Writing Sample: Website Comment Policy

This is a sample of the type of policy documents I have written for a business. This document was intended give information primarily to college students. It is intended to be informative, but not so tied to legal speak that might cause students to quickly abandon it.

Our Website Comment Guidelines

We love comments about our articles, and we want to hear what you respectfully have to say. Remember to:

• Be nice, courteous, and stay on topic;

• No profanity, name-calling/personal attacks, or inappropriate content;

• If you harass others or joke about tragedies, you will be blocked;

• No spam posts, or posts trying to sell anything.

The primary rule here is pretty simple: Treat others with the same respect you’d want for yourself. Trolling and posting inappropriate content will lead to you being banned, and we don’t want that. Play nice.

Our moderators do their best not to delete comments, we feel that the community has individual, often strong opinions and points of view. We do, however, reserve the right to remove comments for the reasons mentioned above, as well as:

• anything that violates our Privacy Policies;

• anything derogatory based on race, religion, color, national origin, disability, sexual orientation and/or otherwise derogatory in any perceived way;

• any other comments that are detrimental to the community.

Our moderators try to catch inappropriate content, but we also hope that our community will help us police it as well. If you see a comment that is inappropriate, you can click on the small flag to mark it for us. We’ll review the comment, and determine whether it should stay or go.

These guidelines are not intended, and may not be relied upon to (and does not) create any right enforceable by any party other than our business. It doesn’t require our business to take (or even not take) any action.

Our business will sometimes change the technologies that run our websites. These include different software, hardware, and even web hosting. Some comments, especially older ones, may not be available in future versions of our sites.

Can’t find your comment on the site?

• We do occasionally run into technical difficulties, and your comment may not have made it to our site.

• We may not have approved it because it broke one of those rules listed above.

• We may have deleted it because it violated the comment guidelines.

Why am I blocked from commenting?

While we do our best to let everyone have a voice in our online communities, sometimes commenters step over the line. We sometimes block and ban commenters who break the rules. Banning procedures use various technologies and information to enforce the block, including emails, IP addresses, and any other available information.

This stops the abusive commenter from commenting on the site in the future, even if later or other comments are not abusive. Depending on the software we are using at the time, banning might cause other previous comments from the abuser to disappear as well.