Updated Comments Policy

UPDATE: One of our original changes included turning off guest commenting to make it easier to enforce our comments policy. Unfortunately this had the unintended side effect of virtually banning several or our commenters who are uncomfortable with creating Disqus accounts. So we did some googling and came to believe that we can still attempt to enforce the policies while allowing guest commenting. Given that, we’ve reinstating guest commenting abilities on our blog.

We’ve updated our comments policy to be more clear about what is and is not okay in comments on our blog. Because of the update above, there is only one change, which is an extended section on what is and isn’t allowed:

The goal of the comments section on this blog is simply and unambiguously to promote productive dialogue. But there is a major obstacle to that goal: the internet is a terrible place for dialogue. People are much more inclined to be poor at dialogue and impossible to reason with on the internet. Our solution is to ruthlessly and without warning ban anyone that is engaging in poor dialogue activity (as outlined below) for the good of all. The result of this is that some people we ban will not appreciate or agree with it. That is unavoidable. Some of these calls will be a simple matter of our discretion. If you want to debate people in a free-for-all environment where you can say anything you want, go to almost any other part of the internet. If you want to dialogue respectfully, charitably, and reasonably, we hope you’ll find this to be a helpful place to seek truth with us. Examples of bannable bad dialogue activity include (but is not limited to): being snarky, disrespectful, off-topic, libelous, flagrantly uncharitable, defamatory, abusive, harassing, threatening, profane, pornographic, offensive, false, misleading, or which otherwise violates or encourages others to violate my sense of decorum and civility or any law, including intellectual property laws; or (d) “spam,” i.e., an attempt to advertise, solicit, or otherwise promote goods and services. You may, however, post a link to your site or your most recent blog post.