A brief clarification of our comments policy, which I will try to link on the sidebar.

1. If you haven’t commented on our site before, your comment will need to be approved. This is to prevent spam comments, but may cause delays in your comment appearing on the site. Don’t get annoyed and complain that we are censoring you.
2. If you are already approved as a commenter, sometimes you may get caught in the approval queue as well. We are sorry and we will approve you as soon as possible. You can minimise this by always signing in with the same email address.
3. We reserve the right to delete or edit comments at our complete discretion. However, typically we will use this power sparingly. If you post a URL in your comment, it messes up our sidebar so we may convert it to a link. If you use obscene language or make an extreme personal attack (or both) we may edit to remove the reference. Please note that we consider people commenting here to be big boys and girls and there may be some heated discussions. If it is not an extreme situation, we prefer to leave comments on the site so they can be responded to and discussed - if you feel that people are being pummelled, feel free to stick up for them
4. We reserve the right to give warnings as to behaviour in comments threads. We will often do this before we take the step of editing or deleting comments. Pay attention.
5. We have never banned anyone from this site except spam and porn merchants. We hope not to ever ban anyone who is participating in discussion, even if that person is being anti-social and rude. We do reserve the right to ban people. Consider this an act of welcome and grace, but do not consider that we necessarily agree with you or endorse your views simply because we allow you to continue to frequent our comments threads.
6. Due to our policy of trying not to ban or edit people, people may say outrageous things in our comments threads or disagree with you strongly. If you find this unacceptable, we suggest that you keep to those threads which are less controversial or that you check out some of our competitors in our blogroll who are engaging with the same issues as us.
7. We monitor all comments even if we don’t participate in the discussion. So be good.
8. Ultimately, this is our site. We pay for it, we maintain it and will continue to do so as long as it continues to amuse us. So, even though the above points are guidelines, we reserve the right to do pretty much what we please without warning or explanation.

Hope that clears things up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 30th, 2005 at 12:03 pm by dan and is filed under us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.