How we moderate user contributions

Your Garden Is Fab really really tries to avoid being the user-contribution overlord in comments, the blog, and our forum. That being said, we do expect folks to maintain a certain level of civility and good will. Gardening should be fun and welcoming. Reading user contributions should be like walking through your neighbor’s garden, preferably with a margarita in hand, chatting about this and that, seeing things through new eyes, and listening to how things have worked out for others.

Our Terms of service describe what’s okay and what isn’t okay when it comes to posting in the forum and commenting in the blog. Here are the relevant parts:

You agree that you won’t:

  • Use our site or service to defame, threaten, stalk, defraud, incite, harass or advocate the harassment of another person, or otherwise interfere with another user’s use of the site or service.

  • Use the site or service to post sexually explicit material or pictures that include nudity.

  • Use the site or service to transmit or post spam, junk email or other mass messages, whether commercial in nature or not.

  • Use the site or service for promotional or commercial purposes, except as expressly permitted by Your Garden is Fab, LLC.

  • Use the site or service to promote bigotry or discrimination.

  • Use the site or service to violate any third party right, including copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, moral right, privacy right, right of publicity or any other intellectual property or proprietary right.

Holy smokes! That’s a lot of verbiage. It seems like that could be distilled down to just:

  • Don’t be an a$$hole.

But we digress.

So, yeah, we do expect everyone to be nice to each other. Disagreement is perfectly groovy, but keep it, you know, civil. Here’s some more on that topic:

  1. Please treat other members with respect. If someone is disrespectful to others, we’ll remove their posts. Sometimes this is a hard line to draw and we’re going to use our judgment. Overlords.

  2. Please don’t attempt to moderate other members. We know how tempting it is to help make other people ‘better.’ But, boy howdy, that usually backfires, big time. If you think someone is violating our terms of service, report the post, but please don’t take anything up with the poster directly. We recommend a disdainful look and a chilly silence. If someone does call people out directly and publicly in the forum, we’ll step in and remove their posts. Overlords.

  3. Please avoid those classic divisive, off-topic subjects. This a gardening forum, for goodness sake. We want you to have fun, and there are tons of places on the Internet where folks can engage in a lively convo on politics or religion, so we’ll remove any deliberately provocative posts on these subjects. Sometimes the lines are blurry, and we’ll use our judgment. Overlords, once again.

If you repeatedly break the rules, we’ll disable your ability to post contributions on our site. We might send along a private note first, but not always. And we won’t discuss moderation decisions we make for one member with other forum members. That just wouldn’t be cool.

If you have comments about moderation, please feel free to contact us. We’ll be happy to take a look at your thoughts, so long as, you know, your comments are civil. ;-)