Community Guidelines

The Potluck · Last updated: July 18, 2026

Welcome to the table

The Potluck is the community side of CookStache. The idea is simple: you bring a dish, you take one home. When you share a cook, other pitmasters can see it, save it, and make it themselves — and you can do the same with theirs. It works best when what's on the table is real, homemade, and honest: real photos of real attempts, accurate info, and credit where it's due.

These guidelines explain what belongs at the Potluck, what doesn't, and what happens when something crosses the line. They apply everywhere your content can appear: in the app, and on the public web at cookstache.com/potluck, /chef/, and /cook/ pages.

What's allowed and encouraged

• Bring your real cooks. Share what you actually cooked — your process, your temps, your times, your results.
• Post real photos of real food. A photo of your plate beats a perfect stock image. The Potluck rewards authenticity over polish.
• Be specific and useful. Cuts, rubs, wood, equipment, internal temps, rest times — detail is what makes a cook worth saving.
• Give credit. If a cook was inspired by someone else, say so. Original work is the whole point.
• "I Cooked This." Made someone else's cook? Bring it back to the table with a rating, a photo of your plate, and an optional note. That's the reciprocity the Potluck runs on.
• Encourage other pitmasters. Ratings and saves are how good work rises. Be generous and honest.

What's prohibited

The following will be removed and may cost you your standing at the Potluck. The categories below map directly to the reasons you'll see when you flag a cook or report a chef.

On a cook (what you can flag)

• Inaccurate or unsafe information. Wrong or dangerous cooking guidance — especially food-safety risks. Pulling chicken at 140°F, undercooked pork, unsafe holding or reheating, or temps/times that would make someone sick. See Food safety below.
• Inappropriate content. Offensive, hateful, harassing, sexual, violent, or otherwise not-allowed content in a cook, its photos, or its notes.
• Spam or undisclosed ads. Repetitive junk, scams, link farms, or promotional content that doesn't disclose it's an ad or sponsorship. Sponsored and brand content is welcome when it is clearly labeled — undisclosed promotion is not.
• Not their cook (stolen / not original). Passing off someone else's work as your own, re-posting another pitmaster's cook or photos without credit or rights, or scraped content.
• Broken or duplicate. Broken, unusable, duplicate, or obvious low-effort posts.
• Other. Anything else that violates these guidelines — tell us what's wrong in a note.

On a chef profile (what you can report)

• Harassment. Targeting, bullying, threats, or abuse directed at a person.
• Impersonation. Pretending to be someone else — another pitmaster, a brand, CookStache staff, or a public figure. The verified blue Chef badge is the only official "this is really them" mark, and it is granted by CookStache staff only.
• Spam profile. A profile that exists to spam, scam, or farm links/follows.
• Inappropriate. Offensive, hateful, or not-allowed content in a display name, bio, or avatar.
• Other. Any other profile-level abuse — describe it in a note.

Food safety (this is BBQ — it matters)

The Potluck is a barbecue and griddle community, and bad temperature guidance can make people sick. Hold yourself to safe practice:

• Hit safe internal temperatures. Use a thermometer. Poultry to a safe finished temp, ground meats and sausage cooked through, pork and beef to safe doneness for the cut. Don't publish a cook that tells people to pull poultry at 140°F.
• Respect the danger zone. Don't leave food in the 40–140°F range longer than is safe. Call out safe holding, cooling, and reheating in long cooks and overnight smokes.
• Be honest about doneness. If a method carries risk (rare, reverse-seared, sous-vide, raw marinades, home-cured or smoked items), say so plainly so others can decide.
• Don't present unsafe shortcuts as fact. Inaccurate or unsafe info is the one flag reason we treat as a real safety issue, and it's weighted accordingly in review.

If you see a cook with unsafe guidance, flag it as "inaccurate or unsafe." You may be keeping someone out of the hospital.

Original content

Bring your own dish. Only post cooks and photos that are yours, or that you have the rights and permission to share. Don't claim someone else's cook as your own, and don't upload photos you didn't take or don't have rights to use. When you upload, you're confirming the content is yours to share. Reposting another pitmaster's work as if it were your own is the "not their cook" violation, and it's one of the fastest ways to lose trust here.

Blocking, flagging, and reporting

You have two kinds of control: personal (block) and community (flag/report).

Blocking a user (your view)

You can block another user. Blocking hides their cooks, profile, and follow activity from your experience in the app. Blocking is personal and immediate — you don't have to explain it, and the other person isn't notified.

The soft-block model. Blocking changes your view. It does not take someone's content off the public web. Public Potluck pages (/potluck, /chef/, /cook/) stay visible to everyone. If content actually breaks these guidelines, blocking is not the fix — report or flag it, and our recourse is to remove it. Removal is what takes content down for everyone; blocking just takes it out of your feed.

Flagging a cook / reporting a chef (the community's view)

• Flag a cook using the reasons above when a specific cook is unsafe, inappropriate, spammy, stolen, or broken.
• Report a chef using the profile reasons when a profile is harassing, impersonating, spam, or inappropriate.
• You can flag a given cook once — flagging again doesn't add weight, and mass-flagging to bury a rival is itself abuse.

What a flag does. Flags are a review trigger, not an instant verdict. When a cook collects enough independent flags, it's automatically pulled from the public feed and held for a human to review — so a problem can't sit live while it waits in line. A held cook isn't deleted; it's paused pending review. This protects the community even from otherwise-trusted contributors, and the hold-don't-delete rule protects honest pitmasters from coordinated false flagging.

Photos are automatically screened

Every photo you upload — on a cook and on "I Cooked This" — is automatically screened before it can go public. Images that are flagged as adult, violent, or otherwise unsafe are rejected up front, so they never reach the feed or the public web. Automated screening catches the obvious cases; people review the edge cases and anything that gets flagged later.

Enforcement ladder

We'd rather coach than punish, so most issues start small and escalate only if they continue or are serious. Severe violations (safety risks, harassment, illegal content) can jump straight to removal or a ban.

1. Warn — a heads-up that something crossed a line, with a chance to fix it.
2. Hold — a cook is pulled from the public feed and paused while it's reviewed. Nothing is deleted yet.
3. Remove — content that violates these guidelines is taken down for everyone.
4. Trust revoked — contributors who've earned the ability to auto-publish lose it after a removal or an upheld report, and go back to having new posts reviewed before they appear. Trust is slow to earn and fast to lose.
5. Ban — for repeated or serious violations, the account loses access to the Potluck.

Earned standing — your badge tier and your auto-publish trust — is awarded by CookStache, never self-assigned, and can be revoked when the rules are broken.

A note on fairness

• One flag per person per cook. Auto-hold is a review trigger, not a conviction.
• We weigh context: a single mistake is coached; a pattern is acted on.
• Reports and flags are reviewed by people before anything beyond an automatic hold happens.
• If your content is removed and you think we got it wrong, you can reach us through the app or at hello@cookstache.com.

Contact us

Questions about these guidelines? Reach us at hello@cookstache.com.

See also our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

CookStache · The Potluck · bring a dish, earn your chair.