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Every photograph and every word on a RestMarker page is reviewed before it can go live. Here is the whole standard, in plain language.

The line we actually draw

It is not tone. It is intent.

Real obituaries say hard things. People write that their father drank, that their mother was difficult, that a brother died of an overdose, that a family was never repaired. That is not something to be filtered out — it is often the truest and bravest part of the whole page. We will not ask you to soften it, and our reviewers are instructed specifically not to reject writing for being sad, blunt, or unflattering.

What we refuse is a page written to punish somebody. A marker bought to humiliate the person buried under it, or to attack someone still living, is the one thing this product must never become. A gravestone lasts a very long time, and nobody should be able to make it a permanent insult.

Text we will not publish

• Contempt or mockery whose purpose is to degrade the person who died.
• Slurs or dehumanising language about any group of people.
• Accusations of serious crimes against a named living person.
• Threats, or calls for harm against anyone.
• Sexually explicit content.
• Home addresses, phone numbers, or account and ID numbers of living people.
• Advertising, fundraising outside a normal memorial donation, or link spam.

“In lieu of flowers, please give to…” is a normal part of an obituary. It is not spam and we do not treat it as such.

Photographs we will not publish

• Nudity or sexual content of any kind.
• Graphic violence, wounds, remains, or images of the deceased’s body.
• Weapons pointed, brandished, or used threateningly. A service portrait or a hunting photograph is fine — those belong on a great many memorials and we are not going to remove them.
• Hate symbols and extremist insignia.
• Drug use as the subject of the photograph.
• Anything sexualising a minor, in any degree.
• Memes, screenshots, adverts, or images that are not photographs. Scanned prints, handwritten letters, service records and newspaper clippings are welcome — those are memorial material.

No video

Photographs and words only. We left video out on purpose: we cannot review an hour of footage as carefully as we can read a page, and we are not willing to publish onto a headstone anything we have not fully examined.

When the review is unsure

If the automated reviewer cannot decide, or cannot run at all, the item is held and a person reads it — usually within one business day. It is never published by default. An outage must not become an approval.

If we get it wrong

We will. Write to help@restmarker.com and a person will read the actual text or look at the actual photograph. We keep a record of every review decision, so we can tell you precisely what happened and why.

If someone else objects

Every published memorial carries a quiet link at the foot of the page for reporting a problem. Families disagree, and the person who paid is not always the only one with a claim on the story. We look at every report, and we contact the family who built the page before we take anything down.