Policy
Mutual Aid Rules
Who can post, what happens before a post appears, and what gets an answer removed.
- Effective date
- September 2, 2026
- Last updated
- September 2, 2026
Mutual Aid works only if a fire chief reading it believes the answers came from people who have actually done the thing. Everything below exists to protect that, and nothing else.
Who can post
Anyone. There is no membership, no account and no fee.
What there is instead is a name, a department or organization, and a working email address on every post. The name and the organization appear publicly; the email never does.
Every post is read before it appears
Questions and answers both wait for an editor. Nothing is published automatically, and nobody on a thread is emailed until the answer has been read.
This is slower than a forum that publishes instantly, and it is the trade being made deliberately. An answer that turns out to be a sales pitch has already done its damage by the time it is taken down.
If you sell in this space, say so
Vendors are not banned from Mutual Aid. Sometimes the person who genuinely knows whether a particular system does a particular thing works for the company that makes it, and an answer from them is worth having.
What is required is that you say who you work for, in the post, in the organization field and in plain words. An answer that reads as peer advice and turns out to be from a supplier is the single thing most likely to empty this board.
What gets an answer removed
Any of these, whoever posted it.
- A sales pitch. Answering "what should I use" with your own product and a link is a pitch, however it is phrased.
- Working for a company in this space and not saying so.
- Posting as a fire department or agency you do not work for.
- Claiming a deployment, a customer or a result that did not happen.
- Contact details for a salesperson, or an offer to take it to email in order to sell.
- Naming a competitor to attack them.
- The same answer posted across several threads.
Answer the question that was asked. If the honest answer involves the product you sell, say who you are and answer it anyway.
What a genuinely useful answer looks like
- What you actually did, in your department, with dates.
- What it cost, including the parts that were not on the quote.
- What went wrong, and what you would do differently.
- What you would need to know before doing it again.
- Where you are not sure, said as not sure.
What is done with your details
Your first name and your department or organization appear on your post. Your surname and email address do not.
Your email is used to tell you when somebody answers a thread you posted on, and to reach you about your post if we need to. Every one of those emails carries a link that stops them, and stopping them stops all of them.
Removal, and disagreeing with it
Posts are removed rather than deleted, so a thread does not silently lose a message that people have already read and replied to.
If something of yours was removed or turned down and you think that was wrong, say so through the contact page. This is a small enough board that a person will read it.
How this relates to the rest of the site
The same rule that governs everything else here governs Mutual Aid: a company's own account of its product is welcome when it is labelled as such, and is never presented as independent. The Editorial Independence and Vendor Policy sets that out in full.