Comment Policy

We We want you to feel at home when you post a com­ment on Mercury Photo Bureau. We want every­one to feel at home post­ing com­ments on Mercury Photo Bureau. We don’t know what your home is like, but we know how we expect peo­ple to behave when they visit ours. That’s why we reserve the right to delete com­ments and ban users as needed to keep the com­ment threads here civil and substantive.

Our N⁰. 1 house rule is sim­ple: Don’t be a jerk.

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

• 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 cor­rect it. 
• Demonstrate and share the intel­li­gence, wis­dom, and humor we know you possess. 
• Don’t feed the trolls. You wouldn’t dive into a debate with our ill-informed, weird uncle Gary just for the heck of it. [Sidenote: Well, maybe you would. See our N⁰. 1 house rule.] And you def­i­nitely wouldn’t feed him. (We told you he was weird.) Downvote and flag com­ments instead.

Although we can’t be every­where at once, here are some of the kinds of com­ments we’re going to do our best to curtail:

• Promoting your own brand, prod­uct, or blog. So you’ve got a cli­mate change solu­tion that will simul­ta­ne­ously solve world poverty. Great. Send it through our con­tact form, you Elon Musk, you. 
• Impersonating authors or other com­menters. We can’t believe we have to say this, but: Don’t do that. It’s weird. 
• Comments that make it clear you didn’t read the arti­cle. Enraged that we didn’t men­tion X in a story about Y? Slow down, Speedy McFingerson. If you’d made it past para­graph two, you’d see a very well thought-out dis­cus­sion of that X you hold so dear. 
• Comments that are com­pletely out of left field. Sometimes dis­cus­sions veer off a bit, but are still related to the orig­i­nal sub­ject. That is fine. Hijacking the con­ver­sa­tion to pro­mote off-topic com­men­tary is not. 
• Threats — no mat­ter how vague — against the author or other com­menters. Things can get heated. Before you casu­ally men­tion your foe’s home address, think of your Mother Earth. (Bonus points if you never use the phrase “Mother Earth.”) 
• Racism, sex­ism, homo­pho­bia, you get the drift. Call us the PC Police, fine, but don’t say we didn’t warn you when you get tased. [Sidenote: And by tased, we mean banned or deleted. Mercury Photo Bureau has not — and will not — ever own a Taser™, and even if we chose to carry a weapon for self-defense, we would never give money to the evil f*ckers who make them.]
• Trolling. If you’re a cli­mate denier just out for a good trolling and are not con­tribut­ing mean­ing­fully to the con­ver­sa­tion, we’ll be push­ing you back under the bridge. 

Acknowledgement and thanks to the Grist, from whom we stole nearly all of this com­ment policy.