The Hidden Dominion Comment Policy

Here’s a quick article on HD’s comment policy to address why some comments are removed.

I am getting a bunch of SEO-related spam in the comments and people complaining when their comments get deleted. Hopefully this will clear it up.

Currently, we allow anonymous comments. I am testing this out to see if we can keep it that way.

Comment System Goals

We want our readers to:

• Comment, debate, and even disagree with our articles.
• List what other articles they would like to see.
• Actively report misrepresentations in the article or other comments.
• Request additional information on any article or source.
• Report any misunderstandings of the article or other comments.
• Mention spelling/grammatical errors.
• Encourage further consideration for external or third-party impacts not otherwise discussed within the article.

Through our comment policy we hope to achieve the above. Likewise, we also want to:

• Define what would be considered worthy of deletion.
• Define what would be considered spam.
• Set expectations for comments that will be edited or deleted.

Take note I use two different anti-spam systems (Akismet and WPBrusier) to filter spam. Neither are Captcha oriented. However, they do remove massive bulks of comments everyday.

Sometimes these systems capture honest comments as spam. I try to filter through these when time is available. However, it is nowhere near my first priority to filter comments so sometimes it will take awhile if your comment is placed in spam to be approved. I apologize but I’m only one person and it is just not a priority. I normally get through these about once a week.

Normal comments are auto-approved. As of the writing of this policy we do not require pre-approval for 99% of comments. Some comments with violent, profane, or other negative language are flagged for pre-approval. You can avoid this by not commenting with harsh language.

Comment System Policy

Please not this website is not run like a democracy. Just like I am not a fan of pure democracy, I don’t want it in my comment sections either.

You will be addressed how you respond. If you respond politely but in disagreement, I will respond politely as well. Your disagreement should be educated. Do not comment if you are ill-informed. Keep this in mind when commenting.

Additionally, I will not subject my readers to stupidity. If your comment is completely baseless or moronic it will be treated as such. Any links sending my readers off to articles that are idiotic or addressed in an article of our own will be removed. High quality content or article links, even that disagrees with our own writing, will be permitted to remain.

Please report any comment that breaks the policy below so I can remove it. Sometimes I get overwhelmed with the number of comments and have difficulty reading them all in full.

We immediately remove any of the following comments when discovered:

• Anything which breaks or encourages breaking any United States law.
• Spam.
• A language other than English (unless the article would pertain to foreign language discussion).
• Baseless ‘follow’ links to another website. My comment section doesn’t exist to help your blog get link juice. The only exception are links to on-topic information, so long as they are no-follow and not clearly trying to derail or get linkbacks.
• Keyword stuffers, anchor texts, or other SEO annoyance. This includes the name field. If you have a website and want to include it in the website category through WPDiscuz, that is fine. Do not mention it further than there.
• Harassment toward other posters. Please be respectful toward other contributors.
• Any content containing language or concepts that could be deemed extremely offensive, violent, or explicit may be deleted depending on severity. Note this may include abusive, threatening, pornographic, offensive, misleading or libelous language.
• Ads or External sales.
• Affiliate links.

We may or may not delete the following:

• Off-topic comments, depending on the context of the article.
• Profane language will be blurred or deleted depending on the severity. This impacts my SEO.

We may edit the following:

• On-topic links that are do-follow, broken, or not listed correctly.
• Profane language will be blurred or deleted depending on the severity. This impacts my SEO.
• Misleading comments.

Obviously, my blog is not legally responsible nor do we necessarily agree with any comment by someone that is not the author or admin.

Thanks for reading!

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