Welcome to the Good Men Project. We set out on June 1, 2010 to “spark an international conversation about what it means to be a good man in the 21st century.” Since then, we have gotten over 4 million unique visitors from almost every country in the world. We currently get 2.5 million pageviews per month. And we’ve gotten over 90,000 comments — we now average about 7,000 comments a month.
That’s a very large discussion.
In order to foster constructive, respectful debate in our comments section, we have established the following guidelines, which have been updated as of today, April 22, 2012.
Please note that by commenting on The Good Men Project, you agree to abide by our policy below. You also understand that the decision to allow your comment to be published is at the discretion of our moderators and editorial staff. We maintain the right to delete any and all comments and to temporarily or permanently block people from commenting who violate these terms.
We’re all about discussion here. That’s what we are. We are a discussion about manhood, masculinity, and what all that means here and 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 moves the discussion forward.
General Guidelines & Tips:
Be civil and respectful.
Don’t personally attack anyone—whether it’s their grammar, their intelligence, their name, or anything else. You can disagree with their viewpoint but don’t go after the individual.
Please be concise. If you have more to say than will fit in a few paragraphs, please consider submitting your views as a post here.
Don’t generalize. Stay on topic.
Don’t write about the same thing each time you comment. That is known as “pushing your own agenda” and is disallowed. 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 topics that are important to men. While we encourage suggestions on how things could be better, being highly critical in the comment section of someone else’s post is not the place for it. Please email lisa@goodmenproject.com with your concerns.
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.
The following will get your comment deleted. Repeat offenders will be blocked from commenting:
Posting threatening, harassing, defamatory, or libelous material
Posting material that infringes copyright or any other intellectual property interest
Posting links to porn sites
Ad hominem attacks**
Comparisons to genocidal dictators and their brutal regimes
Hijacking threads to push your own agenda
Sweeping generalizations
Posting anything 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
**[“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.”]
About our commenting system
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 gets “held for moderation”, it usually means you either used inappropriate language, are commenting on a potentially provocative post that is more heavily moderated, your post is unduly long, has multiple links, or you have violated or come close to violating one of our guidelines. If your comment disappears completely, it means our moderators have decided your comment was either in violation of our guidelines or it was not written in the spirit of moving the discussion forward in a civil way.
The Good Men Project relies on volunteer moderators who are not full-time; thus we may not be able to enforce these guidelines in real time. If you are interested in becoming a moderator, please email publisher Lisa Hickey at lisa@goodmenproject.com.
Good Men Media Inc., reserves the right to remove comments and block users entirely at its discretion, including but not limited to, violations of these guidelines. Good Men Media Inc. is not responsible for the content of user comments.