Forum Etiquette

Etiquette is an important aspect of an online forum, as a post directed towards one person can also be read by a great number of other individuals each of whom might interpret the content of that post in different ways. To reduce the potential for upsetting individuals, please abide by the OCA’s forum etiquette guidelines, which follow:

  • Swearing is not tolerated. A post containing swearing will either be edited by OCA or removed entirely. The individual responsible will be given a warning by E-mail.
  • Posts that are intended to cause offence against an individual or a group of people will not be tolerated and will be removed and a warning will be sent to the individual by E-mail.
  • Individual issues with OCA procedures should be raised directly with the OCA, not posted.
  • Repeated posts regarding an issue that has already been dealt with will be removed, an explanation will be sent to the individual by E-mail.


When making posts to the forums, also consider the following:
  • When linking to an image or video on the OCA website that is not your own, or to an image or video elsewhere on the Internet, give the owner full credit and if possible provide a link to the website where the image or video was taken from.
  • Be considerate when using symbols and smilies -they can change the tone of an entire post, and some find excessive use of smilies an irritation. More common symbols can also be misused.
  • Exclamation marks indicate varying degrees of loudness or enthusiasm, excessive use can be off-putting to readers and cause annoyance.
  • Use of capital letters is generally interpreted as shouting and should be avoided.
  • The ‘@’ symbol should be avoided when posting a person’s e-mail address, as these symbols are searched for by companies that harvest e-mail addresses for marketing campaigns – use [at]
  • Consider an individual’s privacy before disclosing any information about them on a forum. Posts that are reported to contain sensitive information will be removed. Continued breach of privacy will result in a warning.

If an individual has to be warned about incidents on several occasions, they will lose their student privileges on the OCA website.

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