Thank you for taking an interest in the Humanist Handbook blog, content platform, or social channels.
We’re so glad that you’re here and can’t wait to see how you’ll contribute to the conversation happening around the content we’ve created for you and the entire Humanist community.
We create and publish content intended to empower individuals to lead happy and healthy lives informed by humanist values at the personal, family, and community levels. Because we value your input, feedback, and perspective we’ve made the decision to maintain an active comment section for 60 days after each post is published.
The comment section on our blog, content platforms, or various social media channels is a place for thoughtful discussion. Before you make your contribution to that discussion, please be sure you have carefully read and understood our comment policy.
Policy
The Golden Standard – Our top criteria for an approved comment is one that adds value. There are several ways to add value to a conversation: asking a relevant question, answering a question, providing expanded insight, or explaining a thoughtful counter-point in a respectful way—to name just a few.
Civility is not optional – The Humanist Handbook blog, content platforms, and social channels are meant to be places of empowerment, thoughtful discussion, encouragement, and learning.
You are welcome to disagree with us, our authors, or other commenters, but the tone of those discussions will remain civil or those comments will be deleted.
We will not tolerate personal attacks, hate speech, rude language or anything our editorial staff considers detrimental to the community.
All rights reserved – We reserve the right to edit, delete, move, or mark as spam any comment we choose. We also reserve the right to block any IP address that violates this comment policy from commenting, subscribing, or accessing our content.
Liability – When posting a comment on our blog, content platforms, or social channels you take full responsibility for it. You agree to hold Humanist Handbook, all post authors, and other commenters harmless.
Comments are not the place for support questions – if you have a support issue our top priority is making sure you get the help you need. This is not possible if the only place you’re asking for help is in the comments section.
The only place we can guarantee a support person will follow up with you within 24 hours is in our official support forum. Support questions submitted as comments will be removed.
Valid Non-support Questions – If you have a general question directly relevant to the article or piece of content we’ve posted, then by all means ask. If, on the other hand, your question is specific to your own project (e.g. Why isn’t this working on my website or budget?) then it is best asked via our support forum.
Name Use – All comments must be posted under your real name or nick name. If you use a company name, obvious alias, or keyword stuffed phrase your comment will be deleted and marked as spam.
Valid Email Required – The email address you use to submit your comment must be valid. We respect your privacy and will not share this information with third parties or publish your email address in any way. Any email address we deem to look like spam will result your comment to be deleted and flagged as spam.
Proper Linking Practices – You are welcome to put a non-trackable, un-masked link to your website’s home page in the “website” field of our blog comments section.
Any link in the “website” field that appears to be shortened for tracking, masked, pointing to a product/services page or otherwise suspicious will be deleted.
Links to products, resources, or other sites are not permitted in the comment body. Do not sign off with a link to your website.
In all of these instances you run the risk of your whole comment being deleted and marked as spam. Repeat offenders will be blocked.
Sharing resources the right way – Occasionally, the best way to add value to a conversation is to share a tool or resource with the community that they may not know about.
To assure that the motivations for sharing these tools and resources are for the benefit of the community and not self promotional, we strongly discourage linking to them.
Instead, name the tool or resource (as well as who created it) so that it is easy for others to search for. If you are the creator of a tool or resource you’d like to recommend, make sure that connection is understood by providing full disclosure upfront.
What is and is not considered self promotional or “spammy” is entirely up to the discretion of our editorial staff.
Gravatar – If you would like your photo to appear next to your comment, you’ll need to create a Gravatar account and use that email address when leaving comments on our blog. This process is simple and takes 1-2 minutes, max.
Language – We create and publish content in English. We’re thrilled if you are a non-English communicator who can understand and gain value from our content. However, we are not equipped for comment moderation in multiple languages so please leave your comments in English. Any comment our moderators are unable to understand will be deleted. This includes comments written in English with especially poor spelling and grammar.
Spam – Don’t do it. If you do do it, your comments will be deleted, marked as spam, and you will be blocked.
FAQ
Why isn’t my comment showing up?
If you’ve followed the above policy and your comment still is not showing up, we ask that you simply be patient. Most likely your comment hasn’t shown up yet because a moderator hasn’t had a chance to read it and mark it approved.
