone aged 13 or under.

We may update these guidelines and recommend you check back once in a while. If you don’t agree with these guidelines and the terms of our Privacy Policy, we won’t take it personally, but it means that the Envato community might not be for you.

You represent and warrant that:
(i) your use of the forums will follow these guidelines and our Privacy Policy and comply with all applicable laws and regulations (including without limitation any local laws or regulations that apply to you) and
(ii) your use of the forums will not infringe or misappropriate the intellectual property rights of any third party.