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.
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.
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.