The Hand Mirror's Comment & Link Policy

We want this to be a safe space for women, and indeed for those who are Other in an internet (and political) culture dominated by white heterosexual men of comfortable income and right-wing politics.

To that end we have established the following ground rules, which we expect commenters to kindly respect:

1. Comments that are abusive or link to abusive posts will be deleted. We're not keen on bigotry here at The Hand Mirror.
   
2. Disagreement should be written in a manner that does not demean either party. Although if you embarrass yourself we will probably just leave it there so everyone can laugh at you.
3. If you are unrelentingly obnoxious you may be banned. To date no one has been banned, although a fair few comment deletions have been made.
   
   
4. When we say "unrelentingly obnoxious" we include the distasteful practice of trying to out someone who uses anything short of their full name, either directly or indirectly, on this blog, be that person a blogger or a commenter. We extend the courtesy of respecting that people who don't blog openly under their own name do so for reasons of their own. For clarity, the only writers here who are currently out for blogging purposes are Julie (Fairey) and Anjum (Rahman).
   
   
5. Discussions about moderation decisions should be sent to email, not continued on the comment thread. You can email us via julie dot fairey at gmail dot com with queries about moderation decisions. Attempts to discuss them in comments will be deleted to avoid derailing from the topic of the post.
   
6. We are particularly interested in blogrolling other NZ women who are blogging, regardless of political affiliation (or indeed whether they are writing about politics at all). We will consider blog roll links to anyone who asks but of course reserve the right to decline to add your blog to our roll. This blog is not all about you, it's all about us. So there.

Individual authors can set the rules for their own threads, in addition to these, and moderate those comments to meet their whims.

Thanks for largely respecting these rules to date. We've made very few comment deletions, in the context of the hundreds of comments we get, other than one persistent troll who has gone away now. We appreciate your help with making this a good space for discussion and look forward to your future contributions to The Hand Mirror.

You might also want to check out a post in April 2009 about the nature of this community and what we want this blog to be like.

Last updated May 19th 2009.

Changes to comments policy made in August 2010, please check it out, will be updating this more fully soon.