Dear readers and contributors,

First off, thank you for being part of the dagblog community. Or rather, thank you for being the dagblog community, for there is no community without you. Your eloquent writing, cogent arguments, passionate beliefs, and sharp wit has made dagblog a unique and (in our opinion) wonderful space in the blogosphere.

In any passionate community, there are bound to be strong ideological and personal differences. Our aim as moderators has been to protect and preserve the political debates while curbing the personal conflicts. Because so many of you have worked hard to respect these goals, we think that we have succeeded better than other comparable websites.

But it hasn't always been easy. While the vast majority of the discussions have been perfectly civil, we found ourselves spending more and more time moderating a relatively small number of recurring interactions within the site. Policing threads is the most unpleasant work that we have to do at dagblog, and the time and energy demands have become too much at times.

Though we've tried very hard to avoid permanently banning people, we will begin to do so with less hesitation, following a three-step process. The first step is a warning. The second step is a short-term suspension. The third step is a ban. We will communicate this process privately, using the email address provided at registration.

The main issue has been personal attacks--calling other participants morons or assholes or racists or sexists, or telling people "fuck you" or to fuck themselves, or a variety of choice references to genitalia. If you were using your real name in a coffeehouse or bar, discussions or relationships that are meant to continue are generally devoid of these things. Attack the argument, not the arguer is a good general idea, as it avoids nasty ad hominems. The full terms and conditions are laid out in our Terms of Service, which we encourage you to review.

To be clear, our moderation policy relates to personal attacks against dagblog participants, not political opinions. We are not trying to limit the political positions that people take nor the passion with which they express those positions. To the contrary, we have always sought and continue to seek a diversity of political views. If you don't engage in ad hominems or other violations of the ToS, we will not moderate your comments, no matter what you believe.

Also, please keep in mind that we cannot police every comment, and we do not have time to engage in a public discussion every time moderation happens, nor do we want threads to be about moderation. If you feel that someone has attacked you, do not publicly retaliate in the blog, or we may end up moderating your comments as well. Instead, please contact us privately, and we will address the issues you raise as best we can.

In the meantime, more happily, we have been working on recruiting new writers and trying to build relationships with other blogs or bloggers, so we can make this platform more interesting and vibrant for all of you here. We appreciate you so much. We hope you will not take a negative from our reminding folks that we will not put up with people calling each other idiots, drunks, racists, sexists, or body parts, regardless of whether they prefer Mao's Little Red Book, Dreams of My Father, or anything in between.  With your continued creativity and constant strong contributions, we think dag is a great place that we can help make even better.  We thank the many of you who read, comment, and e-mail, for making the user community what it is.

Best, G and A.

PS Sorry, we're not permitting comments on this thread in order to avoid the personal accusations and conflicts that tend to accompany such discussions. Feel free to email genghis or articleman @dagblog.com with feedback. (For some reason, our user contact pages aren't working. The site contact us form also goes to both us, and that is working.)