Comment Policy

Many of the posts on this website allow you to leave comments and discuss the article with other readers.

Your comments are greatly appreciated. They contribute to the conversation of an article and provide valuable feedback about how helpful it was.

Please note, however, that this is not a public forum. All comments are moderated, to prevent spam and to support conversation that is helpful and constructive.

This site uses Akismet anti-spam to automatically prevent known spam and comments that match common spam patterns from appearing. For more information on how Akismet processes a comment, see my Privacy Policy.

All new comments, including genuine non-spam comments, are held for approval, meaning that, once you make a comment, it may not appear immediately. Most comments are approved within 1 day.

If you believe a comment you have made has been automatically rejected, please contact me. It’s important to me that, as a reader, you are able to provide feedback if you want to.

Genuine comments from real people are, generally, never rejected. In the rare case that one is, the following policy will be adhered to:

Why a comment may be rejected

Generally, all well-meaning comments from real people are approved, whether negative or positive.

Below you’ll find the general rules for which comments are approved or rejected.

1. Spam comments

All Spam comments will always be rejected. These generally include any comment with an author URL or a link in the comment itself that does not relate to the content of the article, but may also include comments that are generated automatically by bots or AI, or otherwise don’t appear as if a real person wrote it.

2. Marketing comments

Comments made for the purpose of marketing a product or service will usually be rejected as a rule, even when made with good intentions.

3. Offensive or abusive comments

Comments that are abusive, provocative or generally offensive will always be rejected. Be nice to each other please.

4. Off-topic comments

Comments that are clearly off-topic or inappropriate will usually be rejected.

5. Unhelpful comments

Comments that are considered to be unhelpful will sometimes be rejected. By all means, correct, challenge, criticise, disagree, but do so in a way that helps readers to understand more, not less. An example of an unhelpful comment could be a reader stating “You shouldn’t do that” in response to a tutorial article, but without explaining why. Such comments are part of the reason that forums can be so unhelpful for beginners. In most cases, comments like this will be allowed but challenged, in extreme cases they will be rejected.

6. The article no longer accepts comments

Comments may be disabled for specific articles (for example if the article is old). There are no precise guidelines as to when I might lock an article’s comments, other than when allowing comments is no longer considered to be helpful or manageable for an article.