Commenting on HD
The Comment Policy In 60 seconds
We follow the mindset of ‘Acceptance through service. Initiation through contribution‘. This means we will always take care of our regular readers and contributors over all others.
- No spam.
- No off-topic content.
- No distortioners or shills.
- No sketchy links.
- Nothing illegal, such as encouraging violence.
- Minimize profane language.
- Do not attack others. Constructively debate the idea, not the person.
- You must demonstrate at least a moderate level of intellectual ability to comment here. Other websites may allow illogical and irrational discourse within their comment sections, but this one does not. If you disagree with another commenter or the author, do so in a polite and intelligent manner or don’t bother. I am always happy to be wrong and to learn. But I will not subject my regular readers to mountains of idiocy, shills, and vulgar ad hominems, which is the norm in online comment sections.
Any comment that breaks one of the above will by auto-deleted, so do not waste your time commenting.
If you do not want your comment to require pre-approval, then do not use vulgar or inappropriate language and do not use excessive or odd links.
Commenting is a privilege, not a right. Remember that you will be addressed by how you address others.
The Full Policy
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. In this policy we want to:
- Explain how our comment system works.
- Set expectations for comments that will be edited or deleted.
Comment Approval
I use two different anti-spam systems (Akismet and WPBrusier) to filter spam. Neither of them are Captcha oriented. However, they do remove massive bulks of comments every day.
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 a while 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, but there are no guarantees.
Normal comments are auto-approved. As of the writing of this policy, we do not require pre-approval for 90% 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
Comment sections are automatically closed after the article is 5 years old.
Currently, we allow anonymous comments. I am testing this out to see if we can keep it that way.
Please note 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 or otherwise cannot present a constructive argument. Keep this in mind when commenting. Think before you speak, read before you think.
Distortioners and shills will be deleted immediately and blacklisted. Do not attempt to distort the narrative on any of my posts or use hostility to get a point across.
Additionally, I will not subject my readers to stupidity. If your comment is completely baseless or moronic, it will be treated as such and deleted. 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 disagree with our own writing, will be permitted to remain.
We immediately remove any of the following comments:
- 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 link backs.
- 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 edit or delete the following:
- Off-topic comments, depending on the context of the article.
- Profane language will be blurred or deleted depending on the severity.
- Misleading comments.
- Comments with incorrect or broken links (including any comment text referencing the incorrect or broken links)
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