Tributes, visibility, and sharing a memorial

This is the community side of a memorial, the companion to Creating a memorial for an animal. It covers tributes from other members, how you moderate them, reporting, and the optional post that shares the memorial to the feed.

What a tribute is

• What it is: a short written message of remembrance left by a community member on a published memorial. It is text only, no photos or attachments, and tributes appear under "Memories" on the memorial page.
• What it means for you: tributes let the community say goodbye in their own words, gathered in one place on the animal's memorial.

Who can leave a tribute

A tribute requires all of the following:

• You are signed in. Tributes are not anonymous.
• The owner has "allow member tributes" on. If the owner turned the toggle off, no one but the owner can add a tribute.
• You can view the memorial. Because a published public or unlisted memorial is viewable by anyone who can see the (now public) animal, in practice any signed-in member who can reach the memorial can leave one.
• A rate limit applies (per user and per IP) to prevent spam.
• What it means for you: condolences can come from the whole community, not only people who knew the animal, and the owner controls that gate with the single toggle.

Tributes are shown immediately, then moderated

This is the key thing to understand about how tributes are handled:

• Post-then-moderate, not pre-approved. A new tribute is visible the moment it is left. There is no approval queue, so no one waits on you to approve a kind message.
• The owner moderates after the fact (manager-only). The actions, and the states a tribute can be in:
• Hide: sets the tribute to hidden. It is kept on record but removed from public view, and it is reversible.
• Show: restores a hidden tribute to visible.
• Remove: soft-deletes the tribute. It is gone from every view.
• Pin / Unpin: pins a tribute to the top of the list (and unpins it again).
• What it means for you: you stay fully in control of what shows on the memorial, without a published memorial ever holding kind messages hostage behind an approval step.

Reporting a tribute

• What it is: any member who can view the memorial can report a tribute for review. It is rate-limited.
• Where it goes: the report goes to Creatures for moderation, the same moderation path as posts, comments, profiles, and reviews.
• What it means for you: even if the owner has not hidden something, the community can flag it for the team.

Sharing the memorial to the community feed (opt-in)

When you publish a memorial, you can opt to share a post about it to the community feed. This is the "Share a memorial post to the feed" checkbox in the editor (draft-only, on by default).

• What it creates: on publish, if the checkbox is on and the memorial is not private, Creatures creates one feed post in your voice, "In loving memory of {animal}", with a memorial card linking back to the memorial and carrying the featured photos. The feed card shows a short, safely truncated excerpt of the remembrance.
• The post's audience tracks the memorial's visibility:
• A public memorial yields a public feed post.
• An unlisted memorial's post is kept out of the community feed.
• A private memorial creates no feed post at all.
• It stays in sync: the post is created race-safely, and if you later change the memorial's visibility, the existing post's audience updates to match.
• What it means for you: sharing is a choice you make once, at publish. Keep the memorial private and it stays off the feed entirely; publish it public with the box checked and it announces itself once in the feed. For the feed itself, see The community feed: posting, reactions, and reposts.

Who can see a memorial (the full picture)

Putting it together, a memorial is visible to someone only when all of these hold:

• the animal is viewable by them,
• the memorial is published,
• the animal is deceased, and
• the visibility is public or unlisted (and the animal is not private).

Managers always see it, including drafts. So a draft is private to the team, a published private memorial stays manager-only, and a published public or unlisted memorial opens up to viewers per the visibility rules above.

Because the memorial is one of the tabs on the animal's own profile, who can reach it follows the animal. For how that profile and its tabs work, see Your animal's profile page: the tabs and what each one does.

To create or edit the memorial and its fields, see Creating a memorial for an animal.

Related information

• Creating a memorial for an animal
• The community feed: posting, reactions, and reposts

Updated on: 23/06/2026