Palatine Pack · Plainfield Pack

Community Guidelines

These are the rules for messaging in the Pack app, for Palatine Pack and Plainfield Pack families and coaches. They apply to everyone — parents, guardians, athletes, coaches and administrators — and they are not optional.

What is not allowed

• Harassment, bullying, intimidation or threats, of anyone.
• Sexual content of any kind, and any sexual contact with or comment about a child.
• Hateful or discriminatory language, including about race, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.
• Violent, graphic or frightening content.
• Sharing another family's contact details, photographs or personal information outside the app.
• Impersonating a coach, an administrator, or another parent.
• Spam, advertising, and fundraising that the club has not approved.
• Anything illegal.

Rules that exist to protect children

Some of these are enforced by the app itself rather than left to good behavior. They are worth knowing because they shape how the app works.

• A coach can never message a child privately. Every conversation with an athlete happens inside that athlete's family conversation, where their guardians see every message. There is no private channel, and the app provides no way to create one.
• Athletes can only have their own account from age 13, and only if a guardian switches it on. The age limit is enforced by the server, not by the app.
• Nobody can erase a message. Not the person who sent it, not a coach, not an administrator. A message can be edited by its author for fifteen minutes, and the original text is kept and shown as edited, so nobody can quietly rewrite what they said. What an administrator can do is remove content that breaks these rules from view for everyone — the original is kept in an archive only administrators can open, because the record is what a safeguarding question turns on later. Removed, not erased. See “Reporting something” below.
• Move club conversations off the app and none of the above applies. If a coach contacts a child by text message, on social media, or on any other service, that is outside these rules and outside the club's records. Tell the club.

Reporting something

Any message in the app can be reported, by anyone who can see it.

Open the message, choose Report, and give a reason. The report goes straight to club administrators. We review every report within 24 hours, and sooner where a child may be at risk.

Content that breaks these guidelines is removed from view for everyone, and the account that posted it is removed from messaging. That is the commitment, not an aspiration, and 24 hours is the outside limit rather than the target.

Removed does not mean erased, and you should know why. The original text is kept in an archive only club administrators can open, because a record of what an adult said to a child is the thing a safeguarding question turns on years later — and a record with the worst parts taken out of it cannot answer anything. So it leaves the conversation and stays in the archive. Photographs and files attached to removed content are deleted from our storage outright, within a minute.

If a child is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first, not the club.

Blocking someone

A family can block a staff member at any time, from the conversation or from Settings → Blocked. A blocked staff member can no longer send your family messages and disappears from the list of people you can contact. You can unblock them from the same place.

Existing messages stay visible to your family after a block: the history is yours, and blocking stops what comes next rather than rewriting what happened. If something in that history should not be there, report it — that is the control that removes content, and it is described above.

What happens after a report

• An administrator reviews it within 24 hours and records what they decided and when.
• Where the content breaks these guidelines it is removed from view for every user, and the original is retained in the administrators' archive for child-safety purposes.
• The account that posted it is removed from messaging — they can no longer send anything, anywhere in the app, and they are removed from any shared room. Where the behavior warrants it the account is removed from the app entirely.
• Where a staff member is involved, their staff access is withdrawn immediately, which also ends their access to every file shared in the staff-only area.
• Where a child may have been harmed, the club follows its safeguarding procedure, which may include contacting the authorities.

Photographs and files

Parents, guardians and coaches can share photographs and documents in a family’s own conversation with its coach. What is shared there is visible to the guardians on that family and to club staff, and to nobody else — no other family can see it. Club staff can also share photographs and files in a private staff-only area that parents, guardians and athletes cannot see. Athletes cannot open an attachment anywhere.

Photographs have their location and camera details removed by the app before they leave your phone. You do not have to do anything for that to happen, and it applies wherever you share one.

Post photographs of your own children only, unless the other child’s parent or guardian has agreed. This is the rule that needs you rather than the app: we can control who is able to open a photograph, and we cannot know whose child is in it.

Nothing shared in the app is used for publicity or social media, and nothing is shared outside the club. If you would like a photograph of your child removed, contact us — it stops being viewable immediately and the file itself is deleted from our storage within a minute.

Contact us

The Pack app is operated by Joseph Kim for Palatine Pack TFCC and Plainfield Pack TFCC. To report something, to raise a concern about a message, or to ask for a photograph of your child to be removed:

jkim6248@gmail.com

We reply within 24 hours, and sooner where a child may be at risk. If a child is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first, not us.