Campfire is a place to connect with other players in your community to share your experience with Niantic apps. We have provided the following tools to help you control what others can see about you so that you can be confident in your Campfire experience.
Blocking
- Being able to add you as a friend
- Send you direct messages or message requests
- See your profile
- Interact with you in Groups
- Invite you to a Meetup
- Interact with you in Flare Chat
- See your posts, even if they are public
Reporting
Reporting another Campfire user creates a ticket for our moderation team to review and take appropriate actions on a case-by-case basis.
In addition to reporting individual users, you can also report inappropriate content, such as violations of the Niantic Player Guidelines, if and when you see it.
Blocking or reporting someone from their Profile
You may block or report anyone (including friends) by going to their profile, tapping on the three dots on the top right side of the screen and selecting “Block” or “Report”. You can access a person’s profile by tapping on their profile picture within Groups, text channels, direct / group messages, Flare Chat, and posts.
Tapping “Report” will pull up a menu to specify the reason for reporting so that our moderation team can review and take appropriate action.
Reporting inappropriate content from Groups, text channels, Flare Chats, or DMs
Within any chat, tap and hold on an offensive message to report that content to our moderation team.
If you need to report a whole text channel, tap the three dots on the top right corner of the chat and select “Report Channel.”
Remember: You can report or block an individual by tapping on their profile.
Teen Safety on Campfire
Campfire is Niantic’s chat function and is only available for adults and children over the age of digital consent. These are tips and tools we share with all our users and you can discuss with your teen to enable them to have a safe experience on Campfire. Please see Niantic Kids Parent Portal for more information on how parents can manage their children’s experiences.
Managing your friends list
When your teen joins Campfire, they automatically become friends on Campfire with all their friends from the games they play and are integrated with Campfire: your teen plays Pokémon GO? When they join Campfire, they’ll be Campfire friends with all their Pokémon GO friends who have joined Campfire. This is a great time for your teen to look at their friends list and remove those they aren’t really friends with.
Choosing who can message you
People you’re not friends on Campfire with cannot send you messages, but you can allow them to send Message Requests. If your teen chooses to do so, they will need to accept the request before being able to reply to the non-friend’s message.
Sharing personal information
We recommend avoiding having personal information in your teen’s username, which may be visible publicly. While we do request the player's date of birth at registration, that information remains private and doesn’t show up on the profile for others to see.
Sharing personal information is generally not recommended and not necessary to play our games. This also applies to Campfire channels, Group messages and private messages. This includes sharing phone numbers, addresses, social media profiles, real names, date of birth (which don’t appear on profiles), age, etc. Any request for personal information or to move to another messaging platform is unnecessary to play our games and should probably not be fulfilled.
Unfriending, blocking and reporting
Does your teen want to stop someone from contacting them? They have a few options:
Unfriending: Remove the user as a friend. To do so, go to the user’s profile, click the three dots on the top right corner and select “Remove Friend.”
Blocking: By blocking a user, you ensure that they will not be able to message you or add you back as a friend. You will not see notifications from them.
Reporting: You can report inappropriate content or behavior for Niantic to review.
Muting: If you do not want to unfriend the user but solely to stop them from messaging you, you can mute the conversation and stay friends with them.
At Niantic we want users of all ages to be able to play and enjoy our games! We also want to encourage conversations between parents or legal guardians and their kids and teens, especially around safety, and for this we have no better recommendation than directing you to the resources created by the Family Online Safety Institute!