Content Policy
Last updated: June 2025
Prodlake exists to help engineers share production knowledge safely. This policy defines what content belongs on the platform and what does not. Every published experience is reviewed against these guidelines before becoming available to learners.
1. What Prodlake Is For
Prodlake is a Production Experience Platform. Content should teach engineers how production systems behave, how incidents unfold, and how experienced professionals think under pressure. The value is in the judgment, reasoning, and patterns — not in proprietary implementation details.
2. Allowed Content
- Production incidents — outage narratives, response timelines, escalation decisions (with identifiers sanitized)
- Architecture decisions — why you chose a particular design, tradeoffs you evaluated, what you'd do differently
- Debugging journeys — step-by-step walkthroughs of how you diagnosed a complex issue
- Root cause analysis — structured breakdowns of what went wrong and systemic fixes
- Migration stories — how you moved between systems, what broke, what you learned
- Reliability lessons — capacity planning decisions, SLO tuning, chaos engineering results
- On-call patterns — triage methodology, runbook design, alert fatigue management
- Infrastructure walkthroughs — using AI Studio to recreate safe representations of real environments
3. Prohibited Content
- Secrets and credentials — API keys, tokens, passwords, certificates, SSH keys, connection strings
- Customer data — PII, user records, transaction data, support tickets containing customer information
- NDA-protected material — proprietary source code, internal documentation explicitly covered by confidentiality agreements
- Internal dashboards — unmodified screenshots of company monitoring tools showing real metrics, hostnames, or endpoints
- Proprietary algorithms — trade secrets, patent-pending implementations, competitive advantages
- Security vulnerabilities — unpatched zero-days, active exploit paths in production systems
4. The AI Studio Distinction
AI Studio exists specifically to solve the "can't show real screens" problem. Instructors describe a scenario, and AI Studio generates a safe, realistic representation. This is the recommended path for content involving dashboards, terminal sessions, or architecture diagrams.
AI Studio output is a creation tool. The instructor reviews, narrates over, and takes responsibility for the final published experience. Generated assets should be treated as a starting point, not authoritative documentation.
5. Content Quality Standards
- Experiences must represent genuine engineering knowledge — not fabricated scenarios.
- Content must provide learning value beyond what's available in public documentation.
- Videos must be reasonably well-produced (clear audio, visible content, coherent narrative).
- Misleading titles or descriptions that don't match content will be flagged for correction.
6. Review Process
All new experiences enter a review queue before publication. Reviews focus on policy compliance (no secrets, no customer data) and quality thresholds. Most reviews complete within 48 hours. Instructors receive specific feedback if changes are needed.
7. Reporting Violations
If you notice content that appears to contain credentials, customer data, or other prohibited material, report it immediately at trust@prodlake.com. We treat credential exposure reports as security incidents and act within hours.
8. Enforcement
- First violation (non-security): Content removed, instructor notified with explanation and guidance.
- Security violation (credentials/customer data): Content removed immediately, instructor account suspended pending review.
- Repeated violations: Permanent account removal and forfeiture of pending payouts.