Desiring God Comment Policy
Thank you for your interest in participating at our blog!
We want our comment section to be glorifying to God and encouraging and informative for you, our readers.
So most importantly, please use the comments at DG to speak the truth in love. Let’s serve each other both with what we say and how we say it.
We can’t exactly enforce the speaking of truth, since we want this to be a place of real discussion. And we can’t enforce love either, since that’s a matter of the heart.
But we do have some guidelines that we hope will help keep our comments valuable to a general audience. We moderate comments to ensure that these are followed. The decision to keep or delete a comment is, of course, subjective, but we will be as generous as we can while remaining consistent with these rules.
Unfortunately, we aren’t able to interact about individual comments. If you don’t see your comment, please review these guidelines to perhaps see why.
The 2 Most Important Rules
Be kind.
For most of you this doesn’t need to be said, but we’re saying it anyway. If a comment is abusive, hateful, or in any way disrespectful to another commenter, the author, or anyone else, we will delete it.
Be sincere.
Our comment section is a place for people who care about truth. This doesn’t mean we’ll always agree, but it does mean we will only disagree in order to better understand what is true. The comment section is not a place for playing games with language to outwit anyone. It’s not a place to argue for argument’s sake.
7 Less Important Rules
Here are several other guidelines that are based more on internet etiquette than being a decent human being.
- Stay on topic.
Only comment about the post or a previous comment. If you have something else you need to say, please contact us.
- Be coherent.
The only reason to comment is for people to understand what you think. Write in a way that makes this possible.
- Limit the length of your comment to 300 words or so.
In the comments, please be reasonably brief so that people can engage with your ideas instead of simply scrolling past them. If you have a ton to say about a particular issue, consider posting them at your own blog. Then you are welcome to leave a comment here linking to your post.
- Only link to items that are relevant.
Links that don’t pertain to the post or a previous comment will be deleted. This includes links to personal sites in a signature. Put these in the URL field after your name and email.
- Post your own work.
Feel free to quote others in your comments briefly with proper attribution, but don’t copy large amounts of someone else's thoughts. (This includes passages of the Bible.) If someone else said what you want to say, you can link to it.
- Don’t self-promote for the sake of self-promotion.
We encourage one kind of self-promotion: Write something so worthwhile that people want to check out your other work. More blatant, less helpful self-promotion won’t be tolerated.
- Don’t respond to provokers.
On other blogs, they say, “Don’t feed the trolls.” If someone is clearly just writing to cause trouble, don’t respond to them. Also, don’t be the kind of commenter that shouldn’t be responded to. Of course, because we're moderating comments, hopefully this sort of unhelpful provocation won't show up.
Rights and Responsibilities
When you comment here, you own what you have written but give us the right to use it as we see fit. As the owner of your content, you are also solely responsible for it.
We reserve the right to make minor edits to comments.
We cannot guarantee that the author of a post will answer questions asked in the comment section.
