Ars Technica's community is—in our biased opinion—second to none online. For more than 26 years, readers have enabled and inspired our work, creating a community with an amazing signal-to-noise ratio. To aid these efforts, we're updating our Posting Guidelines to make them more accessible to new readers—and more straightforward and more transparent for everyone.
The substance of the guidelines isn't changing. Most provisions are just common-sense items meant to foster genuine discussion, such as the prohibitions against hate speech, personal attacks, trolling, and spam. We did, however, think a few rules could be clarified and that we could explain the moderation process more clearly. To that end, we are introducing The Ars Posting Guidelines Version 3.0. (The previous version of the Guidelines is archived here for comparison purposes, but again, the substance hasn't changed.)
We now outline the moderation process more clearly because it has caused some confusion in the past. As Captain Barbossa put it in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, "The Code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules." Same thing here. Human judgment will always be used when it comes to interpreting infractions. We will, for instance, be much more patient with long-term members who have a history of good-faith posts but who sometimes have a bad day—but much less tolerant of brand-new posters who try to stir people up.
As the new guidelines state, our goal at all times is to promote the well-being of our community and to foster respectful, frank, and productive discussions, with room for diverse viewpoints. Our Posting Guidelines were originally written at a time when the biggest controversies in our community were the overreach of the Recording Industry Association of America, the OS X-fueled rebirth of Apple, and the hope-springs-eternal coming of "Linux on the desktop." But the world has changed, to put it mildly. We hope, on some level, that a refreshed set of guidelines might encourage everyone to be a little more kind and a little less eager to perform moral outrage.
If you have questions about our moderation efforts, you can leave them in the comments below—or you can take them to our Feedback Forum.
A thank-you note
While we're on the topic of community... I want to close by thanking all of you. Last month, I began my 27th year as the editor of this site. It remains an incredible privilege to do something like this, and it's even rarer to love doing it more than ever after so long. Our community has helped Ars stay true to itself, avoiding clickbait journalism and "pivots to video" and all the rest of the noise while going wherever our interests take us.
Thanks to you, we have an amazing "direct" audience. In 27 years, we've watched dozens of tech sites come and go, many dying because they lost the plot and got sucked into hyped-up media futures or the sycophancy of Silicon Valley access journalism. We've made plenty of mistakes, of course, but we have always believed that Content is King. We have done our best to operate that way in an industry that can feel less and less about quality "content" every year.
Whether you're posting in the comments, sending us emails, subscribing to the site, or just reading us quietly, your support truly matters. I couldn't have served in this role for so long without it, and I know everyone at Ars Technica feels the same. We're an incredibly fortunate bunch, and this "thank you" is as forthright as they come.
Gratias vobis agimus ex toto corde. Semper grati.
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