{"id":296,"date":"2008-06-18T11:05:15","date_gmt":"2008-06-18T16:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/?p=296"},"modified":"2010-02-10T05:08:21","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T10:08:21","slug":"comment-policy-needed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/18\/comment-policy-needed\/","title":{"rendered":"Comment Policy, Do You Need One?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After writing <a title=\"Second AEC Article\" href=\"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/ajax-edit-comments-rc-21\/\">2<\/a> <a title=\"First AEC Article\" href=\"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/ajax-edit-comments\/\">posts<\/a> about the Ajax Edit Comments WordPress plugin, and receiving an e-mail from a reader who was wondering why I was editing comments, I thought it was salient point in time to develop a comment policy for PixelWit.com.  But where should I begin?<\/p>\n<p>The first thing I did was read a bunch of articles about blog comment policies like:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"Comment Ownership Policy\" href=\"http:\/\/weblogtoolscollection.com\/archives\/2008\/06\/14\/the-ownership-of-comments\/\">Ownership of Comments<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"ReasonableMans Comment Ownership Discussion\" href=\"http:\/\/www.reasonableman.com\/archive\/2005\/02\/who_owns_blog_c.html\">Who Owns Comments Discussion<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Should you Care About Comment Ownership\" href=\"http:\/\/regulargeek.com\/2008\/06\/03\/who-owns-comments-who-cares\/\">Who Cares Who Owns Comments<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"No Comment Policy Sucks\" href=\"http:\/\/whydoeseverythingsuck.com\/2008\/05\/who-has-comment-copyright-ownership-in.html\">Why a Lack of Comment Policies Sucks<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Then I &#8216;perused&#8217; (the literal sense of the word, look it up if you must) approximately a dozen comment policy examples like these<!--more-->:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"ProBlogger Comment Policy\" href=\"http:\/\/www.problogger.net\/archives\/2005\/11\/03\/problogger-comments-policy\/\">Casual Comments Policy<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"OptiNiche Comment Policy\" href=\"http:\/\/www.optiniche.com\/blog\/comment-policy\/\">Explicit Comment Policy<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"T.O.S. in Legal-Speak\" href=\"http:\/\/www.reasonableman.com\/tos.html\">Legal Sounding Terms of Service<\/a> with the prerequisite <a title=\"Privacy Policy Jibber Jabber\" href=\"http:\/\/www.reasonableman.com\/privacy.html\">Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now before I get all wound up telling you how to write a comment policy of your own, the most important (and often least discussed) thing to note is that &#8216;Not all sites need a Comment Policy.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Some major blog hosts like <a title=\"WordPress Blog Hosting Service\" href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.com\/\">WordPress.com<\/a> already have a comment policy built into their <a title=\"WordPress.com's Terms of Service\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wordpress.com\/tos\/\">Terms of Service<\/a> (paragraph #2 titled &#8220;Responsibility of Contributors&#8221;) which should serve as a guide for those blog owners and commenters.  On the other hand, some little blogs are so small that it&#8217;s counterproductive to create a lengthy all-encompassing legal statement just to scare away the few potential commenters you might have.<\/p>\n<p>Besides, does your Aunt Millie really need to agree to a 3 page legal contract before telling all the readers of your personal blog how small your weenus was when you were a baby?  Perhaps, but that&#8217;s not the point.  The fact of the matter is that most blogs will never encounter a situation where comment copyright or ownership is or will ever be an issue.<\/p>\n<p>So where does PixelWit.com stand on this issue?  While I doubt anyone will post an acceptable Unified Field Theory or write the next great American novel in a comment on this site, there is a good chance that someone might provide a unique viewpoint or chunk of code that&#8217;s worthy of copyright protection.  Since I don&#8217;t have the desire or resources needed to hire a lawyer to write an explicit legally binding policy and enforce it, I&#8217;ve chosen to take the less formal route and use a set of <a title=\"Comment Guidlines for PixelWit.com\" href=\"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/comment-guidelines\/\">Comment Guidelines<\/a> instead.<\/p>\n<p>The guidelines probably aren&#8217;t legally binding but they do tell potential commenters what to expect and hopefully that&#8217;s enough to smooth out any potential problems before they occur.  If you have any thoughts on my comment guidelines or comment policies in general feel free to&#8230; leave a comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most blogs will never encounter a situation where comment copyright or ownership is an issue but it&#8217;s best to be prepared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[60,20],"class_list":["post-296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-site-development","tag-comment","tag-wordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}