HR
Hi everyone.
The BFD is humming even more than usual with 1.7 million or so people being in lockdown until recently and highly likely to be locked down again. The hot topics are, of course, covid, the government and the media.
Emotions are high and commenters obviously want to express their opinions and discuss those hot topics. Which is great. But we don’t want to be a single issue site, so let’s try to discuss things other than just covid and how terrible the government is.
Now, we are never going to censor an opinion or topic or person. The big caveat here is our Comments Policy. If you can get your opinion across without breaching The Rules it will never be deleted or altered. Look at how well some of our regulars post comments.
The BFD has many articles per day, and we regularly get hundreds of comments and thousands of page views per article. There are some things that will automatically drop a comment into Moderation. Links to websites, news articles or pictures/videos are all automatically sent to Moderation before it hits the comment section. Don’t be surprised if a news article you are hurriedly trying to drop into a thread/conversation gets held up.
With so many people posting comments and so many links to outside sites or videos or articles sometimes we can get a bit clogged up. The Moderators check EVERY link. That means clicking on them, reading the article or watching the video before we approve it or in some cases delete it. We do this to make sure of a number of things:
- The link is real
- It is legal
- It does not harm the BFD (for example, it is not breaching a suppression order)
- It doesn’t take readers to dodgy websites that have pornography or hackers or worse (it happens a lot)
- It is relevant to the topic
- It is not promoting someone else’s website/blog/product. There may not be an issue doing so, but any promotion MUST be approved through the official channels first.
The snippet below is from our Comments Policy about links:
- Don’t cut and paste material from another source as your comment. Post a link, perhaps a snippet, and add your own point of view or information.
We are going to add to that a bit.
If you are posting a link, an article, a video or any other media in a comment we require a brief synopsis in your own words describing what it is and what the item is about.
This is to help the Moderators out, but mainly to make sure that other readers are fully informed about what they are clicking through to. Believe it or not, not everybody cares about covid or covid stats or the latest covid conspiracy theory and they will not have any interest whatsoever in your link. This is why there needs to be a good explanation of what it is you are posting.
From today, any links, videos, articles posted that do not have a good synopsis or description will be deleted.
Here is an example of how to do it well from one of our regulars déjà vu:
And one that is not so good:
Déjà vu has taken the time to write a very descriptive synopsis of the link so readers can have an informed view before clicking through to it. The other one could take you anywhere.
So please put in some effort to writing an informative description of the link you wish to post. If your link is really that good and adds to the thread it is worth some time and effort describing why we should all read it.