An Update to the GMP Commenting Policy

We’ve updated our commenting policy. The rules will always be found here, but we wanted to repost the guidelines on the blog so everyone sees them. Thanks.

Welcome to the Good Men Project. In order to foster constructive, respectful debate in our comments section, we have established the following guidelines. Violation of any of these guidelines can result in you being blocked from commenting on this site.

Comments on the Good Men Project are loosely moderated. That means we don’t check every comment, but if it raises a flag it will be held in queue until a moderator makes a decision in it. If your comment doesn’t show up, it usually means you either used inappropriate language or violated one of our guidelines.

Look, we’re all about discussion here. That’s what we are. We are a discussion about manhood, masculinity, and what all that means right now. So we want you to comment. We want you to be passionate about the things we publish, but we want you to be passionate in a way that doesn’t offend anyone.

General Guidelines & Tips:

Be civil and respectful.

Stay on topic.

Don’t personally attack anyone—whether it’s their grammar, their intelligence, their name, or anything else. You can attack a viewpoint. That’s fine, but don’t go after the individual.

Don’t feed the trolls. They will bite, and they’ll keep coming back. Let’s keep them where they belong: under your bed.

Please be concise. No one wants to read a rambling, long-winded back-and-forth that forgets what it was supposed to be about.

Don’t generalize. No, all men aren’t dogs—just some of us. And if you want to say something like that, show us some evidence, post a link with more information. Don’t group people together just because it’s “your opinion.” That’s lazy and leads to all sorts of problems.

Stay on topic. Don’t come over to a sports post and tell us we’re all losers because we’re discussing the long-lasting emotional effects of the NBA lockout. We get it. “We should be worrying about the economy, instead.” Comment on the topic at hand, or just don’t comment.

Don’t write about the same thing each time you comment. We will find you, and we will ban you. Mix it up, and we won’t have any problems. If you have something to say that you feel strongly about, write a post, work with our editors, and we will run it. We encourage well thought out points of view on a variety of topics.

We will not tolerate attacks on the Good Men Project itself, people who question our motives, our intentions or our reason for being. If you want to create your own platform to talk about these issues, go ahead. We invite community participation and encourage people who want to have thoughtful discussions around the topics of important to men. Period. Questioning why we are doing it the way we are doing it is a quick way to get yourself banned.

We want everyone who reads our stories to comment. And we especially don’t want anyone to be scared to put their thoughts out there. The comments section should be an open place for thoughtful—and, yes, passionate—discussion. Stick to these rules, and it’ll stay that way.

Comments with more than one active link are held for moderation.

Please refrain from the following:

Posting threatening, harassing, defamatory, or libelous material
Posting material that infringes copyright or any other intellectual property interest
Ad hominem attacks**
Comparisons to genocidal dictators and their brutal regimes
Hijacking threads to push your own irrelevant agenda
Sweeping generalizations
Posting anything even approaching the length of the original post
Posting an article from another website
Putting Good, Good Men, or Good Men Project in quotation marks, as a means of expressing your suggestion that the Good Men Project isn’t, in fact, good

The Good Men Project does not employ a full time moderator; thus we may not be able to enforce these guidelines in real time.

*Please note that once you post a comment to one of our sites, it becomes part of the public conversation. We will not remove a user’s comments unless we deem them to be in violation of these guidelines. We cannot remove your comments simply because you have a change of heart about making them. Good Men Media, Inc., reserves the right to remove comments and block users entirely at its discretion, including for violations of these guidelines. Good Men Media is not responsible for the content of user comments.

**[“Ad hominem abuse involves insulting or belittling one’s opponent in order to invalidate his argument, but can also involve pointing out factual but ostensible character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent’s argument. This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and even true negative facts about the opponent’s personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent’s arguments or assertions.”]