What you should know, so you can get the best from The Student Room
We hope you enjoy using The Student Room. It's a great place to interact, find answers and make friends.
To help the site run smoothly for everyone, we have some community guidelines. These are pretty straightforward: they describe what’s OK to post and what’s not.
You’ll find the community guidelines here, but if you’re being friendly and trying to help other people where you can, you’re already on the right lines.
Sometimes we need to review posts and discussions that might have fallen outside our guidelines, and we have a moderation system that helps us do this.
In this article you can find out how moderation works on The Student Room. You’ll also find some tips on protecting your privacy and staying safe online.
How The Student Room is moderated
So that The Student Room is a safe space for everyone, we moderate the posts and discussions that members add to the site.
Using this moderation system, we can identify and remove rule-breaking content, and help the community when required.
Some moderation is managed by an automated system, and some of it is done by people. We also use AI technology to help improve the efficiency of our moderation processes.
Our automated system works by spotting messages that contain certain terms or phrases. These are flagged for review by our moderation team. We have a swear filter, which prevents certain words from appearing in posts at all.
We also rely on our members to report rule-breaking content. There is a report function, which everyone can use. You’ll find the report button at the bottom of all forum posts. When content is reported in this way, it is again flagged for the moderation team to check.
The moderation team aims to read and act upon all reported content within 24 hours.
Sensitive topics
The Student Room aims to be a place where our members can discuss the things that are important to them, within a safe and supportive environment.
Sensitive topics will be moderated in the same way as all other content. Moderation decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, always with the best interests of our members at heart.
Your agreement with us
Everyone who uses the site is required to accept our terms and conditions and our community guidelines.
If you do something on The Student Room that goes against our rules and guidelines, you may receive a card on your profile. This card system is designed to let members know if they have broken a rule.
We reserve the right to close member accounts without warning where there is behaviour that may harm The Student Room’s community.
Questions about moderation
We spend a lot of time ensuring The Student Room's community guidelines and rules are fair. We’re always happy to discuss the way moderation works in relation to you.
If you have any questions about any moderation action taken towards you, please post in the Ask the Community Staff forum. We try to reply to questions within 48 hours.
Please do not discuss any specific moderation actions taken by the community staff on the public forums, private messages or similar.
We can only discuss warnings with the user receiving them, so please do not ask about other users’ community records.
Protecting your identity and privacy
If you use social platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, you’ll be familiar with people posting under their real name.
The Student Room is different. On our site, member profiles are anonymised. This means you can create and reply to discussions while still protecting your identity.
In order to ensure your privacy is protected, we recommend you follow these tips.
- When choosing a username, don't use your real name
- Only add information to your profile that you feel comfortable sharing and that doesn't directly identify you. Things like subjects studied and grades are fine
- Don’t post photos of yourself, these will be removed. Remember: if you share a picture of yourself online, someone may download it or take a screen shot. It will no longer belong just to you
- Your avatar (profile photo) shouldn't be a photo of you. Lots of our members use gifs, memes, cartoon characters, celebrities or cute animals
- Take care 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
- Do not post the following, these will be removed:
- Links to any of your other social media profiles, such as Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok
- Email address
- Landline and mobile phone numbers
- Passwords
- Postal address
- If you must post any personal information, keep it general. For example, posting about the universities you’re interested in will not identify you. But going into lots of detail about a relationship issue might. It’s likely your friends are also using The Student Room so be aware that if they know your story they might identify you
- 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 want to be seen by people you may know offline? Remember, our site is available for anyone to visit and read
Staying safe when making friends online
Over the years lots of our members have made lifelong friends on The Student Room.
If you build a friendship here, you might choose to keep it on The Student Room only and that’s OK.
- Never feel pressured to give out your number or another social media profile. If you are being asked for this information, report it to the community staff at The Student Room.
- Don’t arrange to meet up with people you’ve met online. If someone is asking you to do this, report it to the community staff and speak to your parent/s or carer about what’s happened.
- Remember that not everyone online is who they say they are. You might have heard of catfishing. This is when someone creates a duplicate or fake profile and pretends to be someone they are not. If you suspect you are being ‘catfished’ on The Student Room please contact the community staff immediately.
- If you do choose to meet people from The Student Room (or any other social platform) in the real world, ensure that your family and friends know where you are going and what time you plan to be back. Meet in a public place. For first meetings, no matter your age, we always advise you to take someone with you, or meet among a group of friends.
If you see something online that makes you feel uncomfortable, unsafe or worried, leave the website and tell a trusted adult. If you saw it on The Student Room, please report it to the community staff so we can take appropriate action.
What to do if you receive threatening or harassing messages
It's not acceptable for any member to behave in a threatening or abusive way towards other people on The Student Room.
If you have received a private message that has made you feel threatened or harassed in any way, please report it to the community staff. If the message is on the forums, please tap the report icon on the individual forum post. It will then be reviewed by the moderation team and dealt with in line with our community guidelines and rules.
Make sure you tell your parent/s or carer if someone or something makes you feel uncomfortable or worried.
For more support on using The Student Room please take a look at the rest of our help pages.
