The Brooklyn Heights Blog would like to provide a gentle reminder of our Terms of Service. In particular, we call attention to this excerpt of the guidelines pertaining to comments:
“Brooklyn Heights Blog welcomes our readers’ comments. However, Brooklyn Heights Blog is a private website, and we reserve the right to delete any comments we find offensive. We strive to maintain an atmosphere of free and open conversation, but inevitably, some user comments, will spiral off into negative sniping and flame wars. When this happens, we reserve the right to close the posts to further comments. If a commenter repeatedly abuses our comment policy, we delete all of their comments on every post on the site, and ban their IP address.
In order to make our comments useful and interesting, the following guidelines have been established for comment users:
- Do not post threatening, harassing, defamatory, or libelous material.
- Do not intentionally make false or misleading statements.
- Do not offer to sell or buy any product or service. This includes shilling or spamming for your own business.
- Do not post material that infringes copyright.
- Do not post information that you know to be confidential or sensitive or otherwise in breach of the law. “Sensitive” information includes, but is not limited to, information about individuals other than the commenter such as residence or e-mail addresses, or telephone numbers. This prohibition applies whether or not the information is otherwise publicly available (for example, in a telephone directory or through a “people finder” website) and whether or not the commenter believes the individual whose information is sought to be disclosed is a “public figure.” Such information may be included in a comment if the individual to whom such information pertains has expressly agreed to allow the commenter to disclose it in a public forum.
- Keep all comments relevant to the particular Brooklyn Heights Blog story where the comment is being posted.
- Commenting on businesses in which your or a friend have a financial interest: You must disclose this fact. BHB will moderate comments that are “shilling” for a business — the practice of posing as a happy, satisfied customer of an establishment who wants to tell everyone how great that business is and how everyone should go there. If a business owner wants to post in a thread relevant to their business they must disclose that they are the owner or a friend or relative of the owner. Even if you are a well meaning business owner, friend or relative of a business owner failure to disclose your interest in a comment will do more harm that good for that business.
- Posting under more than two usernames repeatedly will lead to your comments automatically being placed into moderation.
- Brooklyn Heights Blog will not accept responsibility for the content of user comments.
If Brooklyn Heights Blog receives notice that a comment post is not in keeping with these terms and conditions or the intended use of the comments, we reserve the right to remove that comment posting. The removal of any comment shall be solely at the discretion of Brooklyn Heights Blog.
You may be placed in our moderation cue or banned permanently if your comments are are mostly self-promotional or for the purpose of self-promotion (making lame comments and having your name link back to your business website for instance), obnoxious, beating a dead horse or plain boring. There will be no warning and no appeal. [Guide to good commenting]”
*Image is CC0 Public Domain from Pixabay.com
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