Comments Guidelines

All comments and thoughts are welcome and on occasion we will agree to disagree.

Readers are most welcome to debate. Reasonable and well thought out argument of a contrary opinion are encouraged as is rational disagreement and constructive interchange. However, commentors are expected to comply with our rules of engagement.

All comments are subject to moderation.

Basic etiquette

Please try to stay reasonably germane to the topic.

Please provide a genuine email address should we wish to get in touch regarding any aspect of this policy.

Pseudonyms are welcome so long as a good-faith attempt at maintaining consistency of identity is made. Posters who have registered gravatars [link: http://en.gravatar.com/] have an advantage in maintaining a consistent identity while using pseudonyms as they see fit.

Unacceptable

Any comment judged unacceptable may be deleted at the discretion of moderators. Unacceptable comments include but may not be limited to:

  • Imputing ideas or motives to others or stereotyping them because of perceived group membership or ideological affiliation.
  • Consistently repeated and aggressively stated opinions which fail to engage with others is regarded as a form of trolling.
  • Off-topic general remarks [i.e. denunciations of political parties, ideologies, politicians or members of any religious, social or community organisation].
  • Vexatious and purely abusive comments.
  • Excessively frequent comments, where the effect of such comments is to discourage the participation of others or turn a debate around into one about themselves.
  • Excessively long comments, which break up the give and take of discourse. Please post such screeds on your own blog and post a summary in comments with a link to your own post. Rule of thumb: think hard before adding a fourth paragraph to your comment – rewrite it for brevity and clarity.
  • Comments which are designed to derail threads.

While we realise that anyone can slip into an ill-judged remark at times, repeated unacceptable comments will be regarded as a form of trolling and summarily deleted.

Commenters may be limited to a certain number of comments within a specified time frame until they give evidence that their behaviour conforms to the site’s policies. Commenters may also be explicitly required to agree to abide by the comments policy.

Some Netiquette

Q. What is Netiquette

A: These are the mores which don’t fit particularly well into a Comments Policy but which nonetheless, when breached, get others’ backs up and make for an uncongenial atmosphere. The general idea is to make it as simple as possible for people to find discussions of interest and to avoid those discussions being thread-jacked by distractions from the substance of the post – Netiquette keeps blog-clutter under control.

Generally, if you’re already familiar with old skool Netiquette from the BB/USENet era, you should manage just fine here so long as you abide by the spirit and don’t try to undermine our local peculiarities via semantic quibbles.

Lurking (internet):

To read without commenting or contributing, therefore effectively invisible to the rest of the group or community. Generally recommended for joining any forum so that you can observe rules, attitudes and prominent personalities without jumping in and breaking a rule, making an ass of yourself, or asking a question about something obvious that you would have learned for yourself if you’d paid attention in the first place.

Online equivalent of attentive listening before speaking; potentially the solution to all Internet faux pas.

(Source: Urban Dictionary)

Those who fail to lurk before diving in will be expected to not whine when their faux pas are pointed out. Reading the About pages and Guidelines of a web forum/blog is an essential part of proper lurking, BTW.

Basically behave as if you are meeting a prospective very good first best friend’s grandparents for the first time and you will do ok. Also remember that age old maxim ‘don’t talk pooh with a plumber’

Legal Stuff

The opinions expressed in comments threads are entirely the responsibility of the various contributors. While Lyneham Community Association moderators will do everything within reason to ensure that comments are not defamatory, we accept no liability for the comment or the content of links included in them.

Responsibility for electoral comment  in posts is taken by Denis O’Brien, Lyneham ACT. Responsibility for electoral comments in the comments section are the responsibility of the author of the comment.

These guidelines are subject to amendment at any time without notice. We reserve the right to include new rules and/or guidelines as we see fit to cope with unexpected instances of offence or other socially unacceptable behaviour.