Terms of Use / Comment Policy

Well hey, it’s come to this, writing policy, our comment policy…

It’s our sandbox. We reserve the right to moderate the comments made to this site according to our values, which include respecting diverse opinions and diverse backgrounds, as long as they are respectful of the writers and visitors of this site. You can disagree with someone and be civil.  We also reserve the right to close comments on a post at any time.

Getting to know you. The first time you comment here your comment will go into moderation, so please don’t repost. Once it has been approved your subsequent comments will appear right away as long as you use the same name and email address. Change your email or use a different name, you go back to moderation. If you leave an obviously bogus email address or hide behind a user-name that serves to bring attention to someone other than yourself, don’t expect to see your comment posted.

Stay focused, respectful, truthful. We will delete comments that are abusive, off-topic, use excessive foul language, include personal attacks or include intentionally misleading or false information. One voice of hate can drown out many voices of reason. Comments like these stifle discussion and those who come here for that reason will have their IP address, email address and name put into the moderation list. Continued abuse will result in blacklisting.  It’s a  given, that any racist or sexist comments will automatically be deleted.

Spam is absolutely not tolerated. We use Akismet spam filters and while they are generally excellent, occasionally they do catch legitimate comments as spam, especially if they contain multiple links. If you left a comment that has not appeared after more than a day it may have gone into the spam folder. Our apologies but we simply do not always have time to look through the many hundreds of spam comments we may get each day.

There are real live people behind the scenes here. We have lives, children, families and hot meals waiting for us, so we may not be right here, on the spot, all the time. If you left a comment and it has not been posted please be patient. We’ll get to it, there is no need to repost your comment again and again. The subsequent comments will only go into moderation also.

Simple enough! Join the discussion!