READ: Community Guidelines and Commenting Policy

[Jules SherredKeymaster]

You are welcome to start topics and comment on current topics. We like comment threads with a wide spread of thoughts and opinions, and we take what we feel is well-justified pride in the general high quality of the comment threads on the site. We prefer to take a light hand at comment moderation, and thanks to excellent commenters, we am usually able to do just that.

That said, you have no right to free speech on this site. This is a personal site, and we are not the Canadian government. We reserve the right to edit all comments, and to moderate all comment threads, as we see fit. Your comment is more likely to be edited, moderated or deleted if it contains phobic content (based on race, sex, gender, gender identity and/or expression, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, etc), is a personal attack or threat toward another commenter, is entirely unrelated to the entry topic, features more than a “fair use” amount of someone else’s copyrighted work, has such poor grammar and spelling that it annoys us, is an obvious piece of trollage, or if we find it or you obnoxious and decide we’ve had enough. Don’t like it? Don’t comment. Simple.

A good rule of thumb is to comment as if the person to whom you are commenting is standing in front of you, is built like a linebacker, and has both a short temper and excellent legal representation.

During comment moderation we will sometimes tell people to “move on.” That means they should not comment further in that particular thread. Subsequent posts in the thread by those people will likely be deleted. They may comment in other threads as they will. Likewise, if we say that a particular conversation thread is off topic and needs to be wrapped up, we will likely delete followups.

Particularly persistent trolls are likely to be kittened.

Aside from two cases noted below, we do not moderate comments before they are published. If your comment is dropped into the moderation queue unexpectedly, you have probably triggered a spam filter, either by using a black-listed word or phrase or by posting three or more links in an entry, or you’ve posted a comment on a thread more than 30 days old. If this happens, don’t panic; we’ll release your entry sooner than later. If your comment is not released in a day, we may have accidentally deleted it. Sorry. Please post it again.

Here are the special cases regarding moderation. One: If you’re getting on our bad side by making bad comment posts, we will warn you to behave. Behave. If you don’t, you may be dropped into the moderation queue (i.e., we read your comments and decide whether to publish them). If you behave, you’ll be let out eventually. If you don’t, you’ll be banned. Two: If you’re obviously a troll, we may put you into moderation without warning you. If you are a troll it is unlikely you will behave, so you probably won’t ever get out of moderation.

We participate in comment threads. Fire away at us. You need to be aware that we respond to tone as well as content. If you’re polite, we’ll be polite. If you’re a jackass, we’ll be a jackass back. If you argue poorly, we may correct you. If you want to gauge our levels of tolerance, watch how others comment to us and triangulate accordingly.

With the exception of comments moderated or deleted for the reasons noted above, we do not delete comments. Also, while we will occasionally go in and fix formatting on someone’s comment, we won’t go in and remove links or other information you’ve put into the post that we would not otherwise delete for moderating purposes. If you’re not willing to have your words and deeds stay on the site for as long as it exists (not to mention as long as archives of the Internet over which we have no control exist), don’t comment.

Commenting policy–with some edits–borrowed by John Scalzi, with permission

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