TSR Wiki > About TSR > Staying Safe on The Student Room
We want you to enjoy The Student Room. It's a great place to interact, learn and make friends; but as with every other social site on the web there are risks associated with sharing personal information that you should be aware of.
Privacy and reputation
If you choose to share personal information, photos of yourself, or meet other members offline it is at your own risk,
- Remember to be careful when posting on the forum. This is a public site and is available for all to see. You may not wish to post information that could be linked to you personally or make you easily contactable.
- Information we strongly recommend you do not post includes:
- Postal address
- E-mail address
- Landline and mobile phone numbers
- Passwords
- If you must post any personal information, keep it fairly general and non-specific. Use your common sense and think before you post!
- If you choose to share information that can be linked to you personally, then be doubly careful about what you are saying (whether it's about you or other people). Is it how you wish to be seen by people you may know offline? Does it falsely represent who you are? You wouldn't be the first person to have something you said on the Internet come back and haunt them! University tutors and employers (and even school teachers) regularly visit the site, so be careful.
- When choosing a username - Please don't use your real name, choose something more random instead that does not make you identifiable.
- If you are using our Classifieds section please take extra care. Only give over personal details such as your address if you feel happy to do so. We also suggest you use Pay Pal for any payments and keep communications private rather than on the forums to avoid other people having access to your details. See the classifieds forum guide for full details of 'Trading Safely Online'.
Online Safety
- People may not be who they seem to be. If you do choose to meet people from TSR in the real world ensure that family/friends know where you are going and what time you intend to be back. Meet in a public place and for first meetings, no matter what your age, we'd always advise you to take someone with you, or meet amongst a group of friends.
- It's not acceptable for Members to send threatening or harassing PMs, posts or reputation messages to other Members. If you feel threatened or harassed in any way by other members, please report it using the Ask A Moderator forum or the Post Report button on individual forum posts. It will then be looked into by the Moderators and dealt with as necessary.
- Files attached to emails from people you don't really know or trust may contain viruses or nasty messages so it's best not to open them.
- Tell your parent or carer if someone or something makes you feel uncomfortable or worried.
Other good advice can be found here:
Please feel free to add any other online safety tips to this page and include any other links to useful safety resoruces and we can then update our FAQs.
