BfB

This is how I run comments on BfB. You should read this carefully before posting a comment so you do not feel you have wasted your time.

Correspondence with BfB is not all for publication and most comments will not be published but it will be read. For a comment to be published it will have to make points which add to the article which includes challenging the points made.

If a comment is not published then the chances are it was appreciated. There is not going to be a lengthy debates over why it is not available for all to read. The judgement is made based on how interesting the comment would be to the reader.

Think of the comments as Letters to the Editor and maintain the same standards.

Comments will never be published without a real name being used. Your name is both your forename and your surname. Somewhere else your name might be not “Dave” or “@Bantam57” but if you want to comment on BfB then you have to include your full name.

Your comment might be edited for clarity but the chances are that if your comment needs a lot of editing to make it clear then it probably would not be published anyway. If one would have to change “u” to “you” seventeen times to make a comment readable one might be prepared to conclude that that comment would not be worth reading anyway.

Many comments will get a reply from the writer but this is not threaded debate and that reply will be the end of that part of the discussion. If you have a question, and if that question warrants a response, then include an email address. The place for personal correspondence is not a published comments section, at least not on this website.

Finally there may not be comments on an article. It could be because the article has automatically had comments turned off because of its age, it might be that comments have been turned off because discussion seems to be at an end. Finally it might be that I’ve decided the article will not be subject to comments. Sometimes a statement is a start of a debate, sometime it is simply a statement.

Some time ago there were few places to engage in online discussion and now there are many and you are free to talk about the subjects raised here there if you do not like the house rules.

But these are the house rules.