An important message to all members

Hi Everyone,

I hope you are all getting on well with the new Health Unlocked layout and enjoying the community. We’ve grown a lot in a short space of time and it’s fantastic to see so many people supporting each other on a day to day basis.

I’m afraid to say this isn’t always the case and we’ve had some recent issues with members breaking the community guidelines.

For the first time since joining HU, we sadly came to the decision to permanently ban a member yesterday. This is after several warnings and a restriction on their account, but unfortunately they failed to respect our requests to stop breaching the site’s rules. We have also put in place another account restriction for a period of time which means a member cannot create posts or respond but can still login and read posts.

Can I therefore remind all members of the Community Guidelines to be considerate when writing a new post or responding to other people’s comments.

The guidelines clearly state:

‘Your participation in the site should be with respect, honesty and in the spirit of supporting and learning from your fellow users. HealthUnlocked is not a form to create negative feedback about identifiable individuals. Negative and damaging references to identifiable individuals may be edited or deleted either by HealthUnlocked or by a community administrator.’

All the site guidelines can be found in the ‘Help’ section if you are unsure of where to find them.

If any member is seen to repeatedly refuse to respect the community atmosphere when we have asked them to, we will not hesitate to restrict their access to the site, or give them an outright ban.

It’s a real shame that we’ve now had to take this decision but we have to consider how this behaviour affects the whole community - even if it’s online, that is what it is! It is here for you to come and feel comfortable with sharing your experiences, when you want support and when you want to give it.

If you have any concerns over the content of a post or comment, please report this immediately. The admins at NRAS receive notification and will look into this. For more information on how to report something, please read my colleague Victoria’s previous post at healthunlocked.com/nras/pos...

As always, NRAS are here to help and provide information where we can, but we depend on you to look after each other. We are providing many services offline too and need your help to make this a safe environment for people to come and find others who understand their condition.

Please refrain from commenting below about any particular issues you would like to raise. If anyone has anything they would like to talk about you can private message me or the other admins. Alternatively you can email me at [e-mail] or call the NRAS office on 0845 458 3969.

Thank you for taking time to read this and I hope you will be confident to continue using this site for the purpose it is here for.

Best wishes,

Ruth Grosart

Digital Media Coordinator & HU Admin

National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society (NRAS)