Community Guidelines

• Anyone can read our conversations, but to contribute, you must be a registered user of our site/app.
• Debate is encouraged, but personal attacks against other users or journalists will not be allowed. Repeat offenders may have their accounts banned.
• We want to hear your opinion; copy/pasting quotes from other sources longer than four lines may be disabled.
• SHOUTING is not allowed.
• Any content that is offensive, especially attacks on characteristics including sex, race, sexual orientation, disability or religion, will be disabled. This includes the use of alternative spelling, asterisks or spaces between words to try to get your comment past our algorithm. Repeat offenders may have their accounts banned.
• All posts should be relevant to the topic in the article. Off-topic posts may be disabled.
• Comments that are compliant with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines will typically be visible immediately, though may take longer on sensitive stories. After you post a comment, you have five minutes to edit or delete it.
• Users must not post any personal information such as email addresses or phone numbers. Public emails and phone numbers, such as for government institutions, are allowed.
• Users may flag any comment they deem inappropriate, and a moderator will review it. Users who abuse the flag function may have their accounts banned.
• Feel free to link internally to articles on our websites. External links are limited to three per post. We reserve the right to disable any external links.
• If you have any issues or questions related to moderation, please email us directly. Complaints about moderation in the comment section will be disabled.
• Users may not post comments that violate or infringe upon copyright, trademark or patent rights, invade privacy rights or defame others or otherwise violate any applicable law or regulation. We reserve the right to disable any such comments. .
• We reserve the right to close comments at any time and without notice. If/when we close comments, we will include an editor’s note to the article.
• The following content is prohibited and, if posted, will immediately result in a permanent ban:

o   Pornography, obscenity or indecent content.

o   Promotion of illegal acts, products or services.

o   Threats of violence or violent content.

o   Hate speech.

o   Posting any personal information about another user.

o   Commercial spam, deceptive trade practices or scams.

o   Harassment or cyberbullying.

We reserve the right to change these guidelines at any time in our sole discretion.

These Community Guidelines supplement our User Content requirements, which also apply to use of this commenting platform.

Please see our Terms of Service for more information about this and use of our site/app. Please also see our Privacy Policy for information about how we handle data.

Decisions about whether content or conduct is in keeping with our Community Guidelines are made in our sole discretion.