As of Jan. 15, 2016, we started using Facebook for reader commenting. We will continue to monitor comments as they are posted on our site and keep an eye out for problematic comments that violate our policy outlined here. Commenters must follow Facebook Terms of Service and use their real names. Comments from fake accounts or accounts using pseudonyms will be deleted when we see them. Our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are here.
-Commenters are welcome to express opinions in a civil manner. Don’t type your comments in ALL CAPS.
-Be nice. Avoid personal attacks or name calling of any kind.
-Comments that include threats of violence against anyone, or inciting violence in any form, will be removed and forwarded to law enforcement.
-Comments should be directly related to the topic of the story. If you must criticize, your comments should be cogent to the topic of the story and should add something new to the discussion. If it’s obvious that you’re simply engaging in a pattern of mean-spirited, partisan attacks from one story to the next, we will stop approving your comments and ban you from the site. If we suspect that you are a paid commenter attempting to further a political agenda, your comments will be deleted and you will be banned.
-We will not publish allegations of criminal, unethical, or other extreme personal wrongdoing based on facts that haven’t been published in articles.
-Keep it clean. Avoid profane, obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist, or sexually-oriented language or your comments will be deleted. Discriminatory comments of any kind, or comments that hint in such a direction, will be deleted.
-Be truthful. Don’t knowingly lie about anyone or anything.
-Do not attempt to hijack a comment thread to link with ads for your personal business, or your political campaign, or invective aimed at a person or a group against whom you have a personal vendetta, or long rants about unrelated issues or crusade. We will delete them.
-Do not copy the contents of someone else’s work and attempt to publish it here – that is plagiarism. Write your own sentence summing up the other author’s point and link back to their original work.
-Be proactive. If we mistakenly approve a comment that is offensive, let us know and include a link to the comment in question.
-At the end of the day, we hope to promote a lively, productive community of reader commenters. Constructive criticism is welcome. But we also are not here to be your punching bag and we are not required in any way to publish your comment(s) on our website or our social media pages. We are not required in any way to publish your comment(s) on our website or our social media pages.
It takes considerable time to read and approve your comments, and that takes us away from the job of covering the news. If you are spending a lot of time commenting here or simply reading the site on a regular basis, consider supporting our work. As always, thank you for visiting with us!
And good grammar and punctuation go a long way toward proving your point or at least making a convincing argument.
