Commenting Guidelines

This website has an active comments section, carefully maintained and curated by the author of this website. When commenting on this website, please keep the following points in mind:

• You may include HTML or Markdown in your comment. Comments are converted to HTML and sanitised before they are published on this website.

• All submitted comments are held for review. Whether a comment is published or not is at the discretion of the author of this website.

• Typically, only the following types of comments are published:

  • Comments that add new information to the topic discussed in an article.
  • Comments that offer new insight on a topic.
  • Comments that provide a neutral, supporting or opposing viewpoint.
  • Comments that report typos, errors or bugs on the website.
  • Comments that contain good humour.
  • Comments that express appreciation.

• Generally, rants are not published, even when the post you are commenting on is itself a rant. This website is the author's place to rant. It is not your place to rant. If you really need to rant, please do so on your own website. This guideline exists to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio in the comments section.

• Similarly, comments containing speculation about worldly affairs are not published. The intention here is to prevent the comments section from becoming an endless stream of speculative remarks. This is especially a problem for articles discussing academic, professional, social or technological issues. Such articles tend to attract a large number of comments speculating about how certain organisations may be causing those issues for their own benefit. While such speculation may have merit, this website is not the place to discuss it. If you feel strongly about such topics, please discuss them on your own website.

• Comments discussing politics are not published. Regrettably, many otherwise good comments have not been published because they contained political asides. Allowing political discussion in the comments section is a sure way to ruin this carefully maintained section. Therefore, comments containing political remarks are not published.

• When a comment reports a typo or error in an article, that comment is published on the bugs page rather than on the comment page for the article. This is done to collect contributions from kind readers on a single page.

• All comments deemed suitable for this website by its author become publicly available on this website at two places: either on the comment page for the article you commented on (example) or on the bugs page, as well as on the overall comment index page at comments.

• Do not submit sensitive personal data in your comments.

• Do not publish original research in comments. This may seem like a strange guideline, but there have been instances where people posted long comments containing mathematical material, claiming that they had novel results. The author of this website does not have the time to review such comments. If you want to share original research, please do so on your own website or in a more appropriate forum.