Brand spanking new comment policy!

This has been a long time coming, but we’re happy to finally present a new and updated comment policy. Our comment sections have been an integral part of this site for many years now, but moderating the discussions have been a challenge for all of us, to say the least. To that end, we’ve developed a few new strategies (tech and otherwise) to help deal with comments. They’re reflected below.
We appreciate everyone in the Feministing community who has contributed to our comment sections, has helped us keep comment threads in check and report abuse by commenters. We also appreciate the feedback we’ve gotten on how to make our comment sections better.
In the coming months you’ll be seeing more changes at Feministing, all in response to community feedback. We’re starting to introduce some new voices this summer (like Lori!) and there will be more in the near future. We’re also preparing to do a site redesign with the money we raised at our 5th anniversary bash, so more details to come with that.
The full revised policy is after the jump!

Comment Policy
(Revised June 2009)
We view Feministing as a platform for not only discussion among feminists and allies, but for reaching (open, not hateful) people who may not agree with every word we write. Comment threads are a big part of what facilitates this dialogue.
Comment moderation has been one of the most difficult parts of running this site. We moderate comments because we want to leave space for dialogue and questions, but also want to prevent the comment threads from getting derailed or offending anyone is a difficult line to walk. We’re not sure there can be such a thing as a safe space on a blog with thousands of readers, but we do want our common conversations to be as productive and useful as possible.
We appreciate all the feedback we’ve gotten from our community about how we can better moderate comments. To that end, here are some strategies/guidelines we’ve developed:
-What isn’t allowed. Comments that contain personal attacks, hate speech or offensive language will be deleted. Victim blaming is never allowed. Commenters who derail threads (i.e. choose not to discuss the subject of the original post) will be warned and possibly deleted if the derailing continues. As editors, we use our discretion in determining which comments meet the criteria for deletion.
-“Report abuse” button. You all can help us to moderate comments and keep threads in check. You can “like” comments that you support, and you can also flag comments you think violate our policy. Just click the report abuse button on the bottom right hand side of the comment and we’ll take a look at it. You can also help us to de-escalate a tense situation in comments by choosing not to respond to a commenter who is derailing a thread or trolling.
-Three options for comments on each post. Because some topics we write about are more contentious than others, and because we are not always able to moderate as attentively as we would like, we realized we needed different tech solutions for different threads. We’ve come up with three ways a post author can set comments on their post, and it’s up to the author’s discretion which method works for them and that conversation.
1) Open comments: Just like now, the comments go up as written and are moderated in the thread. We expect the majority of our posts will continue to be moderated this way.
2) Moderated comments: On these posts, the comments will only go up as they are approved by the author. This slows down conversation and allows us to make sure all comments are within our policy.
3) Closed comments: These are posts with no comments allowed. This option will be used in rare circumstances.
-Comments on the Community Blog. The editors don’t have the capacity to moderate community blog comments as heavily as comments on the front page. We will do our best to keep an eye on them, but please use the report abuse button when possible to alert us to comment policy violations. We also recommend that community bloggers actively monitor and participate in comments on the posts they write.
-Comment thread duration. Threads will be heavily moderated the first day they are posted. After 24 hours, they will still be watched, but not as closely and community members should keep that in mind when participating. (This is where that report abuse button comes in really handy!) Comments on every post will be closed after seven days. We have thousands of posts on Feministing and the Community blog, and we simply don’t have the capacity to moderate threads forever.

We’ll also be adding a short reminder of our comment policy to appear in the space above the comment thread on each post–keep an eye out for that in the next few weeks.

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