Runbooks
The procedures that cross screens: publishing, a serious report, somebody who paid and did not get it, and taking the site down safely.
Publish a reel to the blog
Draft it
New reel — title, slug, hook, description, article. Upload the reel and its MP4. Save draft.
Check both previews
The live preview plays the reel; the search preview is the result Google will show. Fix the description here rather than after it is indexed.
File it
One category, the tags that apply. Both become listing pages, so a tag nobody else uses is a page with one reel on it.
Publish, then open it on the site
Watch it end to end on the public page once. That is the only check that catches a file that uploaded but does not play.
A serious report about a published reel
Unpublish first
Reels → Unpublish. It is instant and fully reversible; deciding takes longer than that.
Then resolve the flag
Moderation. Resolving records the decision — it does not unpublish, which is why the order matters.
Fix or delete
Edit and publish again, or leave it unpublished. Delete only once you are certain, because that one does not come back.
Several people reporting once is a different signal from one person reporting several times. The queue distinguishes them; read the reports before you act on the count.
Somebody paid and did not get their plan
Check Billing, not Users
Billing — find the subscription and the payment. If the payment is there and the plan is not, this is a delivery problem, not a pricing one.
Run reconciliation
It repairs paid-but-never-activated in exactly this case, from live Paddle state. This is the right fix and it leaves the audit trail correct.
Only then reach for the manual override
Moving the account by hand on Users gets them working but leaves the subscription unrepaired — the nightly sweep may undo it. Use it to unblock somebody urgently, and still fix the subscription.
Take the site down for a migration
Announce it, ahead of time
Announcements, on the signed-in dashboard, with the window in it.
Turn maintenance mode on
Settings. Then open the public site and check the holding page is actually up — every failure in that path answers “open”, so an unreachable service looks exactly like a site that is fine.
Do the work
Reading stays on throughout: the reels, the listings and the feed keep serving. Only writes are refused.
Turn it off, and end the announcement
Then save something small yourself — a plan limit set to its own value — to prove writes are back.
An account is misbehaving
| How bad | What to do | Why not more |
|---|---|---|
| One reel is wrong | Reject the flag in Moderation with a reason they can act on. | Nothing else is affected, and they can fix it. |
| A script, not a person | Tighten the per-plan limits on Abuse & rate limits. | A limit ends a script; a ban ends a person. |
| Deliberate abuse | Ban on Users. Sessions are revoked on the spot. | Reels are kept and the ban is reversible, so you can still be wrong. |
| A legal request, or they asked | Delete on Users. | Nothing else here is irreversible. Be certain. |