Why does the site lock serious questions?

Dear hurtnme, since you have been browsing this site (and BRAVO for you for looking around) you will probably have seen that there are often times when these heavy problems have gotten advice on how and where to get trained and professional help. Indeed you can help by spreading that knowledge. Even a super psychologist couldn’t solve these sorts of problems through a website. So as far as I’ve seen, the advisers give then a nudge or a phone number or website to get the kind of help they need. Then they lock the question because that’s all anyone can do here .All any of us can do is open the doors to these people, they have to decide to go through.

I’ve been on this website for about 10 days and I’ve seen an unbelievable number of the same questions on self-esteem, weight loss, depression. All of which take years to correct.

Absolutely- FunAdvice has such a high standard of professionalism and regulates answers/questions judicially.

Also, he’s right. Most of these questions ARE people just wanting attention. I mean, young women asking how to make themselves anorexic?

Ok, since I’m one of the owners, write a lot of the policies, etc, I’ll be happy to help on this topic.

We lock questions where people are trying to hurt themselves, become anorexic, etc, only after giving positive advice. The reason we do that is to prevent other people from jumping in & encouraging them.

Next, according to our terms of service, we’ll delete suicide questions on site. We might have a few, and I hope if we do, they have positive advice on them. 99.9% of the time if somebody posts that, they’re trying to get attention, and they aren’t serious. However, if we DO have an instance of somebody being hurtful, mean, or spiteful, we have a “report abuse” link next to every question or answer.

AND, we have a link on the profile page, and a link on each photo page to report abuse, and a link to report abuse in fun mail.

I take this issue incredibly seriously. Every single abuse report we get, I review personally, and follow up where appropriate.

Sure, I could have other people do that, but, I care :) FunAdvice has been around for almost five years now. Currently, we get more than a million people on the site a month, and more than 65% of the people who visit are from the US.

The site is too big, unfortunately, for me or anybody else to read every single thing that happens on the site. So, we rely heavily on the abuse reporting system, volunteers who have stepped up to have extra responsibility (the advisors) and our small team to review as much as possible.

Unfortunately, we can’t catch everything, but we take the issue seriously, and if you notice something wrong, use the abuse link. Otherwise, we might miss it.

Perhaps, as you seem to be interested in helping out & like us, making the world a better place, you could let us know via the contact form OR the abuse links on how we can improve.