Online Safety & Acceptable Use

This policy sits under the Safeguarding & Child Protection Policy. It applies to every part of Arcadia: the club chat and voice rooms, all six Minecraft worlds, and the creative and coding tools.

1. The rules, in full

The short version members sign up to is on the Club page and pinned in the chat. This is the complete version.

Talking to people

• Be kind. No insults, put-downs, threats, or ganging up on someone.
• No swearing, sexual talk, or slurs of any kind — including "as a joke" and including in a private voice room.
• Do not mock how somebody types, spells, reads, speaks or plays. Members here have all sorts of brains and that is the point of the club.
• If someone asks you to stop, stop.

Keeping yourself private

• Never share your surname, address, school, phone number, email or a photo of yourself.
• Never share somebody else's details either.
• Do not share your password with anyone — not even a friend in the club. Your tutor never needs it.
• Use your club username in the club. You do not have to use your real name.

Staying inside Arcadia

• Do not move club conversations to another app. No Discord, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Roblox or anything else. If somebody asks you to, say no and tell your tutor.
• Do not post Arcadia's addresses, invite links or screenshots of the club anywhere else.
• Do not bring people from outside into the club, and do not let anybody else use your account.
• Do not post links to outside websites in the chat.

In the Minecraft worlds

• Do not break, burn, steal from or grief anybody else's build. Ever. Somebody may have spent months on it.
• No killing other players unless everyone playing has agreed to it first.
• Do not use hacked clients, X-ray, duplication glitches or cheats.
• Do not install mods on a shared world without asking — mods have to match the server or nobody can join.
• Only Eris has operator commands. Do not ask for them and do not try to get them.

The tools

• Keep what you make suitable for a club with children as young as [to confirm: youngest member's age] in it — no gore, no sexual content, no hate imagery.
• Do not delete or edit somebody else's project.
• Do not try to get around the login, break into other people's accounts, or probe the server. If you find a security hole, tell Eris — you will be thanked, not blamed.

Telling someone

• If anything in the club upsets you, frightens you or feels wrong, tell Eris straight away. You will never be in trouble for telling. If it is about Eris, tell your parent or carer, or email the club's safeguarding sponsor Piyush Gupta — pgupta@tutordoctor.co.uk — or ring Childline free on 0800 1111.
• If someone else is being hurt or bullied, tell Eris. That is not telling tales.
• Do not screenshot, photograph or record other members or the session, and do not post anything from Arcadia anywhere else.
• You can also talk to Childline on 0800 1111 at any time, about anything, without telling us.

2. What is switched off by default

Arcadia follows the ICO's Age Appropriate Design Code: the private setting is the starting point, and anything optional stays off until a parent or carer asks for it. Defaults are set by age band, not by request from the child.

There are no streaks, no leaderboards ranking children against each other, no notifications designed to pull a child back, and nothing that rewards spending longer online.

3. What is monitored, and what is not

Members and parents are told this plainly rather than finding out later:

• Text chat is kept. Messages stay in the club chat's database, so a reported incident can be checked. Eris can read any club channel.
• Voice is not recorded. It passes through the server live and nothing is stored. If something is said in voice, it can only be dealt with if someone reports it.
• Minecraft activity is logged — joins, leaves, chat and commands — as part of the normal server log.
• Connections are logged, including IP addresses, for security.
• There is no keystroke logging, no webcam access, and no monitoring of anything on the child's own computer. Arcadia sees what happens on Arcadia and nothing else.
• No automated content scanning or AI moderation runs over children's messages.

4. When a rule is broken

The full steps, and how to appeal, are in the Behaviour, Bullying & Sanctions policy. In short: a quiet word first, then a conversation with a parent, then time away from the feature involved, then suspension. Anything that is a safeguarding concern skips the ladder entirely and goes straight to the safeguarding procedure.

We take account of a member's needs when responding. A child who has melted down and said something unkind is handled differently from a child who has systematically targeted somebody — but the child on the receiving end is protected first in both cases.

5. For parents and carers

Things that genuinely help, based on where problems actually start:

• Keep the club login somewhere you can also get at it. It is not a secret from you.
• Ask to see what they are building. Interest beats surveillance, and it means they will tell you when something goes wrong.
• Agree where the device lives — a shared room helps more than any software.
• Know that Arcadia is closed and invite-only, but the rest of the internet is not. Most grooming risk comes from the "add me on x" step, which happens outside anything we control.
• If your child mentions anything that worries you, contact Eris. You will not be wasting anyone's time.

6. Review

Reviewed annually, and whenever a new tool, world, mod or feature is added to Arcadia.