Comment Guidelines

Spam Comments

Like most blogs, ReadWriteWeb assumes the best about our commenters. We don’t pre-moderate because we don’t want to slow down your ability to contribute to discussions. If we see a comment that we aren’t sure about, we do assume your comment isn’t spam.

That said, when a comment is clearly only made to pimp your blog, your startup, your product or an affiliate offer, we’ll remove it. Spam includes folks who call themselves ‘Free iPad’, ‘Low Cost Mattresses’ and other SEO stunt names.

Sponsor

You won’t receive a warning or an email notification, your spam will simply be removed. If you think we’ve made an error, feel free to let our community manager know.

Personal Information

Our advice is to avoid placing personally identifiable information in the comments. We’re not hall monitors, so if you choose to do so we won’t remove it, but remember that doing so opens you up to spam and worse.

Links

Please don’t simply drop a link in a comment and leave. While your link may direct our readers to insightful discourse that is absolutely relevant to the discussion, without context it’s useless. Please take a few moments to explain why your link is relevant. If you don’t not only will no one click your link, we may assume it’s spam and remove it.

Disagreements

Please do let us know if you disagree with our writers. Likewise, if you see a typo or if we’ve otherwise slipped up in some way we want to hear about it. However, please do this respectfully. It should go without saying that writers have feelings too…

Your Treatise on Subject B

Remember that you are writing a comment and not a blog post. Anything beyond 500 words probably belongs on your own blog. While we won’t remove your long-winded treatise, we probably won’t read it all the way through either.

Trolls, Free Speech and Hate

We understand that this is the Internet and you expect to be given free rein but this particular slice of the web is not your personal property. Any comment that we deem destructive will be removed. This includes but is not limited to libel, defamation, hate speech, excessively sexual content, excessive profanity and harassment. Passion is good. Anger is OK. Harassment is a no-no.

If you disagree with a removal you are welcome to let our community manager know.

Please give us a hand by flagging spam or destructive comments when you see them.

These guidelines aren’t comprehensive, because they don’t need to be. We don’t struggle with a burden of inane vitriol that you see elsewhere on the web. If need be in the future we’ll update these guidelines as necessary.

Candle photo by Christa Uymatiao

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