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.