The Chartership Forum
Community guidelines
Ten things that keep this a place where engineers can ask real questions and get useful answers.
01Treat people as colleagues
Disagree with the argument, not the person. Harassment, personal attacks, hate speech, discrimination and threats are not tolerated and will end an account. Nobody should have to be thick-skinned to ask a question here.
02Do not post confidential material
No client-confidential information, no unredacted drawings, no commercially sensitive material, no security-sensitive detail about real assets, and no precise locations of infrastructure. If you are not sure whether you are free to share something, you are not free to share it.
03Protect personal information
Do not post other people's names, contact details, employers or anything else that identifies them without their agreement. Do not post your own personal data either: you do not need to, and it will be removed.
04Be honest about what your answer is
Say what you are confident about and what you are not. State your assumptions. If you are working from memory rather than the standard, say so. A hedged answer that is honest is worth more here than a confident one that is wrong.
05Forum answers are not design approval
Nothing on this Forum replaces project-specific analysis, checking, approval or competent professional judgement. Do not treat a reply, a vote score or an accepted answer as verification that a design is safe. An accepted answer is the one that helped the person asking, and it may still contain errors.
06Do not give advice you are not in a position to give
If a question involves a live structure and the answer could affect safety, say what you do not know and encourage the person to get competent project-specific review. Report anything that looks like genuinely dangerous advice.
07No promotion, no marketplace
This is not a place to advertise services, tout for work, or promote a product. If you have a commercial interest in something you are discussing, say so plainly in the post.
08Respect copyright and examinations
Do not reproduce standards, textbooks or paid guidance. Short quotations with a citation are fine. Do not share examination material you are not free to share, and do not ask for it.
09Credit other people's work
Cite your sources. Passing off someone else's explanation, calculation or figure as your own is plagiarism and is treated as such.
10One account, used honestly
Do not impersonate anyone, do not claim qualifications or registrations you do not hold, and do not create new accounts to get around a ban. Professional information on a profile is provided by the member and is not verified by Queensferry unless it says otherwise.
What happens when a rule is broken
Most problems are dealt with by a moderator removing or editing one contribution and explaining why. Repeated or serious breaches lead to a warning, then a temporary restriction, then a ban from a community or from the site.
Whenever content is removed you are told which rule was applied, whether you can edit and resubmit, and how to appeal. Appeals are reviewed by someone other than the moderator who made the original decision wherever the community has more than one moderator.
Reporting something
Every discussion and reply has a report link. Reports go to the moderators of that community. The person you report is never told who reported them.
If something urgent has been exposed, such as confidential project material or somebody's personal data, report it and it is treated as a priority.
Moderation is a job, not a status
Moderators keep discussions useful and within these guidelines. Being a moderator does not make someone technically right, and a moderator's reply carries no more engineering weight than anyone else's.
How we handle your data is set out separately in the privacy notice.