In these guidelines:
- Building a strong community
- What is not allowed?
- What happens if someone breaks the rules?
- Legal Notices
Intercom customers worldwide bring vastly different perspectives, ideas, and experiences, and range from people only just starting out with our Messenger Product to those who have evolved their customer engagement, using Intercom from the beginning. The Intercom Interconnected Community (the “Community”) is a place for collaboration with the goal of utilizing Intercom to keep internet business personal.
We rely on our Community members to work with us in moderating interactions in the Community and report abusive behavior or content. By providing these guidelines, we hope to help you understand how best to support each other on our forum, and what type of actions or content may violate our Terms of Service, inclusive of our Acceptable Use Policy.
Building a strong community
The primary purpose of the Community is to help each other optimize your use of Intercom products. To help ensure all participants feel comfortable asking and answering questions in our Community, please follow these guidelines:
- Be proactive. If you know the answer to a topic another Community member has asked, share your knowledge, and keep the discussion going. If you see inappropriate behavior before we do, let us know so we can take action. We’re all here to learn.
- Be respectful. Most responses are provided by other Community members just like yourself. Post professionally and with civility, and don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech. That means no insults, name calling, or otherwise harassing other members.
- Stay on topic. People use Intercom to get work done and to be more productive. Off-topic comments in our threads and categories are a distraction. Staying on topic helps generate positive and productive discussions. See a new post relating to an existing topic? Share it with the author. Staying on point helps our Community remain clutter free and makes it easier to find the topics we need when we need them.
- Be empathetic. In the spirit of Intercom’s values, keep it personal! Welcome newcomers to our Community, and help those who have questions. Recognize that we all come from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives and if we try to understand and share each other’s feelings, we’ll create a safe and friendly atmosphere where people feel comfortable asking for help and making contributions.
What is not allowed?
We are committed to maintaining a Community where users are free to express themselves and challenge one another's ideas, both technical and otherwise. Certain types of communications have no place in our Community for reasons of legality and relevance such as sharing confidential information or advertising your own services or products. Other types of behavior, however, serve to silence voices and chill participation, defeating the purpose of our Community. These behaviors also violate our Acceptable Use Policy which governs all use of our products and our Community. Here are some such behaviors that simply aren’t allowed:
- Threats of violence - You may not threaten violence towards others or use the site to organize, promote, or incite acts of real-world violence or terrorism. Think carefully about the words you use and the images you post and how they may be interpreted by others. In extraordinary cases, we may report threats of violence to law enforcement if we think there may be a genuine risk of physical harm or a threat to public safety.
- Hate speech and discrimination - While it isn’t forbidden to broach topics such as age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation, we do not tolerate speech that attacks a person or group of people on the basis of who they are.
- Trolling, bullying, and harassment - We do not tolerate trolling, bullying, or harassment. This means any habitual badgering, continuous pings, or any amount of intimidation targeted at a specific person or group of people.
- Impersonation - You may not seek to mislead others as to your identity by impersonating others, posting content under others’ user names or email addresses, using a similar username, or otherwise posing as someone else.
- Doxxing and invasion of privacy - Don't post other people's personal information, such as phone numbers, private email addresses, physical addresses, credit card numbers, Social Security/National Identity numbers, or passwords. Depending on the context, such as in the case of trolling, intimidation, or harassment, we may consider information such as photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject's consent, to be an invasion of privacy, especially when such material presents a safety risk to the subject.
- Vulgar, obscene, inflammatory, or hostile language - We are a community of professionals, and vulgar and obscene language distract from the purpose of communications with each other while inflammatory or hostile comments often serve to intimidate and silence the valuable voices in our Community.
- Gratuitously violent content - Don’t post violent images, text, or other content without reasonable context or warnings. If necessary to raise a particular topic related to use of our products, please post a clear warning or disclaimer in order to help our members make an educated decision as to whether or not they want to engage with such content.
- Active malware or exploits - Being part of a community includes not taking advantage of other members of the Community. We do not allow anyone to use our platform for exploit delivery, such as using Intercom as a means to deliver malicious executables, or as attack infrastructure, for example by organizing denial of service attacks or managing command and control servers.
What if you see these behaviors in our Community?
While we will be moderating content and behavior in the Community, we also rely on the Community to let us know when an issue needs to be addressed. If you run into something or someone on the site that you find objectionable, please reach out to our moderators right away. To flag a post for our moderators, just click on the "arrow" drop-down menu in the top right hand corner of a post and select Flag.
What if someone breaks the rules?
There are a variety of actions that we may take when a member reports inappropriate behavior or content. It often depends on the exact circumstances of a particular situation. We'll review each report as it comes in and investigate the content and surrounding facts, using these guidelines to guide our ultimate decision. Among possible courses of action, we may choose to edit the offending content, remove it, and/or disable the content author’s use of our Community at any time with or without prior notice.
Legal Notices
These are only guidelines; they don’t modify our Terms of Service or Master Service Subscription Agreement (collectively and respectively, the “Agreement”) and are not intended to be a complete list. Intercom retains full discretion under the Agreement to remove any content or suspend or terminate any accounts for activity that violates our Agreement or Acceptable Use Policy. These guidelines are intended to provide some clarity on when we will exercise that discretion.