Blog User Guidelines

User Guidelines

Warc has created this blog for anyone who wishes to discuss ideas and evidence for marketing people.

To ensure our platform offers lively and respectful conversation, we have developed a shared, transparent and flexible set of guidelines. Please take a moment to read them below.

The opinions on this blog are not those of Warc, and Warc is not responsible for the content of external websites linked to this blog.

Copyright

If you post a comment on the site, you retain the copyright to your words and pictures. But by doing so you also agree to grant Warc a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicenseable right and license to use, reproduce, adapt, and publish your comments.

If you do not wish to grant Warc such publishing rights, we suggest you do not post comments on The Warc Blog.

Moderation

We will not pre-edit posts, but we will remove any that we feel fall foul of the letter and spirit of the guidelines below.

We may contact via email any parties who have their comments removed by Warc moderators to let them know of our decision. Repeated or serious violations of the rules will lead to users being banned from the site.

We would not do this lightly, but we take seriously our responsibility to ensure The Warc Blog is inclusive and welcoming for all.

The 10 guidelines below apply across the site. Moderation decisions are also informed by the context in which comments are made.

1. We welcome debate and dissent, but personal attacks (on authors, other users or any individual), persistent trolling and mindless abuse will not be tolerated.
2. We acknowledge criticism of the articles we publish, but will not allow persistent misrepresentation of Warc, our content partners or other organizations.
3. We will consider removing any content that others might find extremely offensive or threatening. We will remove ALL comments not in English since all moderation will be in English-language only.
4. We reserve the right to redirect or curtail conversations which descend into flame-wars based on ingrained partisanship or generalizations. We ask users to find ways of sharing their views that do not feel divisive or menacing to others.
5. We will not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of hate-speech, or contributions that could be interpreted as such.
6. We will remove any content that may put us in legal jeopardy, such as potentially libellous or defamatory postings, or material posted in potential breach of copyright or trademarks.
7. We will actively discourage commercial entities passing themselves off as individuals, in order to post advertising material or links. This may also apply to people or organizations who frequently post propaganda or external links without adding substantively to the quality of the discussion.
8. We ask users to avoid spamming and flooding. Please don't repost the same message, or very similar messages, more than once, and please do not write your posts in capital letters only as this can cause offence.
9. For users’ own safety, it is unacceptable to publicise contact details including address, place of employment, name of educational establishment, telephone or mobile number, email address, etc. We will also not tolerate impersonation or usernames which participants might find offensive.
10. We ask users to keep comments relevant. If you post something which is unrelated to the original topic ("off-topic") then it may be removed, in order to keep the thread on track. This also applies to queries or comments about moderation, which should not be posted as comments.

Participants who seriously, persistently or willfully ignore these guidelines will be banned from the site. Please be aware that Warc moderators may contact you by email about your participation, especially where an issue comes up in relation to these guidelines.

Any advice Warc moderators give, or any requests they make, should be adhered to, as our moderators are employed to enforce these guidelines and create a constructive environment for everyone who contributes to our site.

We will only edit user posts to clarify meanings, correct spellings, or make text more legible.

Even if only part of a comment or posting is perceived as breaching the community guidelines, the whole thing may be removed.

Also, when a comment or post is removed for any of the reasons above, it is sometimes necessary to delete subsequent messages which refer to explicitly or quote from the original (removed) comment, in order to preserve some notion of conversational thread.

This may also happen because a later comment quotes directly the problematic bits of the original comment, which just perpetuates the problem. In such cases not every deletion will be marked individually.

We hope and expect participants to help us keep the Blog reflective of these guidelines by notifying us of potential problems or suggestions for improvement, and by helping each other to keep conversations appropriate and inclusive.

If you spot a problem or want to suggest a way to improve these guidelines, please email blogs@warc.com. If you have questions or any suggestions about how to improve any aspect of community participation on The Warc Blog, email blogs@warc.com.

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