Instructions & Guidelines
The main purpose for our Chat Room is for Caringonline visitors who have an eating disorder and/or depression to have a safe place for peer support. Caringonline is Pro-Recovery, not Pro-Anorexia, so anyone who encourages or supports a pro-anorexia philosophy will be banned.
This Chat Room is not meant to take the place of professional counseling. If you have an eating disorder or are suffering from more than mild depression, we encourage to seek the help of a counselor. We have listings of counselors/clinics throughout the U.S. and in other countries.
Chat Room Instructions
Chat Room Guidelines
Accessing Chat Room Area
The Chat Rooms are available
24/7. Currently only registered users of the Caringonline Discussion
Board are able to use the Chat Rooms.
There are two ways to access the Chat Room Area:
1. Just below the section titled
DISCUSSION BOARD LINKS there is a link titled
FlashChat.
If you click on this link the Discussion Board will stay open and a
new browser will open for the Chat Room Area.
2. You may also open the Chat Room Area by going directly to:
http://www.caringonline.com/discussion/mods/flashChat/flashchat.php.
Chat Rooms are best viewed in Explorer 6.0+. We recommend that you save the
URL in your Favorites folder.
Once you log into the Chat Room Area, it takes a moment for the Chat Screen to open. Once in the Chat Room Area choose the Chat Room you want to visit.
If you have used chat rooms prior to now, it will be easy to understand how to use the Chat Room. You will find a variety of features to enhance your chatting experience.
If you are new to chat rooms,
then go to our Chat Room Help
Section.
Initiating Chats in the Chat
Room
Currently, until the Chat Room has
more activity, here are the ways to initiate a chat
if no one is in the Chat Room:
 |
Schedule a
chat time with a Discussion Board
member by sending a Private
Message to them via the Discussion
Board. (Be sure to state the time zone for your
time.) |
|
View the Chat Room Calendar to see
when the Chat Room/Discussion Board Moderator has scheduled a chat.
If you are a Discussion Board member, you can PM the Moderator and
ask them to enter a date and time you will be in the Chat Room. (Be
sure to state the time zone for your time.) |
|
Go to the Discussion Board Chat
Room Forum and and enter a date and time you will be in the Chat
Room.
(Be sure to state the time zone for your time.) |
|
Go to the Chat Room at anytime and
see if there are any current users. |
CHAT ROOM GUIDELINES
Usernames
You must log in the Chat Room using your
Caringonline Discussion Board. Your Username should not be
offensive, encourage eating disorders, or would create the Chat Room
or Discussion Board to not feel safe to others. At our sole
discretion we may cancel your Caringonline membership if we feel
that your username violates this guideline.
Age Requirement
We encourage anyone under the age of 16
to not use this Chat Room.
At some point we will create a Teen Chat Room.
If you are thirteen years of age or younger you are not
permitted to use the Chat Room at all,
in compliance with
Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
Proper Communication
During chat times profanity, verbal attacks of others, on-line
dating, pro-anorexia comments, advertisement of
any sort, or promoting any business opportunity, is not allowed.
Remember, this Chat Room is to be a place that feels safe to talk
with others.
The Chat Room is NOT the appropriate forum for conversation that includes threats to commit suicide, hurt yourself (including self-injury), or detailed accounts that express either of these things are currently taking place. Anyone who partakes in this kind of behavior in the Chat Room may be immediately moved, without warning and potentially banned from using the Chat Room in the future.
Netiquette
Please be courteous of
others in the room. Keep in mind that many of them are dealing
with very serious issues surrounding their Eating Disorders. You
should always be respectful of other's wishes.
There are often times when conversations get emotionally intense, including the use of graphic language (not vulgar language). This is permitted in the proper context, but we ask that you try to remain courteous of other people in the room. It is also your responsibility to yourself to leave the Chat Room and return at a later time, if the conversations are counter-productive, or triggering bad memories for you.
This Chat Room is for support and not for finding new ways to continue to perpetuate your Eating Disorder or Self-Injury. You are not use this Chat Room to ask for suggestions on how to purge, what diet pills or laxatives to use, or to brag about how little or how much you eat or what you weigh. These types of topics are counter productive to the goals of this Chat Room, which is to find support that will lead to a healthier lifestyle, and/or to find friends that can understand what you are going through in living with an Eating Disorder.
On-line Dating Policy
We strongly discourage our members from using the Chat Rooms as
a means to participate in on-line dating relationships. Some of our
members have had bad experiences from members of the opposite sex
and we do not want them to have fear in using the Chat Room. There
are many on-line Dating Chat Rooms, so there is no need to use
the Caringonline
Chat Rooms for this
purpose. Therefore on-line dating via the Chat Rooms is banned.
Additional Activities Not Permitted
Lurking, harassment, verbal abuse of another user, flooding,
flaming, spamming, use of programs such as IRC clients, worms,
bots scripts, or trojan horses will NOT BE TOLERATED for any
reason. Initiation or participation in any such activity will
cause you to be banned from chatting and using
the Caringonline Discussion Board, and may be cause to
report the behavior to your ISP for termination of account.
Be aware that we record the ISP of all visitors
and users of the Chat Room and Discussion Board.
Chat Room Addiction
We define Chat Room Addiction as the following:
When a person,
is showing excessive signs of co-dependency when chatting
with others.
is chatting more than a few hours a day.
is chatting instead of taking care of themselves physically
or emotionally.
is avoiding relationships with others by chatting online.
At the sole discretion of the moderator, a person who appears to have a Chat Room Addiction, may be banned for an indefinite time from using the Chat Room.
Banning
A chat room user may be banned from a chat room or from
the chat service completely. If they are banned, they will be
banned for a minimum of 24 hours. Normally if a moderator is on
duty, a user who is violating any of these guidelines will receive
a warning prior to being banned.
To report abuses of any of these guidelines, please send an e-mail with date, time of abuse, username, and type of abuse to webmaster@caringonline.com.
