Ars Technica's community isin our biased opinionsecond to none online.
For more than 26 years, readers have enabled and inspired our work, creating a community with an amazing signal-to-noise ratio.
To aid these efforts, we're updating our Posting Guidelines to make them more accessible to new readersand more straightforward and more transparent for everyone.The substance of the guidelines isn't changing.
Most provisions are just common-sense items meant to foster genuine discussion, such as the prohibitions against hate speech, personal attacks, trolling, and spam.
We did, however, think a few rules could be clarified and that we could explain the moderation process more clearly.
To that end, we are introducing The Ars Posting Guidelines Version 3.0.
(The previous version of the Guidelines is archived here for comparison purposes, but again, the substance hasn't changed.)We now outline the moderation process more clearly because it has caused some confusion in the past.
As Captain Barbossa put it in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, "The Code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules." Same thing here.
Human judgment will always be used when it comes to interpreting infractions.
We will, for instance, be much more patient with long-term members who have a history of good-faith posts but who sometimes have a bad daybut much less tolerant of brand-new posters who try to stir people up.As the new guidelines state, our goal at all times is to promote the well-being of our community and to foster respectful, frank, and productive discussions, with room for diverse viewpoints.
Our Posting Guidelines were originally written at a time when the biggest controversies in our community were the overreach of the Recording Industry Association of America, the OS X-fueled rebirth of Apple, and the hope-springs-eternal coming of "Linux on the desktop." But the world has changed, to put it mildly.
We hope, on some level, that a refreshed set of guidelines might encourage everyone to be a little more kind and a little less eager to perform moral outrage.