Public artifacts — policy & flows

import { Aside } from ‘@astrojs/starlight/components’;

A public artifact is a page anyone on the web can open — no sign-in, no invite. This page is the full policy and how the flows work: who may publish publicly, what you’re responsible for, what ShareOut checks before and after a page goes live, how this differs for Teams & Enterprise, and how monitoring and abuse handling work.

For the developer-facing API details (visibility field, moderation_status, anonymous opt-ins, quotas) see Publishing artifacts. For the basics of sharing see Share it.

Visibility levels

Every artifact has one visibility. You choose it; you can change it later.

Visibility	Who can open it
`private`	You, and people you explicitly share with (email/Google/password).
`workspace`	Any member of the artifact’s workspace.
`public`	Anyone with the link; discoverable and search-indexable.

public is the only open visibility. Everything on this page applies to it. private and workspace are closed and never reachable by the anonymous internet.

Who can publish publicly

Publishing an open artifact requires more than a closed one, by design — it’s what keeps free, anonymous hosting from becoming an abuse magnet.

A verified email. Accounts with no verified email (anonymous, token-only accounts) can publish privately but not publicly. Sign in with Google or a one-time email code first. (Anonymous accounts publishing public would be the cheapest way to mass-produce abuse, so it’s blocked.)
A signup that passed a bot check. New accounts pass a Cloudflare Turnstile challenge, so signups can’t be scripted at scale.
A paid plan (or paid workspace). Public visibility is a paid feature. Free personal accounts can publish private and workspace only. You get open visibility when any of these is true: your account is on Pro or higher, the artifact lives in a Teams/Enterprise workspace with an active subscription, or the workspace is a public showcase. Trying to go open without entitlement keeps the artifact at its current closed visibility and shows an upgrade notice — ShareOut no longer silently downgrades.

What you’re responsible for (owner)

When you make an artifact public, you are the publisher of that content. You agree:

The page and its readable data are world-visible. You put nothing there you can’t expose publicly.
You own the rights to what you publish, and it doesn’t break the law or the acceptable-use terms (no phishing, malware, fraud, illegal content, or content that targets or harms others).
ShareOut may review, withhold, block, or take down public content that violates these terms, and may suspend repeat offenders.

How ShareOut authorizes and checks a public artifact

Public artifacts pass through layered checks — before they go live, while they’re served, and on an ongoing basis. No single check is the whole defense.

1. At publish — automated safety review

The first time you publish or switch an artifact to open visibility, ShareOut runs an automated safety review on the page:

an AI content classifier judges it for phishing, malware, scams, and illegal content, and
a URL-reputation check (Cloudflare URL Scanner) looks at the outbound links and embedded resources.

The outcome sets the artifact’s moderation state:

State	What happens
Approved	Goes live publicly immediately.
Pending	Held private until cleared — anything the classifier can’t confidently approve, or any check error, lands here rather than going live. ShareOut re-checks hourly and auto-restores public visibility when the hold clears; owners see Home badges and get email when resolved. Visitors opening the URL see an under-review page.
Blocked	Not served; the page returns an “unavailable” notice and is not indexed.

Re-publishing unchanged content is not re-reviewed; changing the page triggers a fresh review.

2. At serve time — read-only by default

A public page can be opened by anyone, but anonymous visitors are read-only by default. They cannot write data, send email, use the in-artifact AI chat, or join realtime collaboration unless you explicitly opt in, per capability:

Opt-in	Lets anonymous visitors…
`allow_anon_write`	Write to json / tables / blobs / datasets
`allow_anon_email`	Send contact-form email
`allow_anon_agent`	Use the in-artifact AI chat
`allow_anon_collab`	Join realtime collaboration

All default off. Your signed-in collaborators keep their normal roles regardless. See Publishing artifacts for how to set these.

3. Limits that contain abuse and cost

Bot check on signup (Turnstile).
Per-account caps on number of public artifacts, stored bytes, and (estimated) daily bandwidth. Free accounts have lower caps; exceeding storage blocks the publish, exceeding bandwidth can pause serving.
Rate limits on publishing, anonymous writes, contact-form email, and AI chat — including a per-visitor and a per-owner ceiling so one page can’t drain an account’s AI budget.

4. Ongoing — after a page is live

A daily re-scan re-checks live public pages against URL reputation; a page whose outbound host later turns malicious is auto-blocked.
Content-domain monitoring watches the shared content domain’s reputation, so a problem is caught before it can affect other pages.

Reporting and takedown

Every free public page carries a Report link (in the “Made with ShareOut” badge). Anyone can flag a page.

A report categorized as child-sexual-abuse material immediately pauses and blocks the page and alerts ShareOut — no waiting for review.
Enough independent reports auto-block a page pending review.
ShareOut can take down a page (block + pause) and suspend an account at any time.

If your page was held or taken down and you believe it’s a mistake, you can request a re-review.

Teams & Enterprise

The safety review above applies to every public artifact, on every plan — it’s a platform protection, not a per-workspace setting. Teams and Enterprise add:

No “Made with ShareOut” badge on public pages (free pages always show it).
Higher caps for public artifacts, storage, and bandwidth.
Custom subdomain (yourteam.shareout.site) for your workspace.
Workspace roles. Owners and admins manage team-wide schedules, automations, metric alerts, feature flags, and member tokens — see Workspace admin.
Per-workspace publish governance. Workspace owners/admins can require internal approval before members take an artifact to public visibility.

Workspace publish policy

Each workspace has a public_publish_policy (default allow):

Policy	Behaviour
`allow`	Members publish to open visibility freely (subject to platform safety review).
`prohibit`	Members cannot go open — the artifact stays at `workspace` visibility with a notice.
`require_approval`	Held at `workspace` visibility until N nominated workspace members approve; then it flips to the requested visibility and the platform safety review still runs.

Owners and admins set the policy in the app under Workspace admin → Publishing (or via the REST API). When a member tries to take an artifact open and the workspace requires approval, the app opens an approver picker: the member nominates exactly N teammates, and the page stays workspace-visible until they all approve. Nominated approvers (and the requester) see pending requests under Approvals in the workspace sidebar, where they approve or reject; the sidebar shows a badge when a request needs the current user. See Publishing artifacts → Workspace publish governance.

Approval is tied to the page’s content hash — re-publishing unchanged content after approval does not require a new round. ShareOut’s central safety review and abuse queues still apply on top of any workspace policy.

Monitoring & stats

Account Analytics — in Home, open Analytics from the sidebar for a roll-up across your artifacts: views, unique visitors, active artifacts, load time (p75 LCP once 20+ samples exist), a trend chart, top artifacts (click through for per-artifact detail), top countries, and referrers. Filter by 7 / 30 / 90 days via GET /v1/home/analytics?range=.
Live viewers — per-artifact analytics drill-down shows N viewers now (owners/collaborators only; polls every ~15s). This is separate from comment-panel “others here” presence.
Per-artifact stats — each public artifact also has views, unique visitors, and real-user performance once enough visits accrue. Owners and collaborators see a per-viewer breakdown — name, email, and last seen for every invited or authenticated viewer (collaborators, workspace members, external sharees). Anonymous public views stay count-only. Shown in Home Studio Details, the share overlay Stats panel, and the per-artifact /admin page.
Platform-side, ShareOut monitors the moderation queue, abuse reports, content- domain reputation, and per-account usage to keep public hosting safe; these operational views are managed by ShareOut, not exposed per workspace.

Availability & how it can be paused

Public publishing is enabled in waves rather than all at once, and ShareOut keeps a kill switch: if abuse spikes, new public publishing can be paused instantly (existing private/closed artifacts are unaffected). This is normal for a hosting platform and lets us open access safely.

Publishing artifacts — the API: visibility, moderation_status, anonymous opt-ins, quotas.
Share it — the simple version of sharing and visibility.
Who sees what — per-viewer row-level data visibility.
Workspace admin — Teams/Enterprise admin controls.