How to Chat Safely

We have chat rooms for people of all kinds, for various age groups to chat with locals all across the United Kingdom. Our site is intended to be a safe and welcoming online chat environment for all of these people, but sometimes maintaining safety requires a little bit of looking out for yourself. Here are some things you can do to keep chat safe and fun for you.

Chat Within the Rules

  • Minors are not allowed to use our chat sites. If you are a minor, leave. You should not trust adults that you chat with on chat sites. They may often be predators.
  • If you are an adult, and minors are in the chat, report them. Do not engage with them. You may be interpreted as being predatory.
  • Do not share personally identifiable information (contact details, social network identities, messenger program handles) except in private with people who you trust.

Secure Your Account

  • You can chat here with no registration required, but registration is also free and worthwhile.
  • To protect your username, register your account. That way, no one can impersonate you in the chat rooms. (Conversely, trusting unregistered users to be who they say they are may be a bad idea!)
  • If you are registered: Don't use short or weak passwords. Try increasing the length or the complexity -- vary your capitalization, replace some letters with special characters, and so on. One tip is to base your password on a complete phrase.

Keep Personal Information Private

  • Remain as anonymous as you can.
  • Avoid basing your username on your exact location, profession, appearance, and especially on your name. For instance, if your username is JohnSmith, someone already knows your name. That's one less piece of information they need to gain by other means.
  • Do not share your real name with other chatters. You may build sufficient trust with someone and think sharing your name with them is a good idea, but we advise against it. If you do so anyway, at least do not share the name in public chat.
  • Do not share your phone number. It may expose many other pieces of information about you.
  • Obfuscate your location if you wish to give it. For instance, give your region, but not your city, if you wish to tell others where you are from.

How to Handle Other Users

  • Do not automatically believe their claims. No one claiming to be, for instance, from law enforcement, your bank, or your Internet Service Provider, and so on, should ever be believed.
  • Do not trust anyone claiming to be selling goods or services online. Our chat rooms are not built around commerce and have no reputation for such, so anyone selling anything is probably running a scam.
  • Do not trust anyone offering anything "free" on any external website. Be cautious of all links shared in chat. External websites may track you, steal personal information, or infect your device with malware.
  • Use the "report" function to report anyone engaging in any of these behaviors so that moderators can evaluate what is happening and handle it.
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