Comments are very welcome on this blog.  They can provide useful insights, knowledge and debate that add to the experience of everyone using the Severe climber.  However, to ensure that this blog is an informative, interesting and welcoming place for people, everyone has to behave respectfully and responsibly.  This comment policy sets out the ground rules that I ask people to follow if posting comments to this blog and sets out what they can expect from me in terms of moderating comments.

Respect

It is important that comments are respectful both to the people using the Severe climber and to the rest of society.  Please comment politely and respectfully so as to facilitate constructive discussion.  Comments containing the following things are not allowed and comments with these things will be deleted at the earliest available opportunity.

• Racist or bigoted speech or language
• Sexually explicit content
• Promotion of violent or criminal acts
• Unlicensed copyrighted material
• Threats, harassment or violations of personal privacy
• Personal attacks or potentially libellous content

Comment forms

Comment forms (AKA replies) must be filled in with legitimate information.  Comments that contain keywords, spam or suspicious information will be edited or deleted.

On-topic and off-topic

Comments must be relevant to the post on which the comment is made and add to the conversation in which they are participating.  I understand that discussions can wander slightly or occasionally go off on tangents and this is fine.  However, comments which are notably off-topic, go off on an inappropriate tangent or kill a conversation are not welcome.  Such comments may be edited or deleted.

Privacy

The comment form does ask for you to supply an email address and name when making a reply to a post.  However, this is optional and the email address is not displayed onscreen (it’s just to enable you to continue the conversation about a post).  I would ask that you do not put email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers and any other private or personal information in the body of any comment in order to protect your own privacy.  If you put this information in the body of a comment, then the comment may be edited or deleted.  To prevent such editing, please do not share such personal information in your comments.

How the Severe climber will respond

I will only respond to comments through a direct comment on this blog.  Please do not ask me to respond privately in any other form as I would prefer not to do so.

Links

I welcome relevant links being put in comments as they can direct people to useful information.  However, irrelevant links or suspected spam will be edited or deleted.

Interpretation

I have a responsibility to the people who view this site to moderate it appropriately and will try to do so.  I therefore have to be the person who makes final judgements about how comments are moderated.

Review

I welcome any ideas about how this policy can be improved and promise to listen to and consider all constructive suggestions.  However, any decision to change the policy rests with me and is final.

Thanks to The Blog Herald and Blogging for Dummies by Susannah Gardner and Shane Birley (4th edition) for some useful insights into creating a blog comment policy and for providing much of the basis for how this policy has been written.