Dear Friends and Readers:
Periodically I step into my role as publisher and clarify the agreement between Planet Waves, Inc. and our blog commenters. This is designed to create a clear working relationship and a sustainable environment on a very public Internet. Nearly a decade of experience moderating public forums has taught us how to avoid problems and encourage a reasonable degree of intellectual freedom.
Our commenters help make Planet Waves what it is, and we welcome your involvement and creative input.
Blog commenters work under similar editorial guidelines as Planet Waves staff. Many of those ideas are outlined in our Terms of Service.
If you are writing for these pages in any capacity, I encourage you to be confident in your facts, to check those facts before you make an assertion or challenge another commenter or contributor. Provide links or other references that support your points, so that you demonstrate that your opinions are grounded in fact. Play fair. I would suggest that a healthy guide is the more controversial a subject is, the more understated and thought-through the comments.
If we think anything posted to this page is potentially libelous, slanderous or misleading, we will place it in moderation while we contact you, or we may delete it without notice. Though we’ve covered court cases where the owners of websites were exonerated for the views of people who comment on blogs, we feel that what appears on our pages is our responsibility.
Our writers and editors (with extremely rare exceptions) are required to use their full legal names or previously established pen name, and we encourage commenters to do the same. While commenters may [at this time] post under a handle or nickname, we request that you use your actual name. We may inquire about your identity at any time; that is, we can ask you to prove who you are with positive identification, holding that information confidential.
We may request clarification of your written views by email, sent to your registered email address; we may also request phone contact to discuss a post in realtime. These are conditions of publishing your views on our website. You don’t have to respond to these queries, but at our discretion we may delete your identity and your posts if you do not, and ban your IP address from future registration.
Blog commenters may have one identity and post under one name. If we discover that you have two identities, we will attempt to contact you and if we don’t hear back, we will delete the identities and all associated posts and ban the member’s IP address. If you happen to have two identities at the moment, please send an email to info (at) planetwaves.net and let us know; we will help you resolve the situation.
We do not tolerate trolling. Trolling has two definitions — playing identity games, which I’ve covered; and intentionally provoking people. If any posts appear to be designed to annoy other readers or disrupt the conversation, we may place the commenter in moderation, place a post in moderation or delete the commenter’s identity, at our sole discretion.
Our webmaster is Anatoly Ryzhenko, who is in charge of security of all of our websites. Our business manager is Chelsea Bottinelli. Email correspondence from myself or either of them is official communication from Planet Waves, Inc.
Again, thanks for participating and for helping us maintain a sane community standard for an exchange of ideas.
Yours & truly,
