Introduction
Voxitatis moderates all comments on this site and schoolreporter.org, but occasionally, inappropriate comments may slip through. Please report these to us by selecting the flag on the comment or emailing paul@schoolsnapshots.org, including the URL of the page on which you saw the comment.
Barring any inappropriate comments (see the following information), we believe that maintaining an open and thriving commenting community is an important part of the work we do to promote positive reporting about our schools. Because people rely on this site, we must pay attention to what you have to say about our work and our schools to ensure that our reporting is truly serving your needs.
To keep our commenting sections welcoming, inclusive, and useful, we ask that you post according to our commenting guidelines and moderation policy.
Commenting guidelines
Who we want to hear from
We want to hear from anyone who has thoughts about the schools, communities, or topics in our coverage.
What we want to hear about
If you’re interested in helping our reporting benefit schools, share your opinions in our commenting sections. If you were hoping to find coverage of a school or topic you don’t see, suggest it. If you think we’ve made a mistake or ought to rethink something, tell us. If you just really love a certain school, team, student group, or topic and want to talk about it, knock yourself out. If you have a question about something we’ve written or something someone else has said, ask away.
Our expectations for our commenters
We expect you to approach conversations in good faith and your fellow commenters with goodwill and the benefit of the doubt. We ask that you extend these same considerations to our work and the writers responsible for it. We expect you to abide by the moderation policy laid out here and to be custodians of the community. If you suspect a comment violates the moderation policy, flag it, and we’ll review it. If you think someone has made a great point, recommend their comment and tell them so.
What you can expect from us
We promise to read every comment that comes in and to make a genuine effort to participate in as many conversations as we can. Although we can’t always reply, we promise to make sure your feedback and questions get seen by our writers and analysts. We promise to actively moderate our comments following the policy here to ensure that conversations are welcoming and helpful.
Moderation policy
Comments are actively moderated by our “community” team. We believe in transparency, and we will never remove comments solely for expressions of criticism or dissenting opinions. However, we do have some rules, the violation of which will result in the removal of your comments and/or the banning of your account to prevent future posting. These actions are taken at the discretion of the community team; when in doubt, the team will err on the side of maintaining the health and integrity of our commenting sections. If you think your comments have been removed in error or your account has been banned unfairly or mistakenly, please reach out to us using our contact form. Mistakes do happen—neither our spam filter nor our moderators are perfect.
These things will get your comments deleted and/or your account banned:
- Personal attacks
- Discriminatory language
- Inflammatory language
- Spam posts (including self-promotion, posting of affiliated or referral links, astroturfing, and PR pitches)
- Red flags: These things won’t necessarily get your comments deleted or your account banned, but they will put us on alert.
- Profanity in comments and usernames: We get it—profanity has its place in conversation. Don’t use it to attack, discriminate, or intimidate, and it’ll be just fine.
- Brand accounts: Brand accounts providing genuinely helpful responses to readers who are discussing the brand’s products are welcome. Brand accounts posting for promotion are not.
- Posting sprees: Posting 20 comments in an hour will have us checking to see if you might be a troll or spammer.
- Monopolizing conversation: If you’re replying to every comment in a given section with helpful info and a good attitude, carry on. If you’re stunting conversation and shutting down other perspectives, we’ll see you out.