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Chat - Moderation Policy

Moderation on Chat

Orange moderates its chat services to ensure a pleasant chat experience for everyone, and especially to limit the dangers to children while they are online. Our aim is not to moderate all conversations all the time, but to provide a cleaner, safer service.

Our moderation policy covers three services: Teen, Main, and Adult. You can read more about these in the sections below.

Teen Chat Service

This is for members aged 16-18 years, and is our most heavily moderated service. Moderators are available every day from 10am to midnight. This service is closed outside moderating hours between midnight and 10am, 7 days a week. From time to time we may extend these hours, or perform ’covert’ checks to limit the damage to the service.

The moderation service is much more thorough and much more strict in the Teen Chat Service than anywhere else on Chat. We have more resources allocated to it, and the moderators in this area put child protection at the forefront of their efforts.

Moderation works in the following way:
A moderator will be available in a special room (’Moderators’) during opening hours (10am to Midnight), for any member who requires assistance.

Moderators wil be ’patrolling’ other rooms on the service and intervening when necessary. In some cases a moderator may decide to watch a specific room more carefully, and during peak hours we may decide to increase the number of moderators on the service.

Notes for parents

The nature of chat means we cannot monitor all of the conversations all of the time. However, we have set up a system which will provide a dedicated set of moderators, specifically trained to make the most of their position, and who have the ability to come into the chatroom at any time. We strive to be a best practice provider for child safety on chat, and are constantly refining our plans to improve the chat environment.

If you are concerned about your child’s activities on chat or on the Internet in general, we recommend that you install commercial activity monitoring solutions. We advise all parents to keep themselves informed about their children’s activities on the net, and to read our general safety guidelines and our advice on protecting children online.

Main Chat Service

This service is for members with a minimum age of 18 and is used by most members and where moderation, though less prominent and intrusive, aims to provide a cleaner, less abusive chat.

Moderators will be ’patrolling’ the service from 11am until midnight. These hours may vary from time to time, and we may decide to extend them without notice, or perform moderation at any other time. The purpose of these patrols is not to control or follow all chat conversations, but instead to target abusers, flooders, and spammers, and to undertake any other actions that help create a clean and enjoyable chat experience.

Orange cannot monitor personal conversations between individual members in Person-to-Person chat, but may keep records of members on chat and may provide this information to law enforcement officials if required.

If, as a parent, you are concerned about your child’s safety while using person-to-person chat, please see our Advice for Parents here

A moderator may sometimes enter a room, deal with an issue and leave straight away. To make their role more efficient, the moderators will not be available to communicate with members, nor answer any questions. For help, technical support and how to report chat abuse, chat members should visit our help articles here rather than looking for a moderator to ask.

Adult Chat Service

This service is for members with a minimum age of 18 and is not moderated or supervised in any way. Parents who are concerned about their children accessing this should set parental control on their computer browser. The pages for this service are ICRA tagged to prevent minors from entering them. See our guide to protecting children on the Internet for more details.