New 10 Point Blog Comment Policy
Blogging friends and blog commentors: I need your help with a new blog comment policy that I put a great deal of thought into… before we make it live, here it is for you to give us your agreement, disagreement or any additional thoughts on it:
The EzineArticles.com Blog Comment Policy:
We warmly welcome and invite you to be an active participant in the blog discussion threads!
In order to have some civility and order to the blog discussion, here are some guidelines that we use to moderate the discussion:
1) Make sure your comment ADDS VALUE to the discussion, is relevant and will most likely be meaningful to the majority of readers.
2) Be kind. Personal attacks (direct and passive aggressive) and flame wars will not be tolerated. We are a professional business forum and expect everyone who participates to keep a “cool head” when the passion of a discussion becomes heated. We will not allow comments that constitute a racial or sexual slur against any person or group of persons.
3) You get to list your NAME and (1) WEBSITE URL with each post and our blog software will automatically remember this information each time you post. Your website URL will be linked up to your NAME, as is for standard blog comment etiquette…and therefore, we will NOT ALLOW SIG LINES below your comments. They will be removed if you add them. We consider adding SIG lines with URL’s as ‘double dipping’ because you already received an active link to your name in each comment.
4) You may not copy and paste private emails you received from someone else in your blog comments. This is bad form and not tolerated.
5) Remember that your blog comments are not editable after you make them…so don’t say anything you wouldn’t mind knowing will be online for a very long time.
6) Trolls need not comment as they will be deleted. A troll is someone who posts garbage to bait a discussion or they only are interested in promoting their website or their clients website. Also known as “comment spammers”.
7) Keep your language relatively clean. Our anti-comment spam software may not even accept your comment if you swear in it.
8) This business blog discussion is not a democracy or freedom of speech blog. It is our intention to keep the focus and tone on a positive upbeat manor that encourages learning, discussion, debate and knowledge sharing. We reserve the right to delete comments for any reason at any time and to do so without explanation. We may delete comments which attack us, attack our authors or publishers or members, attack our friends, colleagues, heroes or admirers.
9) New commentors are moderated for their first post and then will be allowed to automatically post without initial moderation; but given enough time, all comments are reviewed by one of our blog moderators to ensure quality and relevancy in the discussion.
10) By submitting your comments to the EzineArticles.com Blog, you grant EzineArticles.com permission to republish this comment without restriction, notification or compensation. You also acknowledge that you alone are fully responsible for each comment you make including inaccuracies or potentially libelous statements. You agree to not disclose proprietary or confidential information.
CHANGE: NOFOLLOW ATTRIBUTE REMOVED
Also, we made a positive change today that will impact all commentors positively: We removed the NO FOLLOW attribute from your website URL when you leave a comment. This will allow search engines to spider your website when they approach your URL on our blog. Don’t know if we’ll make this change permanent or not, but for now… we wanted to remove the NOFOLLOW attribute to deliver more potential link love value to our commentors.
Ok, what did you think of the above comment policy? What did we forget to include? Anything we should change or remove?
Chris,
I read number one and went “oh no”. It’s really a judgment on someone’s part as to whether or not my comment “adds value”, and whether or not it will be perceived as “meaningful” by your other members.
You have a few members who will sometimes posts one sentence..is it of “value”? Well I crack up sometimes. It’s of value to me ;)
I think the remaineder of your guidelines are great and leave no room for “oops I didn’t know that”.
Audrey :)
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