Our Vetting Process: What We Do, Why We Do It, and How We Protect You
Off The Traxx — ott-dungeon.com
Welcome. Before you can attend events at Off The Traxx, we'll ask you to go through a vetting process. We know it's more work than signing up for most websites, and we know some of what we ask for is sensitive. This page explains exactly what happens, why we do it this way, and what we do to protect the information you share with us.
If you have questions or concerns at any point, email
Why we vet at all
A dungeon is a space where consent, trust, and physical safety are the whole game. The work of keeping that space safe doesn't happen at the door — it happens before someone ever walks through it. Vetting is how we do our share of that work. It exists to:
- Reduce the chance that someone with a history of assault or coercion gets access to our members.
- Give members a baseline of confidence that the people around them have been through the same process they did.
- Give us a documented, consistent process so decisions don't come down to whoever happens to be at the door that night.
Vetting is not a guarantee. No process catches everyone, and no one should treat a vetted membership as a substitute for negotiating carefully, watching out for each other, and trusting your gut. It's one layer of safety, not the only one.
What the process looks like
Roughly, here's what you'll go through:
1. Online application. You fill out a form on this site with a scene name, contact information, and some questions about your experience and what you're looking for. This part is quick.
2. ID verification — two ways. You choose how to prove your ID, and you can switch between the two any time before the check actually happens. Online: you photograph your government-issued ID and take a quick selfie; our third-party verification partner confirms your legal name and date of birth and reports the result back to us. OTT never sees the image or the selfie — only the verified name and date of birth — and we have the partner delete its copy as soon as we've received that (or within 30 days at most if a check runs into an error). This path is usually the fastest, since it doesn't wait for a munch. In person: a vetter looks at your physical ID at a munch (or another time that works for you), confirms the photo matches you and the name matches your application, and hands it back. No photo or scan of your ID is taken or stored — nothing about your ID lives in any digital system, ours or our partner's.
Optional: providing legal name and date of birth at application time. The application form offers an optional section where you can provide your legal first name, last name, and date of birth at submission time. If you do, we can run the public registry check before we meet you in person, which cuts the overall timeline by 1–2 weeks. We treat this data the same way as anything captured during ID verification: encrypted in our database, visible only to vetters, audit-logged when accessed. If you leave these fields blank, the vetter collects them when they look at your ID at a munch — we won't ask why you skipped them.
3. Registry check. A vetter searches the National Sex Offender Public Website (NSOPW.gov) for your verified legal name. This is the same public search anyone can run. We do it because it's freely available and because not doing it would be hard to justify to the rest of our members. The application asks whether you've used any other legal names in the past ten years (for example, a maiden name or a name from before a legal change); we ask this so the search is complete, not for any other reason. NSOPW only covers US jurisdictions, so if you've lived outside the US for a significant period we'll note that the search isn't comprehensive in your case.
4. References. We'll ask for one or two references from people in the local scene who can vouch for you. If you're new to the area or to the scene, tell us — we have other paths for people without an established network, and we don't want this step to gatekeep newcomers unfairly.
If you give us an email address for a reference, our system will send them a short standardized form (about five minutes to fill in) asking how long they've known you, in what context, and whether they'd recommend you for a private adult community. Their answers come straight back to us — encrypted, vetter-only. The email itself is plainly worded: subject line is "Reference request from [your scene name]", the body identifies us as Off The Traxx and explains what we're asking for. It does not mention kink, BDSM, or dungeon anywhere — references' inboxes are sometimes shared, and we don't want to out anyone.
Before you submit, the form asks you to confirm you've already let each reference know they might hear from us. Please do that. A reference who gets an unexpected email about a "private social club" they were named for is a bad first impression for us and an uncomfortable position for them. A quick "hey, I'm joining a private group and listed you as a reference — they may email you a short form, totally fine to ignore if you'd rather not" is enough.
For non-email contacts (FetLife, Signal, phone, etc.) a vetter reaches out personally. Either way, the response window is short — we generally hear back within a couple of weeks.
5. Munch attendance. Before your first dungeon event, we ask you to come to a munch (a casual meet-up at a public venue). This isn't a test. It's a chance for you to meet people in low-pressure clothes-on circumstances and for us to meet you the same way. If you chose in-person ID verification, the munch is also where a vetter will look at your ID — bring it with you.
6. Decision. A vetter — or, for edge cases, two vetters together — reviews everything and makes a call. You'll hear back either way, usually within a week of the munch.
After you've submitted: your status page
Once you've applied, you can log in any time and visit your status page to see where things stand. It shows the current status, when it last changed, and what to expect next. A few things you can do from there:
- See your references and their status: which have been contacted, which have replied, which we're still waiting on. If a reference's email bounces, you'll see that here.
- Add a reference you forgot to list. Up to five total per application. If you didn't realize references were expected, or you thought of a better one later, this is where you fix that. The same rules apply — confirm you've told them they may receive an email.
- Switch your ID-verification method between online and in person, any time before the check happens.
- Withdraw your application at any time before a decision is made.
If anything in your application needs correcting (a typo in your legal name on the optional pre-fill, a reference contact that bounced, the wrong date of birth), a vetter can fix it during review or email you to confirm. You don't need to do anything special.
How long it takes, and what we'll tell you while you wait
Figure on roughly 2–4 weeks from application to a decision. The online ID path is usually faster; the in-person path depends on when the next munch falls relative to your application, since the ID check happens there.
We'll send you status updates along the way so you're not left wondering. At a minimum: confirmation when we receive your application, an update if you've been waiting more than a week, and notification when a decision is made. If you ever want to check in, just email — we'd rather answer than have you stewing in silence.
What we'll tell you about a decision
If we approve you, we'll just say so. There's nothing else you need to know.
If we decline you, here's what we'll share — and what we won't, and why.
We'll tell you:
- That a decision was made
- The general category of reason: information surfaced during the registry check, concerns raised during reference contacts or community feedback, an issue specific to fit with our venue, or other
- That you may appeal (see below)
We won't share:
- Which specific references or community members we spoke to
- What any specific person said, even paraphrased, if it could identify the source
- Whether one person raised a concern or several
- Whether a concern came from someone you listed as a reference, or from community members we contacted independently
We hold this line even if you ask directly, and even if you think you already know who said what. We don't confirm or deny inferences.
Why this limit exists. When references know their candor will get quoted back, references stop being candid. The whole reference system collapses into "everyone gives glowing recommendations," which gives vetters no useful signal and means we end up admitting people we shouldn't have. The community we're protecting — including you, if you're admitted — depends on people being able to speak honestly to vetters without it coming back on them. The cost of that protection is that declined applicants don't get the specifics they might want.
We think this tradeoff is the right one, but we know it's frustrating to be on the receiving end of it. If a decline lands wrong, the appeal process is where to push back. An appeal is reviewed by different vetters than those who made the original decision, and you can use the appeal to say "I think the information you have is inaccurate" or "I think the conclusion you drew was wrong" without us needing to first tell you exactly what we have.
Filing an appeal. If you've been declined, log in to your account and visit your application status page — you'll find a "File an appeal" button there. The form asks for your statement, any specific corrections you'd like considered, and what outcome you're hoping for. Only one appeal is allowed per application. Once submitted, your appeal is routed to vetters who didn't participate in the original decision; reviews typically take 1–3 weeks. If the appeal is granted, your application returns to active vetting. If it's denied, that's the final decision on this application — though you remain welcome to apply again later as a fresh application.
Partners, plus-ones, and visitors from out of town
Applying as a couple or partners. Each person vets independently, even if you're applying together. We can usually schedule both of you to attend the same munch so you don't have to come twice.
Bringing a plus-one to an event. Approved members can bring a guest to non-play events only — munches, classes, social mixers, and the like. Plus-ones are not permitted at dungeon events or any event where play happens, regardless of whether the guest plans to participate. Anyone attending a play event has to go through full vetting first. Even for non-play events, plus-ones go through a lightweight check: ID verification at the door and a brief conversation with a vetter. We don't allow members to vouch a guest in cold.
Visiting from another venue. If you're a member in good standing of a venue we know and trust, we may accept their vetting in lieu of starting from scratch. This is case-by-case and we'll need to talk to someone at your home venue. Reach out before your trip — the conversation takes time.
What happens after you're approved
Approval isn't the end of the process. A few things stay active:
Annual re-vetting on renewal. When your membership comes up for renewal each year, we run the registry check again against your verified legal name. The same standards apply — a hit is a conversation, not an automatic anything. We don't re-run ID verification, ask for new references, or otherwise restart the process; the renewal check is just the registry piece.
If something changes mid-membership. If a member is newly added to a registry, or if credible reports come to us about behavior at events or elsewhere, we may pause that member's dungeon access while we review. Pausing is not a decision — it's a hold so we can talk to the people involved and figure out what's going on. We'll tell the affected member what's happening, what we're looking at, and what the timeline is.
Reporting things that happen at events. If something happens at an event — a consent violation, a creepy interaction, a safeword ignored, a DM call you disagree with, anything — there's a way to report it that goes to the same group of people who handle vetting. Members and DMs can both report. Reports are taken seriously, kept as confidential as possible, and result in a real review. The reporting process is documented separately at ott-dungeon.com/incident-reporting; the submission form itself lives at ott-dungeon.com/report.
About the registry check, specifically
We want to be clear about how we treat registry results, because this is where a lot of people have legitimate concerns.
A hit is not an automatic decline. The sex offender registry includes people convicted of a wide range of things, and the offenses on it are not all alike. Public urination charges land on the registry in some states. So do convictions from teenagers having consensual sex with each other. So do people who got caught skinny-dipping. We don't think any of those belong in the same conversation as someone who has assaulted another person, and we don't treat them the same way.
Every flagged result is reviewed by a human. When the registry returns a hit, a vetter reads the actual offense details, looks at the conviction date, and considers context. We use a structured assessment that distinguishes predatory and contact offenses from public-indecency offenses, statutory cases that look like Romeo-and-Juliet situations, and unclear cases that need more discussion. Predatory and contact offenses are a hard no. Other categories get a real conversation.
You can talk to us. If something on your record concerns you and you'd like to explain it before we run the check, email
False matches happen. Name-and-date-of-birth matching produces real false positives, especially for people with common names. If we find a possible match that isn't you, we'll figure that out before it affects your application.
The honest pros and cons
We think you deserve to see the trade-offs the way we see them.
What this process does well:
- Catches the subset of people whose history is documented and accessible.
- Creates a documented decision trail, which makes our process consistent and reviewable rather than arbitrary.
- Verifies that the person showing up at the door is the person who applied.
- Filters out people unwilling to engage with even a basic accountability process — which is, on its own, useful information.
What this process can't do:
- Catch people who have never been caught, charged, or convicted. The majority of sexual harm is never reported, and most reports never reach conviction. The registry is a small slice of who has done harm.
- Predict future behavior. A clean record is not a promise of safety.
- Replace the work of negotiating carefully, communicating with play partners, using safewords, watching out for each other on the floor, and reporting concerns to DMs.
- Catch coercion that doesn't rise to a criminal charge but still hurts people.
We are telling you this because we'd rather you have a realistic picture of what vetting buys us than an inflated one. We do this work because the alternative — doing nothing — is worse. We do not believe it makes the space safe by itself.
How we protect your privacy
Sensitive information collected during vetting is treated very differently from anything else on the site.
Two identities, separated by design. Your scene name is what appears across the site — in member lists, on your profile, in event signups, in messages. Your legal name is stored separately and is only visible to the small group of trained vetters. Other members, including most administrators, never see it. The site is built so that legal name and scene name are not casually connected.
Encryption at rest. Legal name and date of birth are encrypted in our database using standard cryptographic libraries (libsodium). If the database were ever stolen or leaked, those fields would be unreadable without a separate key that isn't stored in the database.
Strict access controls. Only members of a specifically-designated Vetter group can decrypt and view legal-name fields. Site administrators who aren't also vetters cannot. Every time a vetter views or accesses your sensitive information, that access is logged with who, when, and why. If a vetter is snooping on people they have no reason to be reviewing, we can see it.
No image of your ID is stored by us. If you verify in person, the vetter looks at your ID, records the verified data, and hands it back — no photo, scan, or digital copy of your ID ever exists, on our servers or anyone else's. If you verify online, your ID image and selfie are handled entirely by our third-party verification partner; OTT receives only the verified name and date of birth, never the image, and we have the partner delete its copy as soon as we've received that — or within 30 days at most if a check runs into an error.
Limited retention. If your application is declined or withdrawn, we purge the encrypted sensitive fields after 90 days. We keep a minimal record (decision, date, decision rationale) so that we don't accidentally re-vet the same person from scratch, but the underlying PII is gone. If you're approved, we keep your verified information only as long as you remain a member, plus 12 months. You can request deletion at any point — see below.
If the venue closes or changes hands. Your records don't outlive your relationship with us by accident. If Off The Traxx closes, we notify all members at least 60 days in advance, give you a chance to request a copy of your own record, and then destroy all vetting records on a specified date — encrypted PII, audit logs, references, the works. If the venue is ever sold or merged, we notify members at least 90 days in advance, and your records are destroyed by default unless you affirmatively opt in to having them transferred to the new operator. We've documented this plan and made sure it can actually be carried out even if the people running the venue are unavailable for any reason.
The registry search itself. When a vetter searches NSOPW.gov, that search happens in their browser, signed in to their organizational account. If you choose online ID verification, the only third party we share data with is our verification partner, and only for the ID check itself — you provide your ID and selfie directly to them, and we receive back only the verified name and date of birth. If you choose in-person verification, no information about you is shared with any third party during vetting, apart from the public NSOPW search that any member of the public can run.
Reference contacts. When we contact a reference you've listed, they see only that you've named them as a reference. They don't see your application materials, your ID information, or anything else you've shared with us.
No sharing, no sale, no analytics on this data. Vetting information is used for vetting. It is not used for marketing, it is not shared with other venues or organizations, and it is not fed into any analytics or recommendation system. If law enforcement requests this data with a valid legal order, we comply with the law; we'll notify you unless we're legally prohibited from doing so.
Your rights
At any time, you can:
- See what we have on you. Email
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we'll send you a copy of your records. - Correct mistakes. If something we have is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
- Withdraw your application. Before approval, you can withdraw at any point and we'll purge your sensitive data on the standard schedule.
- Request deletion after membership ends. When you stop being a member, you can ask us to delete your records ahead of the standard retention window.
- Appeal a decision. If we decline you, you can ask for a review by a different vetter. See "What we'll tell you about a decision" above for the specifics of how that conversation works and what's shareable.
Things we won't do
To be clear about the lines we draw:
- We will not run credit checks or employment background checks. Those tools exist for housing and hiring decisions, not for membership in a private social club, and we don't think they belong here.
- We will not share your vetting information with other venues. If another venue contacts us to ask whether you're a member in good standing — for example because you're trying to visit them — we'll confirm that and nothing more, and only with your permission. Your application materials, ID information, references, and reasoning notes stay with us. The one exception is community safety alerts: if a member is banned from our space for behavior that poses a credible risk to others, we may share that fact, and the general nature of the concern, with vetters at other venues we work with. We do not share alerts based on registry hits alone or on declines that didn't involve a safety incident at our space.
- We will not use vetting as a backdoor to exclude people for reasons that have nothing to do with safety — political views, kinks within the range of what's negotiable between consenting adults, body type, race, gender identity, orientation, disability, or relationship structure. If you ever feel this has happened to you, the appeals process is real and we want to hear about it.
- We will not pretend this process makes the space risk-free. It doesn't. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Age verification at the door
Vetting is one check; the door is another. Everyone presenting at any event — member, guest, plus-one, no exceptions — must be at least 21 years old, and door staff verify this with photo ID at every event, every time. Approved-on-paper does not bypass the door check. We do this because age verification is non-negotiable in spaces like ours and because relying on a single check (vetting) means a single point of failure. Two checks, every time.
Why 21 and not 18? It's our policy. We've decided that the kinds of play, conversation, and social dynamics in this space work better with a more established adult population, and 21 is the line we draw.
If you've been a member for years and the door staff still asks for ID, that's the policy working correctly, not a personal slight.
Intoxication and substances
The short version: nothing impairing before or during play, drinking is fine after.
The longer version, because it matters:
Why this exists. Play in our space involves negotiating consent in real time, giving and receiving safewords, reading body language for signs of distress, and noticing problems before they become injuries. None of that works reliably when someone's judgment, perception, or reaction time is impaired. This isn't a moral position about substances — it's a safety position about capacity.
The rule. No alcohol, no cannabis, no recreational drugs, and no medications that meaningfully affect your judgment or reaction time before or during play. After play wraps for the evening, drinking is fine; we have a social-then-play-then-social structure at most events and the last segment is when people relax. The DM on shift will generally announce when the play floor closes; alcohol comes out then.
What "before play" means. From when you wake up that day, basically. We're not interested in adjudicating whether four hours after one beer counts as "before play." If you've had a drink, you don't play that night. Plan accordingly.
Prescription medications. This is where most policies have a blind spot, and we want to be direct about it: many prescription medications affect judgment, reaction time, or pain perception in ways relevant to play safety, sometimes more than a beer would. Antidepressants, ADHD medication, anti-anxiety meds, painkillers, sleep aids, muscle relaxants — any of them might or might not be a problem depending on the medication, the dose, how long you've been on it, and what you're planning to do that night.
We don't ask you to disclose medications and we don't keep a list. The responsibility is yours: know how your meds affect you, be honest with yourself about whether you're in shape to play tonight, and tell your play partners about anything they need to know to keep you safe (a medication that affects pain perception is something a top doing impact play actually needs to know about). If you're not sure how a med affects you, don't play that night and find out in a lower-stakes context.
Cannabis specifically. Same rule as alcohol. Legal status doesn't change the capacity question. "I just had a little" is not an exception.
DM authority. DMs on shift have full authority to decline play floor access to anyone they assess as impaired, for any reason, and their call is not subject to debate at the time. If you think a DM made a wrong call about you, take it up afterward through the normal channels — but at the time, the DM's call stands. This is in your interest as much as anyone else's; the alternative is DMs hesitating to make calls they should make, and the people who get hurt by that hesitation are the people on the floor.
A note on honesty. If you're unsure whether something you took counts, ask before play, not after. Coming to a DM and saying "I took a Xanax this afternoon, am I okay to play tonight" is the right move and won't get you in trouble. Hiding it and getting caught will.
Questions
The people running this process are members of this community too. If something in this document concerns you, or you want to talk through any part of it before applying, email
Last updated: 2026-06-03. We'll post a notice in the members-only section of the site when this document changes in any meaningful way.