GadgetyNews Community Guidelines

Be Excellent to Each Other

We want you to feel at home when you post a comment on GadgetyNews. Granted, we don’t really know what your home is like, or what goes on there. But, we still want you to feel safe here on GN and, we know exactly how we expect people to behave when they visit our home here. That’s precisely why we reserve the right to delete comments to keep the comment threads here civil and substantive.

Our No. 1 house rule is simple: Don’t be a dick.

Want to be the kind of commenter we’d love to bring home to meet our mum? Here’s what we like to see in comments:

  • Feel free to weigh in with smart, informed ideas that contribute further to the story.
  • Give us useful, constructive criticism. Spot a typo or an error? Let us know, and we will sort it out as soon as possible. We get tired and run out of caffeine tokens. We’re sorry.
  • It would be awesome if you could share the wisdom, experience and humour we know you possess.
  • Don’t feed the trolls. Downvote and flag comments instead.

You know when we said, “Don’t be a dick” earlier? Well, here are some examples of what we consider dickish behaviour:

  • Promoting your own brand, product, or blog. Got something you really want to share? Email it to us and, if it’s as groovy as you think it is, we will shout it from the mountains (or publish a news piece).
  • Commenting when it’s blatantly obvious that you haven’t read the whole thing. We know we’re living in a fast-paced society and nobody has time to listen to a full album (we mean a collection of songs an artist has put together in a certain order with the intention you’d share their journey, by the way). But, bashing out your missive when the answer you seek is actually covered in the original article? Well, that just makes you look silly.
  • We get it that discussions can veer off when a bunch of like-minded enthusiasts get together, but hijacking the conversation to promote off-topic commentary is not cool.
  • We’ll have no bullying. None. So, threats — no matter how vague — against the author or other commenters will not be considered “bants”.
  • We can’t believe that we have to say this, but the above goes for racism, sexism, homophobia, …you get the drift. “It’s PC gone mad!” we hear you call. Beautiful. It’s our house, our rules and don’t say we didn’t warn you when you get zapped.
  • Don’t troll. If you’re trolling rather than contributing meaningfully to the conversation, we’ll be pushing you back under that bridge.