Cavaliers fans, we know you’ll be coming here a lot thisseason, ready to talk about your team. As the tipoff looms, let’s go over some ofthe community rules on this site, so that you’ll know where the boundaries are. We won’t go over everything; you can read therules for yourself. But we’d like to spotlight some areas that come up mostoften and lead to comments being removed or users having their accountstemporarily or permanently frozen: Personal attacks andinsults. Don’t attack another user. Don’t call other commenters stupid,don’t question their manhood, don’t accuse them of living in their moms’basements. Don’t order them off the site because they don’t cheer the Cavsenough to please you. If another commenter attacks you, don’t lash back; we’llpenalize both sides. Even some remarks that aren’t technicallypersonal may be removed because they tend to lead to no good, like tellinganother user, “you’ve just won the award for the most idiotic comment of theday.” When users complain that their comments were removed eventhough they didn’t do anything wrong, this is usually the problem. Unlike somesites, the rules here don’t just barobscenities. Obscenity and vulgarlanguage. Ah, but the rules do, definitely, bar obscenity. If you use badlanguage – even if you misspell it, try to disguise it or abbreviate it – itwill be removed. Off-topic remarks.Cleveland.com maintainsforums where users get to name their topics and can take the conversationswherever they want. For comments on stories, though, we ask that you stick tothe topic of the story. This becomes a particular problem when someone tries torake up old controversies – particularly ones that involve the initials LJ– or inject politics into the conversation. Among the comments that are always off-topic: Complaintsabout our comment moderation. It’s spelled out very clearly in the communityrules. Trolling. Thiscovers a lot of behaviors, but one that we know upsets a lot of good users iswhen someone continually tries to rile up everyone else, usually by repeatingthe same criticism of a player or coach (or even the city itself) over and overagain. This is not a site just for Cavs fans, and criticizing the team or thecoach is a part of any sports discussion. But those who come here not to have areal discussion, who just want to yell “Cavs suck” or some longer variationagain and again – we think the rest of you deserve to not have to wade throughtheir comments. (One other thing: This site’s automated spam filter was attacked recently, and as a result it’s blocking more comments than it should. It will take some time for us to train it back to normal. In the meantime, if you get a message that your comment has been successful but it’s being held for approval, that means you’ve been filtered. Please don’t keep trying the same post over and over again; all you’ll do is train the filter to believe you’re a spammer. We will monitor the filter several times per day.) This site gets a lot of comments across all its blogs, so wecan’t promise we’ll catch every violation quickly. But we do pay extraattention to popular blogs like the Cavs, and we do go back to check commentswe missed and clean them up. If you see someone who’s violating the rules and seems to be getting away with it, rest assured that we’ll track that user down eventually. (And remember you can use the link on each comment to report it as inappropriate, which alerts a group of moderators who track complaints over all the Advance Digital sites.) As we said, the tools we use to keep things in order includedisabling accounts. Anyone who’s been around here a while knows that isn’t100 percent effective; people create new accounts and go back to their oldmisbehavior. We know that, and we have other ways of dealing with them. In the end, these comments are as good as you make them. Thanks for participating in the site, and for adding value to it by your contributions.
