We invite you to contribute your thoughts, ideas, reactions, and opinions to articles and topics on Boston.com. To engage with the conversation, you can post a comment or reply to someone else’s. If you don’t feel like commenting, you can like or share comments you find compelling so that others will see them.
To become part of our community, simply create an account then post away. You can update your account settings and profile at any time. Before you sign up, please review our discussion guidelines, which aim to create a meaningful experience across Boston.com.
1. BE KIND AT BEST.
We want our discussions to be informative, insightful, and helpful to the majority of people who read them or participate in them.
We hope to create a community that’s courteous, thoughtful, and respectful, and our decisions about entire conversations, individual commenters, and specific utterances will consistently reflect that.
2. BE CIVIL AT WORST.
In a city full of differing opinions, preferences, and viewpoints, people won’t always see eye to eye. We get that. We welcome active, spirited discussions. Debate — disagree even — but don’t attack. Keep the conversation respectful.
3. WHAT’S OFF-LIMITS:
Discussions across Boston.com will flourish only when participants feel welcome and safe. Those who don’t follow these guidelines may lose their commenting privileges. By signing up, you agree to read and adhere to our full Terms of Service. When you post a comment, you are consenting to its display on Boston.com and our other websites, and for related online and offline promotional uses.
In order to keep the conversation up to our standards, we don’t allow any form of hate speech, imposters, spam, commercial material, or anything that you wouldn’t say in front of your significant other’s grandma. The full list of prohibited practices is available in our Terms of Service. We’ll work to keep the conversation on point, so we’ll remove this type of material if it’s posted on our platform.
4. WE’LL JUMP IN.
We try to pay attention to every discussion across Boston.com in a timely fashion. As needed, we may moderate so that what’s posted to our platforms always meets our standards. We reserve the right to edit or remove comments at our sole discretion.
This also means that the ability to comment won’t always be available. Some content will publish without discussions enabled; some will be taken down after a few minutes; others after several hours. Decisions on whether discussions are enabled or disabled will be at the discretion of our editors and our technical partners.
For content where discussions are active, we typically moderate comments in a few ways:
- We use algorithms to scan for offensive language.
- We have a third-party team of professional moderators that reviews comments as they are posted.
- Our staff engages with these sections from our downtown Boston office.
Invariably, some comments will irk some but not others. You can help to steer the conversation by reporting inappropriate comments by clicking the button to the left of a person’s comment. On the flipside, if you enjoy a comment, let others know by “upvoting.”
So go forth: Converse, debate, discuss, be passionate, be funny, be a devil’s advocate, give another perspective, but remember that commenting on Boston.com is a privilege and not a right. Be kind at best and be civil at worst.