Stories:
We accept stories and comments from anyone, both attributed and anonymous. We are selective about which stories we publish, but liberal about comments.
Comments:
We may edit comments for clarity and brevity. We may also remove comments, remove links within comments, or unlink text within a comment.
Think of us as “harvesting” comments rather than merely publishing them. Remember that QuestionCopyright.org is primarily an advocacy site, not a discussion site. While we publish most comments, including those that point out relevant things we haven’t thought of, and those that present counterarguments that will help us improve our advocacy, we sometimes decline to publish comments that we feel simply do not contribute to the site’s mission.
Spam and semi-spam comments:
Like all web forums, we are faced with an increasing number of spam and semi-spam comments. The obvious spam is an easy call: we just delete it.
But semi-spam comments (including paid-link spam) are a trickier problem. With semi-spam, an actual human has read the article and left a comment, but the comment contains links that a) have nothing to do with the article’s topic, and b) are the primary motivation for the comment. That is, the comment is really a form of parasitic advertising.
Our strategy with semi-spam is to preserve the meaningful part of the comment, if any, and delete the rest, including the link. When we feel the comment contributes nothing, we just remove it entirely. We’re sorry to have to exercise such judgements, but the semi-spam phenomenon leaves us no other choice. Note that when we edit a comment, we may not bother to mark it as edited, as that would take too much time, and we have a lot of comments to deal with. Our philosophy is: anyone can get their own web site, but this one is ours.
Preservation:
We moderate as accurately as we can, but we still make mistakes sometimes and delete comments that we shouldn’t delete. If your comment is valuable to you, please save a copy yourself. We cannot take on the logistical burden of preserving copies of everything we delete. (Software improvements to Drupal, our content management system, would make it easier to remove copies from public view while still preserving them for archival purposes, but we don’t have the resources to implement that ourselves right now.)