OpenNASA Comments Policy

Comments are an essential part of the openNASA blog and our community. We all benefit from the interaction between the authors of this site and the readers through the comments. However, some recent comments on openNASA have encouraged us to develop a “comments policy” to better facilitate this sites mission. As stated in our disclaimer, this blog is an experiment in transparent and direct communication about the U.S. space program. We have only the highest intention to contributing to an open and honest workplace. We strive to provide insight into the space program we work for and are passionate about creating ways for people to participate. That being said, when a comment is cloaked in abusive and manipulative statements that detract from the value of the conversation and what the community is all about, we have to respond. Angry, accusing and vindictive posts don’t add to an open and participatory conversation.

The key word in our disclaimer is *experiment*. Until this point, we didn’t fully consider the value of how we manage comments on this site. Unless the comment was clearly spam, we approved everything. Turns out that this is not the best way to manage a community and we can all benefit from a policy on how we manage the comments. Essentially, think of it as a public “responsibility statement”. It informs the reader of what we will allow on this blog, what we will not allow, and what guest commenters are allowed to do. It establishes the responsibilities of each party involved and is posted in a place for all to see. It will help to set down in words all the assumptions and expectations we have of the openNASA community, removing all doubt. If doubt arises, we will point to these ground rules so that we are all playing by the same rules.

Not all websites have a Comment Policy so we expect this to be a learning process for us all. To get us started, I’ve listed a draft of our new policy below for your review. Please comment with suggestions and feedback and we’ll update the site appropriately. Our goal is not to be restrictive, but to facilitate a quality discussion and deter abusive and irresponsible comments, so that all feel welcome to participate. We look forward to your feedback.

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The following Comments Policy has been written to give guidance on participating as openNASA community member.

We are a community of many types of people, who may not think what you think, believe what you believe or see what you see. So, be polite and respectful in your interactions with other members. A comment, which does not add to the conversation, runs off on an inappropriate tangent, or kills the conversation may be edited, moved, or deleted.

We welcome all thoughts, supportive, dissenting, critical or otherwise, but do not publish comments that have content that:

– is abusive

– is off-topic

– contains ad-hominem attacks

– promotes hate of any kind

– uses excessively foul language

– is blatantly spam

Additional Comments Policy Details:

Comment Form: The comment form must be filled in with a proper or legitimate sounding name and URL. Comments using keywords, spam or splog-like URLs, or suspicious information in the comment form will be edited or deleted. Email addresses are required for commenting, and they are not published on the blog, nor shared. They may be used by the authors to privately contact the commenter.

No Personal Attack Comments Permitted: No personal attacks are permitted in this blog’s comments. OpenNASA is not a venue for you to harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. You may question or argue the content, but not attack the blogger, nor any other commenters. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct from another user, we’ll edit, move or delete your comment. Failure to respect fellow participants on this blog could result in removal and blocked access in the future

Family Friendly: This blog is “family friendly” and comments that include offensive or inappropriate language, or considered by the comment moderators to be rude and offensive, will be edited or deleted.

Spam: Any comment assumed to be possible comment spam will be deleted and marked as comment spam.

Spam Filtering: All comments are filtered through spam filtering technology; the kind we uses varies over time, but we are currently using Akismet. The spam-filtering technology isn’t perfect, and from time to time it flags legitimate emails (false positives).

Hold Harmless: All comments within this blog are the responsibility of the commenter, not the blog owner, administrator, contributor, moderator, editor, or author. By submitting a comment on our blog, you agree that the comment content is your own, and to hold openNASA and all subsidiaries and representatives harmless from any and all repercussions, damages, or liability.

Trackbacks Are Comments: All trackbacks will be treated inline with our Comments Policy.

All Rights Reserved: The blog owner, administrator, contributor, moderators, editor, and/or author reserve the right to edit, delete, censor, move, or mark as spam any and all comments. They also have the right to block access to any one or group from commenting or from the entire blog.

Violation of Comments Policy: Anyone who violates this Comments Policy may be blocked from future access and/or commenting on this blog. In most circumstances, we like to give second chances, so we’ll send you a warning if you violate this policy. This is done as a courtesy and will only be done the first time. Subsequent violations can result in banning your IP from commenting on or participating in our site.

We’ve written this policy to ensure that everyone within the openNASA community feels comfortable participating on this site. If you don’t feel that you can abide by our Comments Policy as outlined above, openNASA may not be for you. If you have any questions, you can contact us at moderators@opennasa.com

6 Responses to “OpenNASA Comments Policy”

  1. ahoppin  on December 4th, 2008

    The specifics aside (and I do think this policy is a net +), I think this *experimental* approach to comment moderation is just the kind of thing that anyone working on a Federal social media policy should pay attention to (though this is not a Federal site). There is a growing body of good thought around the Web about this, many of them linked here: http://mycoastguardcareer.blog.....cally.html

  2. iMensah  on December 4th, 2008

    As a contributing author to this sight, I wholly agree with a comment policy. It seems to be a growing trend on blog sites across the blogsphere, regardless of topic(s) discussed on the blog. There is one question I have:

    As a contributing author, would I be given authority to approve/deny comments so that I may moderate comments on my postings? If not, who will be the keepers of the keys (as it were), and what criteria will be used to select those individuals?

  3. jessy  on December 4th, 2008

    hi isaac,

    definitely, you should have authority to approve/deny comments on your post, although i think it’s fair to say we would like authors to adhere to the policies as well, and to welcome dialog, discourse and constructive criticism (ie, dont just block all comments that arent positive :) ).

    AFAIK, right now all comments go to both the admin email for the site (which right now nick and i get), and to the post author, is that right?

    to allow authors to moderate comments directly, we need to update your role on the site to editors. the other option is to have authors who dont want to moderate directly, just send a request to the moderators.

    but obviously the moderate-your-own approach has less overhead.

    for the record, we havent had many problems and i generally expect the vast majority of our comments to be approved…

  4. Skytland  on December 4th, 2008

    To build a bit off what Jessy wrote. As mentioned, the thought is that the author of the post has primary authority on the comments of that post. That seems to be the least overhead and is how a lot of other sites work. If anyone has a better suggestion here, please do speak up. We have options in how we can make this happen. 1) We can upgrade the role of the author to editor if they’d like to physically moderate the comments themselves or, 2) the author can just shoot an email to moderators@opennasa.com. Whatever the solution, we are limited to the functionality of the wordpress blogging software. In general, anyone who visits this site can serve as a moderator. If someone (anyone) has a concern with a comment, they can email moderators@opennasa.com with the concern and the author/moderators will take a look at it. Our goal is to be as objective to how we moderate our comments as possible (hence the policy). By stating our general guidelines, everyone is on the same playing field in terms of whats acceptable and not. So if you’d like to see something else in the policy, please let us know!

    To date, we’ve had 542 comments on openNASA. 25 of them were spam that was not captured by the akismet spam filtering system. Only two of the comments were *real* comments that were dis-approved. Both clearly violated the policy and were personal attacks against another person, and of which we received complaints about. So that means, out of the 517 *real* comments on openNASA, we have accepted 99.6%. That’s a pretty good quantitative measure of the track record at openNASA. It also goes to show that we are absolutely interested, and in fact encourage, “constructive criticism”, dialog and discourse. The ability to have a healthy debate is what being open and transparent is all about. We just want to make sure that everyone understands the ground rules up front.

  5. Natalie  on December 4th, 2008

    This is a great idea! I think having clear, fair rules up front will help everyone in the openNASA community feel more comfortable.

    The first “comment policy” that I saw was on Wayne Hale’s blog. It made me smile (as all his posts do)…. Wayne’s rules are: 1) must have good grammar, 2) no UFO comments.

    http://tinyurl.com/6gzmzr

  6. iMensah  on December 5th, 2008

    Nick and Jessy,

    Thanks for the clarification, it makes things a lot more clear! My main concern was that I actually encourage dissenting opinions and I rather enjoy a good, clean, intelligent debate on subjects. I was just wondering about the overhead of moderating such a (potentially) large amount of comments.

    I agree the moderate-your-own-post is the most light-weight approach (with respects to the previously mentioned moderators), and probably the easiest to implement. Of course, that means trusting each author to allow dissenting opinions that encourage constructive criticism, but no system is perfect.

    Thanks again guys for making this site such a well-oiled machine. I’ve enjoyed reading the posts and comments and look forward to many more as this site grows and improves!