We want you to feel at home on our website. We want everyone to feel at home on our website. And to ensure that you can, we reserve the right to withhold approval of or delete comments and ban users as necessary to keep the comment threads on our website courteous and substantive.
Keep the discussion healthy.
Weigh in with smart, informed ideas that contribute further to the story. You have some ideas we didn't mention. And you know everyone wants to hear them. OK, at least we do!
Demonstrate and share the intelligence, wisdom, and humor we know you possess. We don't want to confine you or your ideas. Don't confine yourself.
Don’t feed the trolls. Don't dive into a debate with an ill-informed, weird commenter just for the fun of it. He's definitely not your best friend. (We told you he was weird.) Downvote and flag comments instead.
Thou shalt not...
Promote your own brand, product or blog. Need we say more?
Impersonate other authors or commenters. That's just weird.
Make comments correcting our typos or facts. To be clear—we want to hear it, but not everyone else does. Fill out the form on our About page, stating what the problem was and which article it was in. Thanks!
Make comments illustrating that you didn't read the whole article. Enraged we didn't mention topic B in our article about topic A? Why don't you check the third paragraph.
Make comments completely unrelated to the topic. If comments veer off topic a bit, that's fine. But we don't want to find you—or your comments—on their way to New Zealand when the rest of us are in Canada.
Make threats—no matter how vague—against the author or other commenters. Conversations can get heated. We understand that. We also understand that studies have proven that arguments almost never convince anyone. Or at least studies should prove that.
Participate in namecalling, harassment, or any kind of prejudice. That doesn't help make anyone's day. While we're at it, profanity doesn't make anyone's day either, so we have a blacklist. Don't use it—your comment won't be going anywhere.
Troll. If you're a politician out for a good trolling and are not contributing meaningfully to the conversation, you're in the wrong place.