Every public forum has to consider the bounds in which discourse is to take place. At Telic Thoughts, we've chosen a form that will hopefully live up to our vision of "a pleasant and fruitful atmosphere." Inspired by the good folks at The Panda's Thumb, who have a similar system, we're introducing The Memory Hole, into which comments, that we, for one reason or another, find inappropriate, will be dumped. Although its name comes from George Orwell's novel 1984, in which The Party used the memory holes to destroy unwanted documents, a comment in our Memory Hole will still be accessible to anyone caring to wade through the piles.

As the crew of this blog, it is entirely our call what gets moved. If you don't like it, that's just too bad; you're free to find another forum with a comment policy more to your liking. That said, here's some guidelines that will lessen the odds of your comments finding their way into the Memory Hole:

• Don't be rude. Treat others with the respect you'd like to be treated with yourself.
• Stay on topic. If you don't have anything to say about the post you're commenting on, don't say anything at all.
• Don't complain about something having been moved. As said, if you don't like how the place is run, find another place.
• Keep quality over quantity. Commenters who like to hear themselves talk will have a high risk of having their comments moved.
• If you are thread-banned and you go to another thread to complain, you will be site-banned.

Of course, any spam, threats, and material of a pornographic or violent nature will be deleted entirely.

Okay, that was the stern message of the day. Run along and play nice with each other.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Metatalk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.