Ethics — the community code

« Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints. »

That's the founding maxim of modern urbex, and it's the ethical code of Urbex Legends. What we explore belongs to collective history; what we take, break, damage belongs to our sole responsibility.

Community rules

• Take nothing. No objects, no souvenirs, no "trophies". Photograph yes, take no.
• Break nothing. No forced doors, no broken windows, no damaged walls. If the site is closed, it's closed.
• Tag nothing. No graffiti, no signature, no marking. Abandoned places are not your canvas.
• No public sharing of coordinates. Not on social media, not on Google Maps, not on YouTube. Popular sites die fast.
• Respect the inhabitants. A squatter, a homeless person, a metal hunter: these are humans. Leave if you're disturbing.
• No "performative" urbex. Progress in the app must never encourage risk-taking, competition at the sites, or damage to them.

The role of the app

Urbex Legends lets you document your explorations. Badges and levels never justify taking risks or entering a prohibited site. In the app, coins can unlock individual places; respect for the sites remains the rule, however you access the information.

Heritage content sources

Historical descriptions on the fiches come from community contributions, supplemented by: Wikipedia, Wikidata, OpenStreetMap. Any factual error can be reported via in-app moderation.

Moderation

A team of volunteer moderators validates each submitted urbex and processes reports. Content violating this ethical code (shared vandalism, public coordinates, provocative tone) is removed; repeat-offender accounts are banned. The full chain, from a place being submitted to a report being handled, is set out in the guide on how a place gets on the map.

Searching without damage

This code says what we do not do. A separate guide says what to do instead: how to find abandoned places legally — public inventories, archives, land records, and how to ask an owner for permission. Another traces these six rules back to their source and sets each one against the French provision that doubles it, where one exists: the rules of urbex, explained and sourced.