Community and Commenting Guidelines

Your comments matter to us at Sifted. 

Your insights help to put our reporting in context, provide different perspectives on our journalism and give us ideas for stories we should cover in the future. They can also be whip smart — and very funny.

We want to encourage all of our readers to join the conversations begun on our site, while ensuring that Sifted remains an inclusive and safe place.

To keep Sifted a space for thoughtful, free-ranging discussion, we ask you to follow the set of guidelines below.

TLDR

• Don’t be nasty. Criticise ideas, not people. Any offensive language will not be tolerated.
• Keep it relevant. Blatant product promotion and off-topic comments will be removed.

Personal attacks, strong opinions and discrimination

• Be polite and don’t insult others. Disagreements and criticism are fine, but making your comments personal is not.
• We like strong opinions at Sifted, but may remove comments deemed to be offensive or threatening in nature. Respect other people’s views and beliefs when getting involved in a discussion.
• Don’t write comments that are abusive, or incite hatred. Comments that are discriminatory in nature or make sweeping generalisations about people on the grounds of race, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, disability, age or anything else are harmful to our community and not permitted.

Sharing the space

• Be concise. Keep your comments to under 200 words. Comments posted in two or more parts will be removed.
• Don’t hog the comments space. Those who we deem to be commenting excessively may be warned or banned.

Criticism of Sifted and our journalists

• Making personal or abusive attacks on our writers will lead to your comment being removed and could result in a ban from commenting. Feedback and criticism needs to be made in a constructive manner: play the ball, not the person.
• We welcome criticism of our coverage but won’t allow comments that are plainly unfounded or misrepresent Sifted or our journalists.

Trolling and misleading

• Don’t be a troll. Commenters we deem to be deliberately provocative may be banned. This includes inciting conflict and unproductive disputes in our threads, as well as picking fights with others who disagree with you.
• Commentators who spread misinformation, or we consider to be writing comments with the intent to mislead, will be banned.

Promoting and impersonating

• We will remove comments that are clearly commercial or otherwise resemble spam. Comments advertising or linking to businesses or products, or aimed primarily at promoting other websites, may be removed in their entirety. This includes linking repeatedly to your own blog posts.
• You must not pretend to be another known Sifted user. You must not impersonate any person or entity or misrepresent any connection with any person or entity.

Moderation

If your comment doesn’t appear immediately, it’s because it contains words or links that automatically refer the comment for moderation. When this happens our moderators will usually review your comment within 24 hours. We may remove comments for legal reasons.