Community Guidelines

Rowena
Rowena Administrator, Club Member, Staff Posts: 192 admin
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edited November 13 in How to use Club Together #1

Welcome to Club Together, the Caravan and Motorhome Club’s online community. We are excited to have you here on the Club’s online forum and hope you enjoy being a valued member of our community. 

In the spirit of the Club this is a positive environment for people to come together to share, discuss and inform. We want you to enjoy Club Together, and whilst we welcome debate and discussion, we value most highly the forum being a safe place that is welcoming and friendly to all. We are relying on you to help keep it that way.  

That’s why we’ve put together the below community guidelines and forum rules (our Code of Conduct) on how to be a good forum member so everyone in our community feels welcome and valued.

In order to use Club Together you need to be 18 years or over. 

The Three Golden Forum Rules

See below our three most important rules for our online forum. These are non-negotiable and need to be abided by if you want to belong to our online community. 

  1. Be Kind and respectful to all

This is your community, so please make it a pleasant place to be. Be considerate, courteous, and friendly. Keep in mind how your posts may affect other community members, community champions and Club staff. We are an inclusive online forum and organisation.  

  1. Be relevant and keep conversations on topic

In order to make our community more useful to all, please keep discussions on topic and in the right areas i.e. don’t post about overseas sites in a UK discussion. 

Although we love hearing your feedback and suggestions on the forum we do ask that you please do not misuse the forum as a channel of complaint. If you have a complaint about a site, product or service please follow the official procedure for registering a complaint. 

  1. Be aware of what you post and your privacy

You are ultimately responsible for what you post so please be aware of what you say and ensure your comments could not be considered as libellous or unlawful. Also do not share any personal details and always be mindful of the privacy of others. 

Please note, we have zero tolerance for inappropriate behaviour and reserve the right to delete posts, threads, and users at any time for any reason if you don't abide by our guidelines and forum rules. This is entirely at Community Team’s discretion. 

Community Guidelines

Also please keep in mind that Club Together is a busy and popular online space and posts are not pre-moderated. As such we have some further Community Guidelines and forum rules. These outline our values as a community and the behaviour we expect from our members. We ask that everyone who posts on the forum is fully aware of these to help ensure our forum is a friendly and welcoming space for everyone to enjoy being part of. 

The Dos and Don’ts 

Do

  • Keep conversations friendly and welcoming. 
  • Support and respect each other. Be kind and consider what another person might be going through. 
  • Be respectful and considerate of our staff and moderators. We are all humans working hard to ensure the forum is a friendly and supportive community. 
  • Keep discussion on topic. Although we all stray off topic from time-to-time please keep this to a minimum as this can be frustrating when conversations go off topic. 
  • Search for previous discussions before you start a new conversation, in case your topic already exists. 
  • Consider the legal implications of your posts. Ensure that your posts couldn’t be considered libellous and land you in court for defamation.
  • Let others have their say. You don’t need to have the last word. It can also be off putting for other contributors when someone is dominating discussions, so please let other people have the opportunity to have their say, especially if you are just reiterating your original point.
  • Be civil and count to five before you post if you need to! 
  • Make sure you know the facts before you post false information, speculation or rumour.

Don’t

  • Post your complaints or misuse the forum to moan about the Club. This forum is for advice and to share experiences.It’s not a place to voice your complaints about the Club although we do value your feedback so please do this via the correct channels. <add link> 
  • Have more than one account per person. If you create multiple accounts you may risk your access to the forum being blocked completely. 
  • Use inappropriate or offensive language in your posts, profiles information and screen names and avatars. 
  • Share personal information. Remember, although this is a community for Club members, it is viewable by the public. Your privacy is important.
  • Share private information about other members or non-members. Everyone has privacy rights now and we must respect them in conversations on the forum. 
  • Share private messages or other people’s contact information. 
  • Post about religion or politics or any contentious topic. Our forum is for caravanning and motorhoming and we request you keep conversations relevant to our hobby. 
  • Post any third-party material that infringes any legal rights - for example, copyright.
  • Post anything about live court cases as you could be in contempt of court.
  • Post anything that would contravene the Online Safety Act 2023 (See note below about this Act and what it does)
  • Intentionally misquote another member or Club representative. Do not alter another contributor's comments in a quote to misrepresent them. If you quote someone legitimately, credit them. Don't quote someone if they specifically asked you not to.
  • Falsely represent yourself.
  • Post anything that could be considered to be advertising or spam. Also don’t post any referral codes and links or pyramid schemes. If you have an item for sale, please visit our classified section of the Club website. <add link> 
  • Question moderation or criticise the forum team’s decisions on Club Together. These posts will be removed, and if this is repeated behaviour it may affect your access to the forum. 
  • Be the grammar police. We all make mistakes and when typing quickly there may be misspellings and grammatical errors. Please don’t criticise anyone for this. 

Takedown policy

The Community Manager and Community Moderators will regularly moderate posts, discussions, stories and other content added to the community, ensuring that each adheres to these guidelines. Items not adhering to the guidelines may be temporarily or permanently removed.

You do have a right of appeal if material has been removed. This must be exercised within seven days, by contacting (email address to appeal to here), including your user information and details of the material that has been removed. You may only appeal against removal of your own posts, not anyone else’s)

We will delete posts where we feel appropriate and if we feel a person has contravened our guidelines we will contact the person to advise and, depending on the situation, we may decide to suspend their website access without prior warning. If we have contacted the person previously to ask them to abide by the guidelines and they ignore our advice and continue to post in a way that contravenes guidelines, it may result in their account for Club Together being locked.

If the person's online account has been unlocked, and they continue to deliberately cause offence, disrupt the community, create disharmony and/or be abusive to other people on Club Together, the Caravan and Motorhome Club will review the person's membership and appropriate action will be taken. If a person re-registers on the community under an alias when their account has been locked we will take this very seriously and again will review the person's membership and appropriate action will be taken.

For any posts that are highly offensive or threatening we will report such offenders to their Internet Service Provider. If their actions breach the Computer Misuse Act 1990 or any other relevant criminal legislation we will also report offenders to the authorities.

Our Community Moderators

Club Together is growing into a great resource of information supplied by the Caravan and Motorhome Club and also by you. However, its vibrancy and effectiveness depends on your participation. Like any other community we need its contributors and its moderators.

What is a Community Moderator?

Our Community Moderators are all members of the Club who have volunteered to help keep Club Together a happy place to be where members feel welcome to contribute. We have asked them to help us keep discussions on topic, close or remove contentious discussions or posts, delete spam, direct new members around the community, move discussions to the right areas and help Club Together grow and develop by being positive contributors to the community.

What to do if you are not happy with a decision a Moderator has made

Community Moderators are ordinary members of the Caravan and Motorhome Club who contribute their free time to help support Club Together. They do a superb job under often difficult circumstances, and as such we want to make sure that our Moderators are treated with respect. They are not paid and are not responsible for the site, they have volunteered because they want to see Club Together grow and develop and be a community we can all be proud of. As such we ask that users of Club Together respect the Moderators at all times.

If you are not happy with a decision a Moderator has made, please be aware this is not open for debate on the community and any comments of this nature will be removed. This is because it can often antagonise situations and we do not wish for our volunteers to be open to abuse. If you are querying a Moderator's decision please first check our Terms and Conditions and Community Guidelines. If you are still not happy with the decision and you feel we should be made aware of it, then please email communitymanager@camc.com. Please do not post your query in a discussion as it will be removed. If you continue to post, it may result in your web access being suspended.

How do I become a Moderator?

As a contributor to the discussions you may well wish to consider a more proactive role in the community as a Community Moderator. Our Community Moderators are volunteers who are helping us to establish this community as a healthy, active space which we can all enjoy together. Some of our Moderators also help to moderate Club Together to ensure the community remains a safe and welcoming online environment.

To find out about becoming involved as a Community Moderator, or if you have another idea for how you'd like to get more involved with this community, please contact the Community Manager via email at communitymanager@camc.com.

Caravan and Motorhome Club staff

A number of Caravan and Motorhome Club staff on Club Together are there to help and support the community, offer advice to members and help keep Club Together a pleasant and welcoming place to be.

At times the staff may need to moderate the community and we ask that you respect the decisions made, as these are not open for debate. Please note, it is not always possible for the staff to read every post and as such the team rely on users reporting posts to them through the 'report' link to make them aware of any issues.

The Community Team are employees of the Caravan and Motorhome Club and as such the Club has a duty of care to their staff to protect them in their working roles. Any abuse aimed towards staff will be removed and may result in your web access being immediately suspended. Any comment that criticises an individual member of the team shall be removed and appropriate action against the contributor will be taken.

We know that most Club Together users would never be rude to a member of staff, but we do need to make this clear within the guidelines.

The Online Safety Act 2023

Like all websites operating an online forum or community, the Caravan and Motorhome Club is now required to comply with the Online Safety Act 2023. This law aims to protect children and adults from harmful online content.

We are sure that our community would not post any such content to our site, but we have to let people know what the OSA 2023 forbids. We have to make sure that our moderators watch out for such content, and that our community report it to us so that we can remove it immediately in the unlikely event it is posted on our forum.

The kind of content forbidden by the Act includes:

  • child sexual abuse  
  • controlling or coercive behaviour  
  • extreme sexual violence 
  • extreme pornography 
  • fraud
  • racially or religiously aggravated public order offences  
  • inciting violence  
  • illegal immigration and people smuggling  
  • promoting or facilitating suicide  
  • intimate image abuse
  • selling illegal drugs or weapons  
  • sexual exploitation  
  • terrorism 

If you do see any content that you think might fall into any of the above categories, you can report it using our flagging system or you can contact the us communitymanager@camc.com marking the subject urgent.

This discussion has been closed.