The Aristophrenium

Comments Policies

(Updated: 10/Jun/2010)

The staff at the Aristophrenium encourage and welcome your comments on the items that we publish. However, there are some policies which visitors should bear in mind when considering leaving comments:

Moderation:

• Comments submitted at the Aristophrenium are, by default, initially held for moderation—not for point of view but for quality. If we receive a comment that’s littered with gratuitous invective and lacking any substantive point of view, it will not be published. Civility is not a requirement but some effort at an actual argument certainly is.
• Moreover, comments that contain abusive or idiomatic profanity will be edited to remove such words.
• Visitors may also request an edit be made (e.g., to correct a grammatical error) or to have a comment removed (e.g., they regret posting it) by contacting the staff. With regard to the latter, whether the comment gets removed is by the sole discretion of the Aristostaff.
• Any edits performed on comments will usually contain a note from a member of the Aristostaff stating the reason(s). Visitors can easily verify the intellectual honesty of our moderation practices by saving a local copy of their comments and comparing it against the approved version that gets published to see that it is essentially identical.

External Links:

• External links are permitted in comments, but they must be directly relevant to your comment or the article to which you are responding. Moreover, such links must accompany some effort at an argument on your part; simply providing a link to argue a point for you will not get approved. When comments are held for moderation, any links contained therein are likewise reviewed.
• Also, your comment will not be approved if it contains little more than a link to a blog or message board where you have published a critical response. That sort of thing contradicts the interactive nature of this web site in the first place. If you truly understand your own position and have an intelligible rebuttal against ours, you will be able to make your case succinctly in the Comments fields we provide here.
• With regard to spam: don’t bother. It will not survive our site’s spam filters, and the Aristostaff will not even see it.