We’d like our website to be a place where people ask questions, enter into discussion, make comments– “engage,” in fact. To encourage this, we’ve enabled commenting, we put question forms on many pages, and we hope you will take the time to add feedback and opinions to posts and articles you read.
In our “Content Guidelines” we let you know what kind of communication you can expect from us on this website. In this policy, we let you know what we expect from people engaging on the site, and our commitment to treating engagement with respect, for the benefit of all site users.
“Registering” vs. “Subscribing”
We may ask you to “register” as a site user to contribute guest content. We collect a bare minimum of information, and our Website Privacy Policy describes how we treat that information. We do not send mass emails to users except on rare occasions (we let people know when we moved the site to a new platform and reset passwords, for instance.)
You may “subscribe” to the site to receive an automatic email notification when we add new posts or articles to the site. This is a WordPress function, we collect no information on subscribers and will never send email or otherwise use subscriber information, and we trust that WordPress won’t, either. So far they’re pretty trustworthy.
Moderating Comments
You don’t have to agree with us or like what we’re saying. If you have a different experience or belief, please share it! We do try to address comments that ask a question or call for a response, though we don’t always have the capacity to respond to every comment. If a comment thread becomes a discussion, and people disagree with each other, that’s fine, too.
We will, however, apply Major Mod Skillz (MMS) to any comment that is clearly off-topic, spammy, or that strays into the realm of abuse, bigotry, intentional disruption, or outright trollery. This also includes comments from bots or other commercial sites adding a few words to the page just to get a link to their site on the page. In other words, we reserve the right to remove or edit such comments.
We use a pretty effective spam filter, but no filter is 100%, so we do moderate. We currently have the moderate function set to route the first comment you make to the moderation queue. We keep our eye on that queue and approve it as quickly as possible, but we’re in North American time zones and we expect to get a night’s sleep now and then, so please be patient. Once you’ve had your first comment approved we take you on trust. If we feel someone’s abusing that, we’ll add them to the “moderate” list.
One final word: This is a low-traffic site. We’re relatively small, with relatively few (but excellent!) users. Higher levels of traffic may require that we change elements of this policy, so check back occasionally. It may change, but our commitment to engagement never will. It’s one of the reasons we’re here.