Terms Of Service

Terms Of Service

Allnurses.com maintains the interactive portion(s) of the Web site as a service free of charge. By using any interactive services provided herein, you are agreeing to comply with and be bound by the terms, conditions and notices relating to its use.

Welcome to Allnurses.com: All New Members Please Read

On behalf of the entire Staff, we welcome you to allnurses.com - The largest and most active online nursing community on the planet. As with any large community, we ask that everyone follow TOS (Terms of Service) which are a set of guidelines and rules for everyone to follow. Some situations require staff judgement calls, and may not be spelled out in the terms of service.

Getting Started

• Watch our Getting Started video which covers most frequently asked questions.
• Subscribe to our email newsletter "Nurse-zine". We currently have 210,000+ e-mail subscribers. To subscribe enter your email below. You may unsubscribe at any time.

The Basic Terms of Service

Many of you struggled through the registration process before being given a membership here. We apologize for that, but I think that after you have spent some time with us, you will understand why we are very particular about user names and passwords. This website hosts the most personable Nursing discussion board on the Internet. You'll find yourself discussing current daily topics on a more personal level and discover that everyone treats each other with respect on this Discussion Forum.

No potentially libelous information about specific schools, instructors, or health care facilities/entities should be posted in these forums. While it is important to be able to network, everyone should be mindful of the following:

1. It is a small world - when we narrow it down to a state and throw in some personal info, there is actually a pretty good chance someone may recognize you if you are not careful. Your privacy is paramount to us.
2. While allnurses.com is a wonderful place to vent (without excess personally identifiable details) it is not the place to express why ("x" specific person, place or program) is terrible. Gripe away, but since we cannot permit allegations to be made about named entities, your care in not naming them is very much appreciated.
3. Please do not give out personal information about others. Do not name names where anyone could identify the person in any facility including your nursing programs.

Remember what you agreed to upon sign up: You will not use this forum to post free advertising or solicitations, any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise violative of any law. You agree not to post any copyrighted material unless the copyright is owned by you or by this site.

Posting on this site for marketing or commercial research is strictly prohibited and member's account will be closed. Research in the context of nursing school or high school assignments is permissible.

You retain the rights to any Content (ie. articles, posts, reviews, etc) that you submit throughout the allnurses INC Network. However, by submitting Content throughout the allnurses INC Network, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to publish, transmit, and distribute via any media or distribution outlets owned by allnurses INC Network.

Finally, you acknowledge that you are 13 years of age or older, and, if under the age of 18, are using this site under the supervision of a parent, legal guardian, or other responsible adult. Children under the age of 13 are not allowed to visit or otherwise use our site.

Advertising or Self Promotion:

We do not allow any form of commercial advertising in the bulletin board post, avatars, or signatures. This includes using your avatar or signature to link to other websites or promotional messages that are advertising in nature. Please note, this includes links to political parties’ websites.

Please do not post any messages anywhere on this site that are primarily for the promotion or advertising of any website, forums, email address, business, MLM, activity, personal blogs, or other entities that you have an affiliation with (ie. no self-promotion).

If you are interested in advertising to our nursing audience, please visit our advertising pages for more information.

Posting e-mail addresses:

We do not allow members to post their email address, if you would like to have someone contact you personally, please use the private message system that is included with your account. If you do post email addresses, they will be removed. Thanks.

Using Professional Titles:

Members cannot call themselves by professional titles, if they do not hold that title. ie. Members cannot call themselves "doctor, Dr., RN, LPN, LVN, Nurse,CNA, RT, MA" etc, unless they are actually licensed and/or certified as such a thing. If you have chosen a user ID name that reflects an unearned professional title, please contact administration, Admin Help Desk, and submit three (3) names for consideration. An administrator will get back with you regarding your name.

Linking to websites / Solicitations:

We do not allow any self promotional post announcing websites to gain exposure, it does not matter if it is non-profit. This includes personal off-site blogs.  It is against board rules to invite, solicit or coerce others to join other community websites through posts, email, PM, use of allnurses.com membership list or any other resource within the allnurses.com website. We allow linking to other information websites, as long as it is for informational purposes and not for self promotion advertisement. Staff members may remove or edit links at it's discretion.

Please note that advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes, and solicitations are inappropriate to post, send through PM, email or any other feature of the allnurses.com website: message boards, guest book, chartroom, etc. Want to advertise? Visit our advertising pages for details and rates.

No cross posting in multiple forums - spamming

Please post question/thread in ONE forum only. Moderators may move to most appropriate area. Do not post similar threads in several area as considered spamming. All members will benefit from performing search of site prior to posting a new thread/topic.

This is not a medical advice bulletin board

This is a board for nurses and nurses-to-be to discuss nursing issues. Please do not ask for any medical or nursing feedback related to a health situation that affects you, a family member, or someone that is not a patient under your care. This is not a free medical advice board. Please be aware that allnurses.com cannot be responsible for problems resulting from reliance on medical or nursing advice received here. If you have a medical problem, please seek attention from your health care provider.

This is not a legal advice bulletin board

This is a board for nurses and nurses-to-be to discuss primarily nursing issues. This is not a free legal advice board. Please be aware that allnurses.com cannot be responsible for problems resulting from reliance on legal advice received here. If you have a legal problem, please seek legal counsel.

Copyrighted Material:

No "spreading of copyrighted Material": Please do not upload, attach or post anything that is copyright or licensed without prior consent of the owner. For example, if you want to post content from an online article, do not post the whole article, post a partial synopsis, and then a link to the source.

English Language Only

While this bulletin board hosts visitors from around the world, it is based in the United States and much of our membership is English speaking. Due to our inability to moderate threads in other languages, we ask that interactions be in English for the enjoyment of as many posters as possible.

Please do not type entirely in capitals as considered shouting on the Internet! Desiring to maintain professionalism, text speak (also known as chatspeak, txtspk, texting language or txt talk) is discouraged. Along with using proper English spelling and punctuation, this shows respect for the owner, other bulletin board members & guests and makes it easier to read your important thoughts.

Disagreements with allnurses.com Policies or Staff Decisions

You agree not to argue about allnurses.com policies or moderating decisions in the public forums. If you disagree with a policy or a decision, you may respectfully post your comments in private in the Admin Help Desk where only you and the administration can see the conversation. You will not attempt to petition the website owner through the use of posts, polls, emails, PMs or any other method found on the allnurses.com website.

Disabling/editing of posts/users:

The allnurses.com staff reserves the right to edit/remove the posts and/or disable the account of any member who does not comply with these community guidelines or any reason deemed appropriate by the administration for the good of the community and its safety. Requests for removal will entail removing personal data, location, avatar, etc,. to protect the privacy of the person but the member account will remain intact because of the nature of the threading of posts within the database.

Freedom of Speech?

Although the constitution of the US guarantees that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech”, allnurses.com is not Congress. Freedom of speech rights do not extend to this privately owned website. The TOS/Guidelines of this website governs the behaviors and activities of the members. If you choose not to follow the guidelines agreed to during registration, the result is a disabling of your account.

Debates

We promote the idea of lively debate. This means you are free to disagree with anyone on any type of subject matter as long as your criticism is constructive and polite.

Personal Attacks

Our first priority is to the members that have come here because of the flame-free atmosphere we provide. There is a zero-tolerance policy here against personal attacks. We will not tolerate anyone insulting another individual's opinion nor name calling and will BAN repeat offenders.

How to Handle Personal Attacks or Objectionable Material

If you are ever in a position where you feel you have been personally attacked, do not respond to that attack. Please report the post using red triangle at the top of each post, you can submit your comments of why you are reporting the post. The staff will be notified with your comments for that specific, this is the most efficient way to report post. Let the staff deal with the problem, if you respond to that attack, you may find yourself removed as well, and we don't want to see that happen.

Considering the real-time nature of this bulletin board, it is impossible for us to review all messages or confirm the validity of information posted. Please remember that we do not actively monitor the contents of posted messages and are not responsible for any messages posted. We do not vouch for or warrant the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of any message, and are not responsible for the contents of any message. The messages express the views of the author of the message, not necessarily the views of this forum or any entity associated with this forum. Any user who feels that a posted message is objectionable is encouraged to contact us immediately using the report button. We have the ability to remove objectionable messages and we will make every effort to do so, within a reasonable time frame, if we determine that removal is necessary. This is a manual process, however, so please realize that we may not be able to remove or edit particular messages immediately.

We are the largest Nursing Discussion Forum on the Internet. We are dealing with 250,000+ of members with and an average of 1600 posts per day. When you grow to a bulletin board of this size, it becomes more difficult to moderate it. Presently, we have 20+ volunteer moderator and admin staff who monitor this board periodically throughout the day. They are here to help -- please feel free to contact them with any problems you may have. On the other hand, they have been instructed to enforce our zero-tolerance policy. Our biggest concern here is the quality of membership not the quantity. We have no problem removing any individual who disrupts this bulletin board.

Hate Speech and Inappropriate Generalizations

It is important to remember that this bulletin board reaches out to nurses and other readers all over the world. Our call is to be supportive, not divisive. Because of this, discrimination, racial vilification and offensive generalizations targeting people of other races, religions and/or nationalities will not be tolerated.

Foul Language

Nothing should ever be posted here that you would not say in front of a crowd of professionals. A profanity filter will automatically edit your language and allnurses staff have the right to edit offensive language as well.

Multiple Accounts

Creation of multiple accounts is prohibited. Use of 2 accounts by the same member simultaneously is not permitted, and one or all accounts may be banned or suspended without notice, especially if the multiple accounts are being used to troll the board.

If you need to change your user ID name after the registration is complete, you may not create another account. Please contact administration in the Admin Help Desk and submit three (3) choices for consideration and your rationale for the change. An administrator will contact you if one of the names is available.

Expectations of the Volunteer Moderators

Problematic posts/threads may be moved to the Moderator's discussion area for review/consultation and occasionally will remain there. Threads may to locked to cool down passionate postings that have strayed off the original topic; we will attempt to post warning notice before taking this action if observed early.

Consequences to Breach of the Terms of Service

Moderators will PM/email the author of reported posts to let them know that members have found objectionable material violating our site rules and will be offered guidance/reminders regarding posting behavior here.

Please note, the administrators do have the ability to read private messages and do so when investigating complaints and harassment issues.

Expectations of the Administrators

Members that repeatedly violate these standards after given a warning will be reported to the administrator. Only the administrator can make the decision to BAN a poster and ALL decisions of the administrator are FINAL.

Though we certainly are a little stricter here than other boards, I think you'll agree that it is necessary when dealing with such a large membership. We can guarantee that most of you will never even realize there are guidelines here. You will enjoy a great deal of freedom here, with the ability to freely debate upon a number of subjects, as long as you remain civil and polite to each other.

You are among the most intelligent, friendly, experienced, passionate and vocal Nursing posters anywhere on the Internet. You are part of a site whose opinions are widely read by men and women considering nursing, nursing assistants, students and Nurses: RN's and LPN/LVN's from across the US and through out the world especially Australia, Canada, UK, and others. This website is one of the most highly respected within the nursing community and is listed as a resource in nursing publications and at other nursing related websites. We didn't get to that status without the professional and courteous contributions of our membership. We welcome you to a place you will soon call home.

Thank You for joining our Nursing Community!

Please browse through our Nursing Discussion areas which are divided into forum folders. Pick out several threads or glance through them all---if you have several days free . General Nursing Discussion and Nursing Polls, Nursing Activism/Politics, and allnurses.com Feedback lead our forums followed by all nursing topics (including Student Nursing). Critical Care Nursing then Nursing Specialty areas follow, The Break Room then offering a place to relax.

Looking for a particular topic? Conduct a search of previous threads by using our powerful search feature

Sincerely,

Brian Short RN – Founder and Administrator
and all of our volunteer Administrator and Moderator staff