Community Guidelines

What Now? is an online community enabling people affected by cancer to share support and information through chat, forums, blogs, pictures and video. In order to keep this a fun, friendly and safe experience for everyone, we ask that all of our users follow these simple guidelines.

By using What Now?, you agree to be bound by the Community guidelines as set out below, as well as by the Terms & Conditions of use, so you should read both of these documents carefully and make sure that you understand them fully. If you have any questions about anything included in these guidelines, or would like us to explain anything in further detail, do contact us and we’ll do our best to answer you.

When you publish stuff to the site (for instance, a blog entry or forum post), it appears almost straight away because we don’t screen it before it goes live. This is called reactive moderation and it means that we rely on you – our trusty users – to alert us to inappropriate content or behaviour. Please click ‘report this’ and let us know whenever you see anything that goes against any of the rules below. Or contact your friendly What Now? community team and inform us that way.

Once notified, we will remove anything that we find inappropriate and we reserve the right to take any further action we deem necessary against repeat offenders. But please bear in mind that we work normal office hours and need to sleep, so you may not see action taken immediately.

The site is here to offer support to people affected by cancer so that's what you need to be aware of at all times. We are all here to support one another. It's about helping each other, making friends and having fun.

We ask you to be tolerant and respectful of other users’ beliefs and opinions at all times. While we understand that you may have strong feelings about the topics addressed on this site, we will not tolerate personal attacks of any kind. It’s your right to disagree with an opinion, but don’t attack the person or people who hold it.

What Now? has a wide audience, so please don’t use language that others may find offensive. Due to the nature of the site, anatomical terms are fine but you should avoid using swear words.

Abusive language is unacceptable on What Now?, and this includes racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism and any other form of discrimination as well as anything that is sexually explicit or obscene. Threats of physical violence will be treated very severely. If harassment or abuse is extreme or repeated we may involve the authorities.

As in real life, not everyone on the internet is as nice as you may want them to be. Some nasty individuals enjoy riling people up online by posting inflammatory comments designed to provoke a response (often known as trolling or flaming). The best way to deal with this sort of behaviour is to report it to us, and then ignore it. Although it is often difficult, ignoring users who do this is the only way to get rid of them; if they can’t provoke a response, they will leave you alone.

Imitating other users is a form of harassment and we take this very seriously. We will remove any content and block any accounts created for this purpose.

We are aware that it is possible to create more than one account on What Now?, but we strongly recommend that you refrain from doing so. We don’t see why you would need more than one account, so if you are creating more than one, we will treat it with suspicion.

You may think that your homemade figurines are just what everybody wants for Christmas. That may even be true. But please don’t try to sell them on our website. We consider any commercial solicitation to be spam, and this includes bombarding us with links to your website.

If you post personal information such as your home address, telephone number and email address please remember that the information is being made public. We do not recommend that you publish this sort of information. There are many protected ways to communicate through the site. Remember that you never know who is reading our site so don’t put yourself at risk in this way. Meeting up with people you’ve met online for the first time can be great fun and really rewarding but you should never meet them alone and always tell someone where you’re going.

It’s a lot easier than you might think to put yourself at risk of prosecution. If you discuss an ongoing court case online, you could be charged with contempt of court. Libellous comments – those which could damage someone’s reputation – could also land you in the dock. Publishing materials for which you do not own the rights is against the law too. We will remove any such content both for your protection and for ours.

Discussing any crime that you have committed or that you intend to commit is not very clever and neither is it allowed.

Our main rule is that everyone should enjoy using our site, and this is why the other rules exist. We understand that emotions can run very high here but we ask that, if you are feeling angry, frustrated or upset, you take a minute to gather your thoughts before you post anything that you may later regret.

If you have any questions about these rules, or anything on the site at all, contact your friendly Community team and we’ll do all we can to help.

Happy chatting!