House Rules

Please remember that the rules are for everyone – scientists and teachers included! They’re fairly basic, and for the most part just common sense.

Rule 1 – no usernames, messages, questions, answers or anything that is offensive in a racist, sexist, sexual or nasty way. If you do it once you won’t get to do again because we’ll remove your access to the site. Offensive usernames will result in accounts being deleted.

Rule 2 – it’s not advisable to give out your personal details (like address, phone number) on the site. This is for your safety. However, if you’d like to stay in touch with scientists or teachers, you can email us and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Rule 3 – if we take a message off the site it’s because it broke the rules, or it wasn’t suitable. It’s our necks on the line if you’re lying, stealing or trying to cause trouble.

Rule 4 –  we don’t approve the same question more than once (even if asked by a different person), it’d be boring for everyone, so we remove repeat questions and add the questioners names to the first question.

Rule 5 – by giving us your address you are agreeing to receive emails about this event and this event alone. We don’t sell email addresses to anyone.

Rule 6 – if you ask a great question we might publish it.

Rule 7 – we can’t foresee everything so we may make up some rules as we go. We will be as fair as we can and we’ll post the rules here.

So that it’s more fair, there’s some rules for us (the people running the site) too.

We Promise:-

We will always try to be fair. Our main aim is giving young people a say in science, but that doesn’t mean we have to be po-faced, worthy, or that we can’t have fun.

We will never block questions because they are challenging, only if they are offensive, duplicates or don’t make any sense. We can’t make scientists answer them if they don’t want to though.

In Live Chat we will block people for being disruptive, aggressive or offensive to other people. Sometimes, when it’s very busy, we also have to block people if they are constantly chatting amongst themselves, so that the people who DO want to talk to the scientists get a chance. But if we are going to do this we will give warnings.

We will try to answer all questions you ask us honestly.