Comments policy
Comments Policy
Please read this before posting (or at least, the five points in bold)
UKPollingReport has a comments policy aimed at encouraging non-partisan discussion between supporters of all parties and none without it descending into political bickering. In the majority of political blogs, comments are either dominated by supporters of one party, or are a pit of unpleasant political point scoring, bickering and one-up-man-ship.
My aim is to avoid that, but it comes at the price of a strict comment policy. UKPollingReport is NOT for party-political partisanship. That means no political point scoring, no posts intended at purely pointing out bad things that the government or opposition has done, no use of partisan nicknames for politicans (the former Prime Minister, for example, is not Bliar), no attempting to start (or continuing) political debates, no crude spinning of polling figures to make the party you support look good.
The purpose of UKPollingReport is to discuss polling and public opinion, so discussing whether a government policy is popular (hopefully with reference to polling) is always on topic... whether the policy is actually any good is not, and the two things are certainly not the same.
Keep to these principles and you should be fine:
* Posts should be in the SPIRIT of non-partisanship. You should not be flying the flag for your team, nor come here just to pick apart posts of people who support other parties, you should look at discussion here as being between people with a shared interest in politics and polling, not a battle against the other side. This is the most important rule - everyone slips into partisanship on occassion - what matters to be if you are genuinely attempting to post in the spirit of the site, or playing lip service to the rules.
* UKPR is a venue to talk ABOUT politics, not a venue FOR politics
* It takes two to have a partisan argument. If you see a partisan comment from the "other side", do not respond, do not rebut it. It takes two sides for a discussion to descend into partisan silliness, and I regard responding to be as bad as starting it (worse, if you are a longtime poster who should know better)
* See it from the other side's point of view. It's not whether you think its partisan... would someone who supported a different party from you read your comment and see it as non-partisan?
* Don't argue with the ref. Not least, I won't respond so it's largely a waste of your time.
I try to be relatively lax on moderation where possible and trust regular comments to moderate themselves, in the hope that newcomers will be socialised into the type of conversation we have here. I am not here all the time - on busy days I may only pop in once or twice to check the threads. Therefore do not conclude that because a comment is there I approve of it, and if you see a comment from someone else that oversteps the mark the best thing to do is to ignore it - an argument about whether it is partisan or not is rarely edifying. The exception is brand new commenters, who may not understand the rules here and where a polite welcoming explanation from an old hand is often useful!
There is automatic moderation of comments that have links in, and that contain certain words that characterise spam or partisan rants. If your comment goes into comment moderation immediately, it probably hit one of those triggers, so either take out links or words you think might have triggered it (swear words and things like viagra or casino are common offenders), or just be patient.
If I moderate a comment manually, then don't whine, consider how it could have been wording in a less partisan way, or whether it was appropriate for the site at all. Bear in mind that I will jump in early if an discussion is spiralling towards a partisan argument, and will sometimes have to take out nice sensible comments along with ranty bonkers ones (often if I take away one comment I will delete those responding to it, even if they did so in a sensible way, so that the thread makes sense). If you feel hard done by, then before ranting please consider that you never see the comments from other people that I moderate - I treat others the same, it's just that you never get to see their blocked comments.
If people persistently break the comments policy, or for whatever reason I cannot trust them to moderate themselves, I will but them on automatic pre-moderation (colliquially known as the "naughty step") until I am convinced that they can be trusted to post within the spirit of this policy - that may be a matter of hours, or even months. If people come off the naughty step and reoffend, I am not sympathetic. If people on the naughty step persist in posting comments that still don't obey the rules, then eventually I will permanently ban them.
