In her post Comments on Comments, Lorelle on WordPress suggested every blog publish its policies on privacy and comments.

Although comments here are usually positive, encouraging, and uplifting, establishing a policy before a problem occurs makes sense. So here are my policies:

Privacy:
Your personal information is not collected unless you leave a comment. If you leave a comment, your name and e-mail address are required. However, the e-mail address is used only if I need to communicate with you about your comment. Your address will never be shared with anyone else.

Comment Moderation and Editing:
The first time anyone posts a comment, the comment is subject to moderation. After the first comment has been approved, future comments do not require moderation.

All comments are checked by Akismet and comments deemed to be spam are deleted. Although this program does an excellent job of separating spam from legitimate comments, it is possible that a comment could be erroneously marked spam. If you leave a comment and it doesn’t appear within a day, you may e-mail me.

I encourage open, honest, and respectful discussion. I will not delete a comment just because someone disagrees with me. I can learn from my readers, as I hope you can learn from me.

Comments may be deleted, if solely in my opinion, they are offensive (such as language inappropriate for a Christian family-friendly audience, name-calling, or hate speech) or if they contain blatant advertising that does not contribute to the discussion. In some cases, I may edit a comment to remove the part considered inappropriate. If so, I will indicate that some text has been deleted.

Although I will not delete a comment if you do not leave a real name, but I prefer to see a name rather than a keyword phrase.

Threaded comments lets you reply to a specific comment to encourage conversation. You can subscribe to comments to be notified when I reply and when other comments are posted.

Live preview allows you to see the comment as it will appear (preview appears below the comment). You can edit your own comment with 15 minutes of posting since errors seem to appear as soon as the comment is posted.

If I see a minor error in a comment (such as a misspelled or omitted word), I reserve the right to make corrections. However, I will not edit comments in any way to change the meaning.

Replies to Comments:
I reply to all comments, usually in a public comment on the blog, but I will also reply by e-mail if I need to communicate with you privately. There may come a time when I will get too many comments to reply individually to every one, but I will always respond if you ask a question.

Links:

This blog is a DoFollow blog, allowing links to your site to be followed by the search engines.

I also follow links and visit the blogs of my commenters.

And speaking of links … I link only to sites that I believe would be of interest to and appropriate for my readers. However, since circumstances change and I have no control over sites I link to, I cannot be responsible for their content.

In rare cases, I may have an affiliate relationship with a site linked in a post (such a book recommendation that links to Amazon.com). However, I do not make a recommendation because I have an affiliate relationship, rather I have an affiliate relationship because I recommend the product, service, or site.

Copyright and Fair Use:
All content is my original, copyrighted work unless the material is marked as a quote. Any quotes are within the “fair use” provision of the copyright law to the best of my knowledge. None of the posts are sponsored or paid (though I have no objection to anyone else having paid posts on their blog). For permission to reprint anything from my blog, contact me.

I welcome and encourage your comments. Join the discussion.

[Updated January 3, 2008]