The Educating Abroad Staff Room Team is keen to maintain healthy, vibrant, and intelligent debate, however in order to keep our platforms enjoyable and inviting we require users to adhere to the following guidelines. These apply to forum posts as well as comments on articles and blog posts.

1. Personal attacks: Users will not personally attack fellow members of the community, including authors and staff. Offensive, lewd or threatening language will not be tolerated; neither will attacking users based on their race, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or age.

2. Anonymity: Users will not identify (nor describe in a way that could feasibly lead to identification) schools, students or fellow members of the community.

3. Inappropriate language: We do not tolerate obscene or inflammatory language on the forums. An automatic filter will censor them out and users should not attempt to bypass the filter (eg by using alternative characters). If you’d like to make a comment about the language filter please do so by emailing the Community Team.

4. Misrepresentation: During a debate, it can be frustrating for users to appear to be misrepresented. When using the ‘quote’ function, please refrain from changing anything within the quoted text. When bolding or italicising cannot be avoided, please note in square brackets beneath that it was your addition.

5. Private messages (PM): Users are welcome to interact privately using the PM feature and request responses in this manner where appropriate. The above guidelines apply to PMs as well as public interactions. Users are welcome to contact the Community Team via PM. However, users should refrain from making the contents of a PM public in any way. PMs can be reported for abuse by sending a screengrab to the Community Team.

Forum netiquette

• Avoid using all capital letters. IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE SHOUTING! Plus it's difficult to read. Use it only to emphasize the odd word.
• Try not to criticise another user's grammar or spelling.
• Don't pick on or bully another user.
• Don't attack another forum or encourage others to do so - if you have a problem with any thread, post or user please use the ‘Report’ option and provide us with the details.
• Welcome and help the newbie (a term used for new users who may not understand forums the way you do) and don't assume that every newbie is a troll.
• If you suspect a troll, the best thing to do is not to respond in any way. Without your attention, they will soon get bored and their threads will disappear off the page. Please report them to us by clicking on 'Report abuse' next to the offending post.
• When you talk, the tone of your voice conveys great meaning. To add personality and humour to your messages, use emoticons or smileys.
• Keep your written communications to the point. Few people like reading text on a computer screen for too long at a time. To keep messages short, use some abbreviations but avoid full text speak as this can be difficult to read.
• Remember that anything you post is a public comment. You never know who's reading it or who may copy it and spread it around. It could come back to haunt you so be careful how much personal information you give away.
• Don't post PMs (personal messages) in the public forums. This can cause upset and disruption to the forums.
• Stick to the topic when posting a message. Don't post unrelated comments, or worse, advertisements. Sometimes you might offend someone unintentionally but be prepared to receive an angry message. To contain the heat, the best response usually is no response at all or a heartfelt apology.
• If you post a message with the sole purpose of winding others up, this is called flaming. If you are flamed and you attack back, you will spark a flame war.
• When posting, make sure that the subject line accurately describes what the message is about.
• A swear filter is in place to block out offensive words, don't purposely swear using methods to get around this.
• If you don't enjoy the topic of the thread, close it and open another or start your own but don't leave a rude post.

Moderation Policy

1. Premoderation: All new users will be moderated until they become an established member of the Staff Room forum. All members are encouraged to regularly post in the forums in order to reach the required established status to unlock more features on the forum platform, such as editing posts. We do not give out the details of the timescales or thresholds needed to become an established member of the forum. Posts will be subject to moderation when posted by a moderated user. The Community Team reserves the right to re-moderate a user at any given time if the forum house rules are repeatedly breached.

2. Abuse reports: All abuse reports will be investigated and the Community Team will endeavour to reply to the user. Please ensure your explanation accurately describes your reason for reporting a post. The Community Team reserves the right to delete any post or thread which breaches community standards, however posts or threads will not be deleted based exclusively on a request, even if the request is made by the original poster.

3. Warnings: Members will be informed via email or PM if a comment or post has been justifiably reported for abuse. These comments may or may not be deleted, and users will usually receive an explanation of why their conduct is not acceptable. Users should henceforth refrain from posting similar comments.

4. Banned users: Educating Abroad as a whole including the Staff Room forum is intended to be inclusive, however, in extreme circumstances, some users will be banned from using their accounts. It is our intention to avoid banning any users unless they continuously and intentionally breach our Terms and Conditions of use and the forum house rules, and abuse or harass our forum moderators.

5. Your help: We cannot actively moderate every thread. Therefore we rely on your help to keep our community a pleasant and stimulating environment. Please do report any content which appears to be spam, advertising, or clickbait, as well as any offensive comments.

That's pretty much it folks, just be civil and supportive like an excellent educator would be.

Kindest Regards

'The Principal