Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Comment Policy

Comments are closed. But, for the record …


The main thing to remember is that moderators are editors and it’s their job to make people’s words disappear before anyone else sees them.

The second thing to remember is that we don’t have the time or inclination to get into debates over our editing decisions. Nagging us about a comment that didn’t get approved is only going to make us even less likely to approve your future comments.

We keep three three lists of commenters.

  1. Trusted – you have to earn a place on this list by consistently submitting constructive comments. Once on it your comments appear immediately after submission.
  2. Potential Trouble – newly registered users go on this list at least for their first comment and if you are an ID-critic you’ll probably stay on it. Anyone from the trusted list who has gone astray also ends up here. People on this list must have all their comments approved by an editor before they show up on the blog.
  3. Repeat Offenders – this is the blacklist where spam goes. Once your name lands here it’s difficult to escape and your comments aren’t well scrutinized before getting flushed.

Spam Words – we get thousands of unsolicited advertisements trying to make their way into our comments. Online gambling, pharmaceuticals, diet plans, porn… you name it and we get it. To keep this out certain letter combinations in a comment automatically dump the comment into a moderation bin (2 or 3 above). Occasionally a trusted user will unknowingly use one of these and his comment won’t show up. Don’t have a cow. If you can’t figure out why your comment didn’t show up right away this was probably the reason. Three of the most common letter sequences to trigger this are “pill”, “diet”, and “porn”. It doesn’t have to be a separate word. “Pillow” will trip it because of “pill”. We don’t publish the words we watch for so that the spammers don’t know what to avoid.

Comment Integrity – Very rarely will anyone edit a comment. It either gets posted whole or flushed whole. On the rare occasions a moderator will edit one and add a note about what and why.

Theism and Atheism – We don’t discourage discussion of the implications ID or evolutionary theories have on religious or irreligious beliefs. We do discourage preaching/proselytizing for a particular faith or attacking one. This includes atheistic faith.

Stay On Topic – If you take off on a tangent unrelated to or only tenuously related to the topic it makes topical dialog in the commentary difficult for others. Off topic comments may be deleted if they appear to interrupt the flow of topical comments.

No swearing.

Try to be polite.

Try to be tolerant.

Try to keep belligerence and sarcasm in check.

No one is perfect. We’ll try to be forgiving.

Some other things to be aware of are in the links below.

Moderation Rules

Arguments Not To Use