Forum Rules

College Confidential Forum Rules

1. General Behavior

College Confidential is a welcoming and friendly online community that helps students and parents navigate the difficult college admissions process. We strive to be inclusive, diverse, politically neutral, and fair-minded. We aim to create a safe environment for everyone. We do NOT tolerate personal attacks, racial slurs, or disparaging of others, particularly students. Members who engage in these types of behavior may lose posting privileges.

2. Personal Information

Be mindful about what content you contribute. After a short grace period, posts are locked and you won’t be able to self-edit or delete them. Please post for yourself or on behalf of your children. Public posts about others (i.e. asking for a friend) are subject to review by staff and may be closed, especially any containing personal information. For more information, please see our privacy policy.

3. Discussion, Not Debate

College Confidential forums exist to discuss college admission and other topics of interest. It is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else. Some topics, such as politics, religion and moderation on the forums, lend themselves to debate. If a thread starts to get heated, it might be closed or heavily moderated.

4. Commercial Posts, Repetitive Posts, Spam

We recognize that occasionally a post may contain a URL which could be of value to our visitors. However, if a user repeatedly promotes an external product or service, the community may identify their posts as spam. Spam posts will be flagged and removed. If you are interested in promoting your business, book or service, please contact us about advertising or partnership opportunities.

5. Copyrighted Material

Fair use allows brief excerpts from copyrighted material for the purposes of review and commentary. Please do not post entire articles or only quote outside sources without your own contribution. Also, be sure to provide attribution when you quote or paraphrase other people’s work.

6. Our Forums Are Moderated, Respect the Moderators

The College Confidential forums are moderated by a team of dedicated volunteers, selected from the community, who donate their time and energy to preserving the high standards we have set for ourselves. Our moderators strive to be neutral and fair-minded. They all have a proven track record with the site and are here to help. Please do NOT disparage them. Instead, we ask that our volunteer moderators be treated with kindness and respect.

Do NOT discuss moderation in the forums. If you are not happy with a moderation decision, reach out to admin@collegeconfidential.com. CC moderators and admins may highlight certain posts in yellow. Those posts are official guidelines. Please read highlighted posts and abide by their instructions. (And please don’t flag them!)

The CC moderators participate in discussions but we ask them not to moderate threads they participated in. You can flag a moderator’s post when they are acting as a regular user and the flag will be reviewed by another moderator.

Our moderators are focused on the following issues:

  • Don’t spam; all spam posts will be deleted and the account will be banned forever
  • Don’t solicit your services either in the forums or directly to users; If caught, you will be banned forever effective immediately
  • Don’t create multiple accounts (only 1 account is allowed, the rest will be closed and a warning will be issued)
  • Don’t share accounts and don’t post for others (except for your immediate family which should be disclosed in the post)
  • Do not post personal information on the site; we do not edit or remove posts so please be mindful what information you share
  • Don’t use profanity
  • Don’t be abusive and don’t make personal attacks against other users
  • Don’t engage in endless debates, no one is interested in having a helpful discussion be turned into a nasty back and forth between users
  • Don’t hijack threads to push your own points of view; please be respectful to the original poster (OP) and keep the discussion on topic
  • Don’t knowingly post false information and don’t propagate conspiracy theories
  • Start a new thread instead of responding to a stale thread that has not had any activity in more than 6 months
  • Don’t flag unless a serious violation of our Terms of Service (ToS); the fact that you don’t like or agree with a post is not a violation of the ToS; state your case and move on; abusing the flagging system is a violation of the ToS so action will be taken
  • Don’t flag posts just because you believe it is incorrect or inaccurate; post a polite response, preferably with cited information
  • Put users you don’t want to read from/be in contact with on ignore (learn more about our Ignore function and learn how to turn it on here)

Please direct questions about these rules or moderation to admin@collegeconfidential.com.

Terms of Service

Yes, legalese is boring, but we must protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks. We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behavior and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. To use this service, you must agree to abide by our TOS.

Last Updated: May 27, 2024