Comment Policy

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.

Comments

[Amarilla]

101.

@ Candy : " the more laws, the less justice ".

[Erik Bethke]

102.

Profoky was banned?

Oh thank you - her drivel killed my TN buzz so hard I wandered off for at least 6 months.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

103.

An old lesson I've learned in commenting on blogs or forums where the rules are unclear and freedom of expression can be at stake (but you might not notice it until it's too late) is that form is as important as content, and that tools like irony, sarcasm, or humour are as efficient to drive a point home than, well, blunt speech.

This was a hard lesson learned in my country during half a century of a right-wing authoritarian benevolent dictatorship. Never in the 20th century were authors and artists so creative with their speech as during the days of censorship. A commonly spread urban legend is that the dictator himself — absolutel void of humour — used to chuckle at books he read where the amount of creativity to escape censorship was so amusing that even he could not avoid to laugh at them. Whole new art forms were created in those days.

Alas, when democracy finally came, literary production declined dramatically.

Caveat lector: the above paragraphs, while containing less than 200 words, are crammed full of sarcasm

[Endie]

104.

The only offensive thing about the massive wall-of-text posts (and the horrendously long, thread-killing ones only really come from one person) is that they appear in toto. If there was a jump-cut/expandable link after the first 350-ish words (click here to read more) then that would be enough. You could use the (deprecated) PROK tag.