Unlike the Wild West of most of the Internet, we have a very strict comment policy. If you’re an asshole, you’ll be banned. Sorry, assholes!
Here are some important things to know when using the comment feature:
If your comment does not immediately appear on the site after posting, it may have been flagged for review. There are a number of things which will get your comment flagged:
- Use of any derogatory terms, curse words and slurs that are on our black list will get your comment flagged.
- Using a Disqus account without a verified email address will automatically flag a comment.
- Fluctuations in the space time continuum. Sometimes things just get auto-flagged and we don’t know why.
- Comments can also be flagged for review by our readership (please do not abuse this option for other users you simply disagree with, it makes our moderation jobs a lot harder and will get you banned).
Here are some things which will get your comment deleted.
- Personal attacks against another commenter or the writer of the post. We don’t take sides, it will just be deleted.
- Jokes or aggressive negative comments. This is a FRIENDLY environment!
- Hate speech or other clearly intentional jerk behavior. You want to judge somebody? Look in the mirror! Keep judgement off here.
Here are some things which will get your account banned.
- Engaging in any of the previously mentioned delete-worthy behaviors consistently and as part of a clear pattern OR presenting a particularly egregious example of one of those behaviors as a first comment (New to the site? Stopped by just to say something horrible? Go find a ditch to bury yourself in)
- Hate reading. Feel like just popping by to start a fight or be controversial? We don’t need you either. Feel free to keep hate reading, but you’ll not be able to hate comment any more.
- It is at the editors’ discretion to ban anyone whom they determine to be a detriment to the atmosphere of the comments section, the site in general, and our regular readers.
There will be some who look at these rules and think that the moderators of Ania’s Poison have too much power to shut down conversations. We have two responses to this.
First: It’s MY site, and I get to make the rules. We’re not taking away your freedom of speech by deleting/banning you. You can take your anger elsewhere, we don’t want it.
We try to treat our comment section like a series of dinner parties, where our job as hosts is to foster interesting, free discussion for all our guests, not just the loudest, most assertive, scariest ones. You can be a poor conversationalist, present a different viewpoint, or talk loudly and brashly. But if you threaten, annoy, derail, or in other ways spoil the atmosphere of discussion for others, we reserve the right to not invite you back next time. If that principle is too restrictive for you, there are many other sites out there that share our coverage and have more liberal commenting rules.
A note to our regular readers:
We love you! Ania’s Poison wouldn’t be what it is without your awesome support. As we mentioned above, flagging comments which violate our policy is a great help but please take this responsibility seriously. Flagging a user who isn’t really causing trouble but who you personally feel is just being obtuse is not a good use of this power. Also, engaging with users who are clearly trolls may be fun for some of you but causes us larger headaches (especially with overly large threads). Flag and move on.