Commenting Policy

Welcome to the Florida Pundit, we are pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences, and observations about our news and topics.

Florida Pundit uses Disqus commenting system. You need to log in with a Disqus account in order to comment.

How we’ll moderate your comments

1. We welcome debate, dissent and the expression of unpopular opinions. But we’ll delete any comment that contains malicious personal abuse and deliberate misinformation, including trolling, flooding and personal attacks on any person, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point.
2. We’ll delete any comment likely to put our organization into legal jeopardy, especially comments that appear to be libelous, in contempt of court or in violation of copyright.
3. We’ll delete any comment that expresses blatant racism, sexism, homophobia or any form of hate speech. In doing this, we’ll distinguish between the forthright criticism of governments, organizations and ideas, and attacks on persons or groups solely on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion or age.
4. We’ll delete comments that we deem to be off-topic, irrelevant or so badly written they’re impossible to understand.
5. We’ll bar commenters who attempt to engage in online smear campaigns, especially during elections. This includes any attempt to post misinformation about candidates, including malicious gossip about their sex lives and drinking habits. We will, however, allow discussion of bona fide criminal convictions, if they are recent.
6. We’ll bar commenters who attempt to flood the site with political propaganda on behalf of candidates or political parties, especially if we detect large numbers of such comments flowing from the same IP.
7. We’ll delete spam and any comment that seems to market a business or business products.
8. We will close comments on any story, if, in our opinion, allowing comments would lead to abuse of our website.
9. Due to the large amount of material that we publish and the high volume of comments we receive, we do not have time to debate a decision to remove a comment, close comments or ban a user. All such decisions are final.
10. Although we have the ability to prevent any IP address from accessing our website, we will deal with repeat abusers of our comment system by restricting them to read-only status.

Guidelines for you to follow

1. Mind your manners. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say in front of your kids or grandparents.
2. Respect the evidence. Don’t make claims you know you can’t prove.
3. Respect the opinions of others – debates are fine, but mean, rude or hateful comments about other users won’t be published.
4. Show respect for the views and beliefs of others, including religious and political beliefs. Treat other commenters the way you want them to treat you.
5. Referring to a Politician, must not also be racist, misogynistic, homophobic, sexual or genital-related.
6. Take responsibility for the quality of conversation. Try to raise the tone of the discussion instead of dragging it down.
7. Stay relevant. Do not post off-topic remarks.
8. If you have a beef with somebody in your community, region or workplace, chances are nobody except you even cares about it. Don’t use our website to express your personal grudges and to destroy the reputations of people you don’t like.
9. If you post a deliberately offensive or provocative comment with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them, your post will be deleted. Continue the behavior and you’ll be banned.
10. Don’t use our comment section to promote your business. Buy an ad.
11. The sex lives and drinking habits of public figures make for good gossip at the coffee shop. But 99 percent of the time, these rumors are not relevant to the issues. Keep them out of your comments.
12. Don’t put people down because of their religious beliefs. We will not tolerate any name-calling, personal attacks or harassment of any kind. Racism, bigotry, misogyny or any other inappropriate responses will be removed.
13. Stick to what you know to be true and don’t repeat hearsay. We’ll delete most comments that begin with phrases like “I hear that…” or “there’s a rumor going around that…”
14. If you’re working on behalf of a particular election candidate or political party, that’s great. But don’t use our comment section to conduct your campaign anonymously. Campaign in public.
15. Threats of harm towards anyone will be dealt with severely, up to and including reporting to the authorities, no exceptions.
16. Flagging is to be done only if the commenter has violated the Disqus Terms of Service, contains spam or offensive language. Flagging simply because you don’t agree with someone is unacceptable.

*All rules are subject to change.

We reserve the right to delete any post and ban any user. We do not give warnings. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.