Hi Magazine editors,
I wanted to open up this conversation to share how I personally moderate comments. I'm not unilaterally declaring any rules here. I'd love to hear from other editors how they make these decisions. In the end, I hope we can come up with common guidance that helps future editors.
Which reminds me... Hopefully everyone does know that we do moderate comments on the Magazine. We think of the Magazine as a place where Fedora can put its best foot forward. That doesn't mean we don't take critical comments. We definitely do, as long as they're in the spirit of betterment. But just like a house party -- if you routinely let guests spill others' drinks, very soon no one will bother to attend. So we keep an eye on the party to ensure everyone can enjoy it.
Often I go through a mental checklist to see if a comment has some quality that makes it unsuitable to publish. If a comment gets through those gates, typically I approve it ("If it doesn't fail, it passes."). These are the ones that I typically think about:
* Does the comment show obvious signs of spam? (Examples: Suspicious website or email name, often coupled with highly generic comments that have nothing to do with the article content.)
* Does the comment engage in rude or obnoxious behavior, like name calling, ad hominem attacks, unconstructive criticism, or insults against Fedora, people, other Linux distros, or open source projects? (Examples: "The maintainers of <X> project should be ashamed." "Fedora sucks, so I use $DISTRO instead." "$DISTRO sucks so I always use Fedora now.")
* Does the comment lack clear discussion value? (Example: "This was a great post, I learned a lot.")
These are three big ones I can think of. How do other editors treat comments?
Are there other rules you use?
Are there things on this list you think we should *not* use to disqualify comments?