Planned Release Date: September 2026

About This Game

It's 2007. You're an unpaid moderator on a dying internet forum.

Inspired by Papers, Please, Permaban is a forum moderation game about interpreting rules, making judgment calls, and dealing with people who hate your decisions.

A user posts leaked game files and calls it "preservation." Someone writes slurs with numbers to dodge the filter. A donor picks a fight with three veterans. The spam bot might actually be a real person.

Every punishment needs a rule citation. Moderate too hard and the community dies. Moderate too soft and the forum drowns in raids, scams, and flame wars.

NSM Messenger blinks. Popups cover the screen. Users DM you insults at 2 AM. The spam filter flags normal posts and waves obvious scams through. Dial-up freezes at the worst possible moments.

The rulebook keeps growing. Some rules contradict each other. Admins rewrite policy mid-shift. Users remember what you did to them.

Features

• Moderate forum posts.

• Ban, warn, censor, investigate, thread lock, IP ban, or nuke

• Cite the correct rule for every punishment

• Deal with contradictory moderation policies

• Track ban evaders and sockpuppets

• A spam filter that barely knows what spam is

• Manage burnout and stress misclicks

• Browse a simulated 2007 desktop

• Read DMs, forum drama, and user complaints

• Endless mode with escalating chaos

Includes

• 500+ handmade forum posts

• Multiple board themes inspired by classic forums

• Recurring users and moderator drama

• Synth soundtrack and retro desktop SFX

• And way too many easter eggs...

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Permaban is a forum moderator simulator set in 2007. Players read and moderate fictional user posts that include mild profanity and insults, online threats and harassment, doxxing scenarios, references to hacking, phishing and software piracy, and posts that reference internet shock sites by name. Those posts carry abstract, distorted placeholder graphics; no explicit imagery appears at any point. All of this content is text the player has to identify and remove. That is the core gameplay loop.