We do not restrict people's right to free speech, but the chat needs some guidelines as to what is acceptable so users can chat without being flooded by abusive users.

It became clear that we had to impose some sort of regulation soon after Alamak started when an 11 year old boy logged in and proceeded to "pee" in the Pool and Hot_Tub. He was asked nicely to stop flooding the rooms with these annoying descriptions but the situation just got worse.

It got bad enough that other users could not chat freely. So policies were set, the /kick and /ban commands created, and a permban feature added to the chat.

The point of the guidelines is to keep the chat friendly and clean enough so anyone, even an 11 year old, can come on and not be harassed or bothered by bad language.

We ask Operators to act according the spirit of the chat and to be flexible, to try to reason with users who are behaving outside the guidelines, and to deal impartially.

We do monitor anything that looks like a network address. We record who posted it and the network address (not the rest of the message). We are a private chat site and do not appreciate users or other site administrators taking advantage of our free services to promote other chat sites.

We also log kick, ban, unban and signoff messages by Operators.

Other than these exceptions, Alamak does not monitor the chat.

All information other than what we monitor is kept in memory (no files) and persists only as long as the server is running. Private messages persist in memory only for 3 minutes. Private rooms hold only the last 60 lines typed and are destroyed after 5 minutes of inactivity. We do not tap into others' conversations, see into private rooms or break into private rooms that are locked. We do not support this kind of invasion of privacy.