Voxeo Talks

What do you think of our new “Comment Policy” for our blog site?

When we launched the site a few months ago, we didn’t put up a “comment policy”, largely because I’ve been blogging for now almost 8 years and have never had such a policy on any of my blogs (although I’m going to be adding one to my other blogs now). It simply didn’t occur to me to do so. However, some of the recent comments we’ve received have made us concerned that we don’t have a policy in place. We’re all for “free speech” and we want strong opinions to be voiced, but we also want to keep our corporate blog portal “work safe” and “family friendly” (i.e. we want people to be able to browse our site when they might be at home with a young kid looking over their shoulder) and encourage an atmosphere of civil discussion.

Obviously, this site is ours and we can realistically do whatever we want to do with it, including deleting/censoring comments we don’t like. But that’s not the spirit of the blogosphere and certainly goes against our interest in having open and honest dialogue. Bring on the negative comments… we’re glad to hear them. (We definitely like the positive comments, too!) Our intent is to continue publishing any and all non-spam comments we receive… but we also want some guidelines in place so that if we do some day feel the need to delete or censor a blog comment, we have a publicly stated rationale for why we are doing so. We may never choose to do this, but then again we may have someone leave a comment that we feel goes too far over one of the lines we’ve stated.

So I’ve put together our first “Comment Policy” and would love to hear any comments about it. We’re definitely open to feedback. Is it reasonable? Are there things there you think we should delete? Are there things that we should add?

FYI, in creating this comment policy, these were some of the resources I looked at:

• “Does Your Blog Have a Comments Policy?”

• “The Legal Issues with Comments”
• The Blog Herald’s Comment Policy
• EFF’s “Legal Guide for Bloggers”
• Cisco Blog Site Legal Disclaimer
• Microsoft’s “Rules of Conduct” (more than just about blogs)
• Neville Hobson’s “Terms of Use”

Comments are very definitely welcome. (If you know of blog comment policies out there that you particularly liked, those would be welcome as well.)

Technorati Tags: blogging, voxeo, comment policies, comment policy, comments

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Tags: Blogs, comments, policy