Here at Mashable, we truly value comments. Commenting is a way for everyone to participate and contribute, breaking down the wall between the author and reader.
To improve the dialogue, we’ve put together some simple commenting guidelines for the Mashable community. When making moderation decisions, we will take these, as well as the context in which comments are made, into account. We wanted to post these publicly and be transparent about our moderation process and why certain comments are removed.
We also recognize that this is your community as much as it is ours. We want you to help us uphold a high standard of quality for conversation in the comments. As always, we’d love to get your thoughts in the comments about things you think should be added to this list.
1. Personal Attacks: Please don’t engage in personal attacks (on authors, other users or any individual), persistent trolling or mindless abuse. The Mashable community should focus on intelligently discussing topics by furthering the conversation and informing the participants with resourceful and constructive ideas.
2. Hate speech: Racism, sexism and homophobia will not be tolerated.
3. Language and Threats: Please watch your language and respect other people’s views, beliefs and emotions. We reserve the right to remove any content that might be found extremely offensive or threatening.
4. No Spam: Spam and advertising content will be removed.
5. Smear Tactics: Although we acknowledge criticism of our articles and our writers, we will not allow misrepresentation. We will distinguish between constructive arguments and smear tactics.
6. Relevancy: Please keep conversations relevant. Off-topic comments are subject to removal in order to keep the thread on track.
7. Quality: We encourage you to take responsibility for the quality of the conversations in which you’re participating. Maintain intelligent discussions in the Mashable community by being respectful and considerate.
8. Help us: Maintain an inviting interaction space by self-policing threads and flagging spam. Although we have a hands-on approach to community engagement, we do sometimes miss problem commenters or trolls. We appreciate your efforts to keep the Mashable community environment inviting, insightful and constructive. Let the conversations be quality ones.
*A big thanks to The Guardian, which inspired these guidelines*
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock
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