For site owners

gnibs is a shared margin for the web: people open your page through gnibs, highlight passages, and leave notes anchored to them. To show your page inside that margin, our server fetches it (logged out, one ordinary request) and re-serves it to the reader with our annotation layer on top. The original page is untouched, readers are always one click from it, and proxied copies are never search-indexable.

If you’d rather gnibs didn’t re-serve your pages at all, you can turn that off yourself. One line, no account, no verification, no process.

The opt-out

Serve either of these from your origin — a response header:

Gnibs-Opt-Out: render

…or, if your platform doesn’t let you set headers, a meta tag in your HTML:

<meta name="gnibs-opt-out" content="render">

Either is sufficient. Because only whoever controls the origin can serve them, the signal is self-authenticating — that’s why there is no verification flow. We discover it during the fetch we were already making and store nothing: it’s a pure render-time check. Remove the signal and rendering resumes on the next fetch.

What it does

• Stops the render. Instead of re-serving your page, gnibs shows its own room for that URL: the link, a note saying you asked us not to display your pages, and the discussion. Readers reach your page by clicking through to it — a full, normal pageview for you.
• Turns off every other use of the fetched page. No content fingerprinting, no snapshots, no stored extracts. The only things we read from an opted-out page are the signal itself and your OG title/site name, used to label the room the way any link unfurl would.

What it doesn’t do

There is no discussion opt-out. The room is gnibs.com hosting gnibs users’ speech about a URL — the same thing any forum thread about your page is. The principle, plainly: readers’ browsers are theirs, our servers are ours, your pages are yours. You control whether we re-serve your pages; you don’t control what people say about them, here or anywhere.

For the same reason, the opt-out doesn’t affect the gnibs browser extension: there, the reader’s own browser loads your page directly — a normal visit, with the margin drawn over it on their screen.

Values other than render (say, all or discussion) are read as render— it’s the only thing on offer. Any value under the gnibs-opt-out name opts you out of rendering.

What it costs you

Said plainly, because it’s a real trade-off: gnibs can’t analyze content it doesn’t process. Opted-out pages drop out of story-grouping and the discovery surfaces that route readers between related margins. Your URL keeps its room; it stops getting the cross-links.

Policy, not promise

The opt-out is a feature of current policy, adopted while we work out long-term moderation solutions — we think it’s the right default, and we intend to keep it, but it isn’t a contract. The one permanent promise gnibs makes is to its contributors: contributing to the margin will never be paywalled.

Content-specific complaints

The opt-out is about rendering, not about individual posts. For copyright complaints about specific content, use the DMCA process on our copyright page. For anything else, email support@gnibs.com — a person reads it.