Comments Policy

“Every insistence on anonymity is a surrender to power”. Ai Weiwei

Comments Policy
Readers are most welcome to comment and debate. Civil disagreement and interchange is thoroughly encouraged. However, please keep discussion just that, civilised.

Moderation
Our blog, our discretion. No public discussion will be entered into regarding moderation decisions. If readers or commenters have queries about this policy, they may email the site or its contributors.

Guidelines
Certain commenting behaviours are considered unacceptable (see below) and such comments are liable to be manually moderated (the automoderator, part of our spam defence, has a mind of its own). While we realise that anyone can slip into an ill-judged remark at times, repeated unacceptable comments will be regarded as a form of trolling and summarily deleted. Repeat offenders may have their IP address placed in moderation or be IP-banned from the site. Individual thread authors have a wide discretion on the interpretation of these guidelines.

Basic etiquette
Please try to stay reasonably germane to the topic [although we recognise the anarchic nature of many comments threads].

Please provide a genuine email address should we wish to get in touch regarding any aspect of this policy.

Pseudonyms are welcome so long as a good-faith attempt at maintaining consistency of identity is made (more below).

Unacceptable
Any comment judged unacceptable may be deleted at the discretion of moderators. Unacceptable comments include but may not be limited to:

Harassing, derogatory and purely abusive comments.

Excessively frequent comments, where the effect of such comments is to discourage the participation of others or turn a debate around into one about themselves.

Consistently repeated and aggressively stated opinions which fail to engage with others is regarded as a form of trolling.

Abuse of traditional Kurungabaa pseudonym play, as explained below:

Playing with pseudonyms. There is a tradition on Kurungabaa of posters morphing their monikers in the spirit of playful silliness by changing the text in the [name] field when they post a comment. We all enjoy this facet of the Kurungabaa commentariat and invite all commenters to play along. However, it’s basic courtesy to make it easy for other readers to know who you are when moniker-morphing through one or more of these options (depending upon your preference) for maintaining a consistent online identity: linking to your own blog/website in the ID field registering a distinctive gravatar to the email address you use for commenting (they don’t ask for your “real” ID to register one, just the ‘nym on the email account) signing your usual ‘nym at the end of your comment. However, anyone considered to be abusing the privilege of moniker-morphing is liable to moderation.

Legal note
The opinions expressed in comments threads are entirely the responsibility of the various contributors. While we will do everything within reason to ensure that they are not defamatory, we accept no liability for them or the content of links included in them.