About participating in our comment area discussion

Planet Waves offers an unmoderated discussion area associated with all of our postings. Participants can post freely, though there are a few guidelines that we follow to maintain a trustworthy space — two in particular: self-moderation, and your responsibility to our editors and our community.

The purpose of Planet Waves is to provide a forum for news and opinions about issues influencing all of us, as well as a creative forum for writers, artists, photographers and musicians. Planet Waves, Inc. functions as a news organization, incorporated and recognized as such. I am an accredited investigative reporter and photojournliast and have been an editor since age 14 (read more here). Therefore we set our standards high and ask you to cooperate with that.

We’re interested in your responses to what you read here. It’s extremely rare that any blog has an unmoderated discussion. I believe that as much as possible, an open conversation is a better one. Yet in order to remain relevant to the thousands of visitors a day, that takes some discipline. As the editor of Planet Waves there are times when I choose to intervene, though this does not happen often.

Partly this is a matter of how much in editorial resources we can devote to monitoring the discussion. Remember that the blog you’re reading is the ‘free’ side of a subscriber website. Our small staff is busy with this content stream you read here on what we call pw2 — our blog — and also producing premium content daily, taking care of the clients whose business pays for all of Planet Waves. We are one of the few daily websites or subscriber services that actually answers the telephone when you call.

“What you’re trying to do is be inclusive without being too much of an authoritarian while holding down your writing fort,” is how Fe Bongolan, one of our columnists, described my role. She is correct. Planet Waves is not a democracy. It’s a very progressive monarchy, where you are a guest of the court. Meanwhile, I must attend to my considerable amount of writing and audio, help organize the business and be available to many people.

Let’s go over those two points — self-moderation and your responsibility as a comment contributor to our editors and our community.

Self-moderation means that you help keep the conversation on-topic. I suggest that you focus your comments on the subject that each respective post includes. This can include your personal response and your personal opinion, though I suggest that you maintain a guideline of factual grounding.

Remember that you’re writing for an audience that exceeds 100,000 visitors a month (occasionally, as many as 10,000 readers in a day) and is rapidly growing. When you write, please consider the relevance of what you’re saying to everyone who is reading.

It’s impolite to dominate the discussion, and it discourages new commenters from participating.

While Planet Waves seems to serve as a kind of therapy space (and as Fe describes it, a psychic bomb shelter when extremely heavy news hits the airwaves), please ask yourself the ways in which any writing about yourself that you offer is relevant to a diverse worldwide audience. It may be very relevant — though I suggest you consider that consciously.

Second is your responsibility to our editors and the larger community. While commenting does not make you a staff member or an accredited journalist, you may post on the condition that your posts are truthful, written in good faith and are respectful of our reading audience. When a Planet Waves editor contacts you, I expect you to be as responsive and as courteous as I would expect any writer to be to their editor.

If you are going to critique writing on Planet Waves, by which I mean challenge its point of view, our guideline is that you must quote the article or post that you are writing about, providing a link back to the original document.

We reserve the right to inquire who you are as a condition of continuing participation in our comment area. Though I discourage it strongly, you may post under an alias — though if one of our editors inquires as to who you are, your continued participation depends on having that discussion honestly. This request will come in the form of an email requesting voice contact. The discussion, and your identity, are confidential within our offices.

In the interest of mitigating trolling, anyone found to be using more than one identity to post will be contacted and is subject to having their accounts deleted. This has served to keep trolling to an absolute minimum, and is the same policy used by Wikipedia.

Remember that you are legally responsible for what you post. All comment posts become the property of Planet Waves, Inc. Though we rarely do so, we reserve the right to delete any post at any time, with or without cause. One last thing: we do not use a content filter, however, our spam filter will catch any post containing two URLs and some posts containing one URL. If you post something and it does not appear, please write to anatoly@planetwaves.net and ask if it got caught in spam.

Planet Waves is a privately owned organization that extends vast resources to the public for free, including this discussion space. We ask that you respect the many factors that we must keep in balance every day as we develop our mission. The infrastructure and maintenance of this blog is a substantial investment of resources, energy and love, and we offer more content to non-subscribers than most websites offer at the top-tier of premium membership.

We are 100% subscriber and customer supported. We present all of our content without the intrusion of commercial advertising. If you’re a subscriber or product customer — thank you for your investment in our publishing adventure, and for taking advantage of the best work that we do. If you’re regular reader of this space and can afford to do so, please subscribe.

Thanks for your participation in our experiment.

Sincerely,