These are standard web discussion rules that are designed to ensure participants feel safe, keen to take part and the discussion meets its objectives:
- Stay relaxed – though this inquiry is important and influential, taking part should be a positive experience.
- Don’t incite hatred on the basis of race, religion, gender, nationality or sexuality or other personal characteristic.
- Don’t swear, use hate-speech or make obscene or vulgar comments.
- Don’t break the law. This includes libel, condoning illegal activity and contempt of court (comments which might affect the outcome of an approaching court case).
- Don’t engage in “spamming”. Please don’t add the same comment to more than one forum.
- Don’t advertise. You can mention relevant, non-commercial websites as long as they support your comment.
- Don’t impersonate or falsely claim to represent a person or organisation. Please don’t mislead other users by abusing our registration procedure.
- Don’t post in a language other than English.
- Don’t invade people’s privacy. Please don’t post private addresses or phone numbers, including your own. You may post email addresses so long as you make it clear who they belong to.
- Stay on-topic. Please don’t post messages that are unrelated to the Diabetes Dialogue online forum.
If a comment contravenes the discussion rules it will be removed from the forum and returned to the participant by email, along with a reference to the rule(s) that were broken. The participant will be invited to make appropriate changes in order that the post reconsidered. However, if a participant repeatedly breaks the rules that participant’s user account will be suspended and may be permanently revoked.
