Dear Commenters, We Need To Talk…Again [Community]

We\’ve pointed out how the commenting system and those crazy tagpages work, but it surely seems that it\’s time for one more type of discussion. Apparently time to discuss trolls, jerks, doo-doo heads, lousy commenters, the banhammer, and the AUTOBAN.

Just as a writer, editor, or comment administrator can approve your commenter account, he or she will be able to ban it. Which means that your previous comments will remain on the location, but you\’ll be unable to make any new ones. We rarely re-approve banned commenters, so once you feel that you simply\’ve learned whatever lesson there was to profit, you\’d ought to join a new account and battle through the audition process again.

Sometimes we\’ll give warnings before we ban-within the style of a reply on your comment, an unstarring, or a disemvoweling-and other times we won\’t. It is dependent upon the placement. Often it\’s not even a single comment that leads to a ban, but rather a pattern inside the commenter\’s history. Each ban, disemvoweling, unstarring, or warning is treated on a case-by-case basis, but listed here are some frequent causes for such actions to be taken:

Personal Attacks

It\’s quite okay to disagree with a post, content, or opinion-but there\’s no reason to make it personal and leave someone crying himself to sleep at night. Nobody\’s asking you to jot down responses that begin with \” dear sir, I urge your pardon, but my thoughts differ from yours,\” but there\’s also no use to write down things like \” you f-ing idiot, you\’re wrong.\”

Professing Your Love and Lust

It\’s fine once you profess your love and lust for gadgets, but please refrain from hitting on writers and editors. It gets uncomfortable to read about what you have to do to our sexy little bodies or about what you believe we do to inanimate objects in our private time. The line between flattering, creepy, and downright scary is commonly far too thin.

Off-Topic Discussion

We offer tagpages and an open forum called #whitenoise so that there\’s room for silly off-topic talk, so please try and keep comments on posts relevant to the content of the post.

Annoying the Hell Out of Everyone

Will it blend? Does it run Crysis? It\’s not a gigantic deal. Sent from my iDevice. I, for one welcome [some kind of] overlords. In Soviet Russia the commenters ban YOU. Step 1: Comment. Step 2: Get Banned. Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit! Yo dawg, I hear you prefer the banhammer. First post! LOL! LMAO!

Those trite and tacky expressions, phrases, memes, and similar ones aren\’t as funny as you would think they’re. In addition they put you prone to a banning-especially in case your comment doesn\’t encompass the rest.

Trolling

There are some people who get a kick out of baiting angry responses by writing some utter nonsense or playing the devil\’s advocate to an extreme. Sometimes it\’s unintentional and innocent, but we\’ll toss you out if we notice that it\’s a pattern.

Whining About Content

Not everything we post will likely be of interest to you or perhaps sometimes there\’ll be too much of a respectable or bad thing. It happens and your first instinct probably to whine or rant about it-please don\’t! You might have other options.

Instead of shouting about what you don\’t like, you will suggest what you do like and need to read more about in our #tips box. You may also clear out content that you simply don\’t like using our tag system and creating a custom page along the lines of http:gizmodo.com/tag/not:annoyingcontent/not:moreannoyingcontent (with \’annoying content\” and \” moreannoyingcontent\” being replaced by whichever tags you don\’t like-you have to be in a position to stack as many tags as you’d like.)

Obnoxious Corrections

We\’re human-most of us a minimum of-and we make mistakes. Sometimes they\’re grammatical, sometimes structural, sometimes we will be able to\’t spell worth a damn, and occasionally we are able to\’t do math. It\’s okay to call us out on that using the #corrections tag, however it\’s not alright to be obnoxious and insult our education or our mothers while doing so.

The AUTOBAN List

The above no-nos are subject to interpretation, but these following few aren\’t. This stuff will get you banned automatically-no warning necessary:

Commenting to simply say \” First!\”
Comments with little more than LOL, LMAO, THIS, tl;dr, or equivalent
Repeated or multiple comments with nothing but an image
\” Slow news day?\” or equivalent
Graphic or disgusting images
Spam or malicious links
Revealing personal information (which include addresses, phone numbers, etc) of others

Questions? Comments? Concerns?

I\’m certain I\’ve ignored some reasons for banhammer use, but those are many of the key issues. In case you\’re left with questions, i’ll have answers in the event you ask politely.

Update: Whoops! Don\’t panic! I ignored a couple of keywords in regards to the image-only comment autoban clause. It\’s applied when someone repeatedly posts nothing but an image or does it several times in a row. Mea culpa.

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This post is tagged: commenters, need, Talk...Again, [Community]