Since its inception in 2003, Terra Nova has been about promoting intelligent and sustained conversations among the community of virtual world researchers and creators. While those who manage the blog sometimes delete obvious spam and ban associated IP addresses, our practice has been to let individual authors control the moderation of comments on their own threads. However, some of the authors and commenters on Terra Nova have been concerned lately about the tone and substance of some of the comments posted here. The problem is not serious at this point, but it has prompted discussion. Given this, we thought it would be helpful to establish our basic expectations about the comments field.
1. We expect and hope that those who post comments on the blog will do their best to encourage others to participate in discussions that are civil, good natured, and respectful of the feelings and sensibilities of others. This means that we do not want to read personal attacks, insults, aggressive comment-fisking, profanity, and sarcastic sniping. All of these are forms of speaking that tend to scare off and offend certain readers while at the same time derailing the conversation intended by the original post author. We make a serious attempt at creating sustained conversations, and have a much higher expectation for civility than exists in many other online forums (e.g. political blogs and Slashdot).
2. As one dimension of civility, we expect commenters to give others authors and readers a chance to speak and to listen carefully to what others say. As long as this principle is followed, there are no word limits on posts.
These expectations apply especially to those who participate here regularly. Naturally we expect our authors to adhere to these guidelines as well.
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