Community guidelines

A strength of edpsy is the overwhelmingly positive and supportive community we’ve helped to create since 2016.

Across all our channels we try to live our values of community, creativity, engagement and sustainability. As we grow, our audience grows and so we have developed these community guidelines to continue to facilitate a space that is inclusive and compassionate.

1. We welcome debate but personal attacks (against authors, users or the team), trolling and abuse will not be tolerated. Comments should be a space for informed and reasonable discussion of topics.
   
2. We acknowledge criticism of the articles we publish, but will not allow misrepresentation of edpsy, our contributors or their work to be published on our website.
   
3. We understand that people sometimes may feel strongly about issues raised in blog posts, but we will not publish comments that others might find extremely offensive or threatening. Please respect other people’s views and beliefs and consider your impact on others when making your contribution.
   
4. We will not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or other forms of hate-speech, or comments that could be interpreted as such. We will block users of the site who persistently attempt to post comments that attack or smear people on the basis of their race, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age or social class.
   
5. We will not publish comments that may put us in legal jeopardy, such as potentially libellous or defamatory postings, or material posted in potential breach of copyright.
   
6. We will not publish comments that are obviously commercial or otherwise spam-like.
   
7. Keep it relevant. If you post a comment about something other than the article then it is unlikely to be published. Likewise posts that primarily talk about content on other platforms are unlikely to be published. This also applies to queries or comments about moderation, which should not be posted as comments. This does not mean that you can’t signpost to other related content in your comments.
   
8. Be aware that you may be misunderstood, so try to be clear about what you are saying, and expect that people may understand your contribution differently than you intended.
   

As a very small team, with many calls on our time, we can’t enter into correspondence regarding specific moderation activity, although any correspondence will be read.

Adapted from The Guardian Community Standards – our thanks to The Guardian team for making their standards and processes so freely available.

Thanks also to the many people who offered thoughts and reflections on initial drafts of these guidelines.