Safety

Is CentralChat safe?

CentralChat ensure that our chatrooms are as safe as possible. The CentralChat-owned rooms are moderated by many helpers, and staff members. We do not tolerate topics of an "over 18" nature on CentralChat. There is a long list of words which we do not allow to be seen in all moderated rooms, these words are displayed on the screen as <censored>.

What about privacy?

To connect to CentralChat, you do not need to provide any information about yourself. There is no obligation to provide any information about yourself, and we highly recommend that kids take these precautions:-

• do not reveal your last name/family name to anyone
• do not reveal your local area/town name to anyone
• do not reveal your school name to anyone.
• do not reveal your exact date of birth to anyone.
• do not reveal your telephone number to anyone.
• do not reveal your e-mail address to people you don't trust
• do not reveal your e-mail address to the whole room.

What can CentralChat guarantee?

We cannot guarantee that a bad word will never appear, and we cannot guarantee that bad language wont occur in chat rooms that are not owned and run by CentralChat, but we can guarantee that we will take action whenever we see a breach of our rules, we will report severe breaches of rules to the culprits ISP, and take steps to prohibit the culprits from returning to CentralChat.

What about webmasters own rooms?

CentralChat offer free chatrooms to webmasters, and webmasters have the ability to set up moderators who can keep the rooms clean. If you are a webmaster and need help with this, read on how to set up your room and if you're still stuck, contact us for help. If you are worried about your kids entering rooms that may not be well moderated, then it is advisable to only allow them to enter rooms that are well moderated.

How can I report an incident?

If you ever spot any breach of rules that concerns you, please contact us with the date, time, your time zone, room name, and details and we promise to fully investigate the matter.

Do many bad people come to CentralChat?

Stalkers and troublemakers will always want anonymity. They don't want to get caught. It is very easy to be completely anonymous on chat services such as Yahoo! Chat due to the nature of their service. However CentralChat is based on the IRC specification, which means IP addresses are visible to CentralChat Staff members, meaning we can track any abuser and report them to their ISP. We can ban them from all chat rooms by blocking their IP address. To protect users, IP addresses are not visible to regular users; only Staff members.

It's not just the IRC technology that CentralChat has that is a bonus, but the fact that the chatrooms are very well moderated compared to, for example, Yahoo! Chat, which has virtually no moderation.

Whilst the CentralChat volunteers will do what they can to prevent bad users from connecting, we unfortunately can not guarantee that we will be 100% effective. We will, however, take all complaints against another user seriously, and remove rule-breakers from the CentralChat servers.

Why is CentralChat different?

We at CentralChat believe we have the safest chat network for kids and people of all ages, and we will always try our best to keep it that way. CentralChat makes a loss every month, and is paid for, administered by, and monitored by, volunteers who want CentralChat to continue to be a success, and many of the people that run CentralChat have met each other in real life, we have a great sense of community at CentralChat and care for all of our chatters.