Datathrob Lounge
What you agree to when you use the Lounge, in plain language. Version of October 2026. A lawyer will review this text, and we will tell members if it changes.
The Lounge is a space for Datathrob members to ask questions, share methods and meet other researchers. It is not a place for patient care advice, and nothing posted here replaces the judgement of your own ethics committee, supervisor or clinician.
Datathrob does not store health data or patient data, and it does not permit you to post it. Do not post names, ID numbers, medical record numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, images, or any detail that could identify a person. Describe your design and variables in words. Never paste rows from a dataset. Every box where you type shows this notice, and you confirm it each time before a post is published. The Lounge also checks each post for email addresses, phone numbers, long numbers and patient-related terms. A match does not block the post. It flags the post for an administrator to review.
Disagree with the idea, not the person. Harassment, insults, discrimination, advertising and spam are not allowed. Do not post another person's work or private messages without their permission.
Other members see your username and display name. Signed-in members also see your institution, profession and specialty. You choose your profession and specialty from a list and may add a sub-specialty in your own words. They see no other personal detail unless you write it yourself. Your email address and payment reference are never shown.
Open groups let any member join at once. By-request groups need the group owner to approve you. Private groups need a code from the group owner. Group owners can remove posts and members in their group. Datathrob administrators can do the same anywhere in the Lounge. Every removal needs a written reason, which is saved in an administrator log. If you are removed, or a post of yours is removed, you receive a message in the Lounge. The message does not give the reason. You can ask the Datathrob administrator about it, and the administrator can review the decision.
Ask the Lounge is a shared space for every Lounge member. It is not a group. Post a question, a challenge or an idea about statistics, research methods, ethics, writing, or a medical topic for research, and choose the closest topic. Every rule on this page applies there, including the ban on patient data. The person who asks can mark one reply as the helpful answer. Datathrob administrators can remove posts in this space, with a written reason.
Members with an active access code can create up to three groups. A Datathrob administrator approves each new group before it is listed, and you receive a message with the decision. The owner chooses the type (open, by request or private code) and may change it later. Private groups are listed by name only. Their description and posts are visible only to members. The owner is responsible for keeping the group within these rules, approves join requests, and may remove posts and members with a written reason. If an owner leaves, an administrator may take over the group or close it.
You can send a message request to another member. The conversation starts only if they accept. You can block any member at any time, and a blocked member cannot contact you. Messages are stored on our servers. Datathrob administrators who manage the database can technically read them. Do not send anything in a message that you would not want an administrator to be able to read. Messages are not part of the one-month archive in section 9, and how long they are kept is still to be confirmed.
Your Ask Nora projects and saved results stay in your browser. They reach the Lounge only when you open the box, choose an item, check the text and press Post. Nothing is shared automatically. Look through the text first and remove anything personal.
Use Report on any post. An administrator reviews the report and may remove the post, warn the author, or remove the author from the Lounge. We may remove any post that breaks these rules, including a post that contains patient data, without notice.
The Lounge is the one place where Datathrob stores text you type on our servers: your posts, replies, group requests and message requests, with your username and the time. Do not put patient data in any of them. See the privacy statement for how your account data is handled.
A discussion stays visible in the Lounge while it is active. One month after its last reply it is archived. Archived discussions leave the Lounge, so members no longer see them. They are kept in a separate archive that only Datathrob administrators can read. An administrator downloads a copy of the archive and keeps it on a Datathrob-controlled server outside Supabase, and may then delete the archived rows from Supabase. A discussion that was archived is no longer shown to you, but the copy is kept by Datathrob. If you want a post of yours deleted from the archive copy, write to Datathrob (section 11).
The Lounge can email you a short notice when something waits for you, such as a decision about a group or a new message. The email says how many items wait and never contains the text of a post or a message. You can turn these emails off by editing your card in Members. The emails are sent through Resend. How long your Lounge content is kept after you leave Datathrob is still to be confirmed.
You are responsible for what you post. Check that you have the right to share it. Datathrob does not check posts before they appear and does not guarantee that any post is correct.
Write to [email protected].