Wouldn’t it be great to live in a world in which comment and moderation policies didn’t exist?  Oh, to dream the impossible dream.

OUR COMMENTING POLICY

Bottom line up front: if you exhibit troll-like behavior in our comments section, your comments will be deleted.  If you exhibit a trend of troll-like behavior in our comments section, you will be banned from the site.  Paul and I agreed during the planning stages of this community that posts and comments should be in accordance with a business-like atmosphere.  If your definition of “business-like atmosphere” is questionable, please consider this a “family-friendly atmosphere.”  If those two categories still leave you in the dark about what is and isn’t appropriate, our comment filters will, hopefully, keep the bad out and the good in.  All are welcome to comment, and we’ve chosen not to manually moderate — unless we have to.  Debate is good, as long as it’s constructive and everyone treats each other with respect.

Personal attacks and insults – unless they’re cheeky and fun – will probably get your comments deleted or you banned.

One of the key words that drives our content is “meaningful.”  Strive for that in the comments, and you’re on the right track!

OUR POLICY ON LINKS AND HIJACKING

Please, do share links in the comments section of our posts — as long as they’re relevant to the topic, and contribute to the discussion.  If you’re trying to sell something that has nothing to do with the topic, consider this: the World Wide Web is a big place — do it somewhere else.

Hopefully most of the people who read our site are somehow connected to the professional communications profession.  That assumed, you’ll understand what we mean when we say “stay on message,” as it relates to discussions in comments.  Want us to see something random, but useful?  Just send it to us.  Want us to write about something completely unrelated to a particular post?  Just send us the request, and we’ll consider it.  Want to maintain that budding relationship you’re having with another commenter?  Do it somewhere else, Romeo/Juliet.

SPAMMING

We could go on at length about spamming and its consequences here, but spammers probably don’t read comment policies.  You get the point.

PRIVACY AND TECHNICAL HELP FOR COMMENTING

If you comment using an email address, it will remain private.  We will never share an email address that someone uses to engage here, and it will not show up in the comments section. If you’ve made an email address part of, say, your gravatar profile then, well, that’s on you.

If you are a WordPress user, your avatar/user name will automatically appear with your comments.  If you are not a WordPress user, or relatively new to the community, you can create an avatar that is associated with your email address here: http://en.gravatar.com

OXFORD COMMAS

You won’t see them around here — we use Associated Press Style for our content.  You’ll also see punctuation inside quotation marks and many other wonderful idiosyncrasies that are part of the style.  It’s what we know, it’s what we like – you’ll get used to it.

Whew! All that said written, thanks for reading, thanks for participating, thanks for reading through this spiel and, most importantly, thanks for being part of this community.

~ brandon