Commenting Guidelines
From Global Voices Wiki
[edit] Comment moderation on Global Voices
Commenters on Global Voices are asked to follow these guidelines:
- All comments are moderated. Do not submit your comment more than once or it may be identified as spam.
- Please treat others with respect. Comments containing hate speech, obscenity, and personal attacks will not be approved.
Comments on Global Voices are moderated by hand.
[edit] Commenting etiquette between authors
Posts on Global Voices are often about complex political subjects that invite commentary from a range of different perspectives. It's unlikely you'll be able to please everyone with everything you write. So if you get comments that upset you, the first thing to do is keep your cool.
[edit] Suggestions for dealing with trolls
Did you receive a nasty comment on a post you wrote? Unfortunately, not everyone on the internet is equally pleasant, and sometimes individuals will latch on to a blogger or group of bloggers and do everything they can to make them mad.
From Wikipedia:
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.
There is one piece of advice that anyone who has dealt with trolls tends to agree on: Don't feed them. Or in the words of a "Bloggers' Code of Conduct" proposed by Tim O'Reilly: "Ignore the trolls". Very little can be gained from engaging a troll in conversation because the primary intent of their commenting is to bother you. The more you try to win the argument, the worse it gets.
The best thing you can do is a) ignore, and b) discuss with your editor or managing editor what can be done to remove the persons comments.
