Community guidelines

The posting rule

You may write about what a shift did to you. You may not write anything from which a patient could be identified — no names, no dates, no room or bed numbers, no facility-plus-date-plus-diagnosis, no photographs taken in a clinical area, no detail specific enough to pick one person out of.

The Safe Story template

The composer opens in a structured mode rather than an empty box. This is deliberate: in-person storytelling formats in healthcare are facilitated by a trained person, and an unfacilitated version of the same thing is how a platform gets into trouble. The template is our substitute for the facilitator. It asks for:

• What you carried out of the shift — the part that is yours to tell.
• Enough context to make it make sense, with specifics blurred by default.
• What you need from the room: to be heard, advice, or nothing at all.

You can switch the template off. The rule above still applies.

About coworkers and employers

You can criticise how a place is run. That is much of the point, and we take no employer money precisely so that we can host it. Do not name individual colleagues in a way that targets them, and do not post anything you know to be false.

Escalation

Some things belong somewhere other than a feed. Where a post describes a genuine safety problem, the product offers a path to the Joint Commission, a state health department, CMS or the facility itself, and gives you a timestamped receipt that you raised it. Using it is always your choice; we do not report on your behalf.

Not allowed, at all

• Patient-identifying information, in any form.
• Non-consensual intimate imagery. Report it here — we act within 48 hours.
• Harassment, threats, or attempts to unmask another member's pseudonymous account.
• Recruiting on behalf of an employer, agency or vendor.
• Anyone under 18. See the 18+ floor on how verification works.

How moderation works

Members report; humans decide. There is no automated system scoring your posts, because a classifier reading the Recovery Room to rank content would be inferring health data about you — which we have committed not to do.

What we can do about a broken rule depends on where it was broken, and we would rather set that out than let you assume more than is true.

• Anything, anywhere: the content goes. A post, a thread, a whole room if it comes to that. Removal never depends on knowing who wrote something, so this always works.
• Inside one conversation: the name can be silenced. A story's name is stable within its own thread, so someone can be muted there or the thread closed. It does not reach their other conversations, because nothing connects those names.
• Where you write as yourself: your account is on the line. Your page, Off Duty, a marketplace listing, and any story you have claimed. Break the rules there and you can lose the account, because there is an account to lose.

And what we cannot do: identify who wrote a pseudonymous story, count someone's violations across conversations, or ban the author of one. The key that would connect those posts is on the member's own device and never reaches us. That is deliberate, and it is the same property that means nobody can ask us who wrote yours.

So the honest position is that a determined person can keep posting in the pseudonymous rooms under a new name each time. What stands against them is removal on report, human review, rooms that only open to a small verified group from one unit, sharing that is off unless an author turns it on, and a capped invite system that limits who is here at all. That is a real set of controls and a weaker one than most platforms claim. We would rather you knew which you were getting.