Comment Guidelines for the WordPress.com News Blog

We want the WordPress.com blog to be a place not just for news, but for a conversation. We love to hear what you think about new features, stats, and events. We love to engage with you. After all, it’s the interaction between writer and reader that makes blogging so awesome.

But to increase meaningful conversation, sometimes it’s necessary to reduce the not-so-meaningful bits. Here are the kinds of things we’ve been deleting in recent posts. Please avoid these types of comments:

• One-word comments like “Cool!” or “Thanks!” While we appreciate the congrats, we’d love to hear more about what exactly you love, and (even more importantly) why.
• Shameless self-promotion. Comments that contain links to your site within the body or otherwise encourage folks to visit your blog are a no-no. If you’d like to increase traffic to you blog, check out this page for tips.
• Support questions. Because it takes a couple of extra steps to get your question in to Support from a comment, leaving a question about an issue on the news blog usually results in slower assistance. For the speediest service, please read the Support docs and contact Support if you can’t find the answer there.
• Multiple comments by one author. We’re glad you want to be engaged, but please give others a chance to speak, too.
• Really long comments. Let’s just say that if you need to take more than three breaths to read your comment, it’s probably too long.
• Personal comments about staff members. OK, so sometimes they make us blush, it’s true. Nevertheless, they’re not appropriate for the blog.

We also delete comments that are written entirely in another language (there will be more language-specific news blogs for that), as well as those that are difficult to understand due to serious grammatical and spelling errors.

We hope you’ll appreciate and stand by these guidelines. Our goal is to make the news blog a place for both information and feedback. What you say matters. The more specific insights we hear from you, the better able we’ll be to adapt to your needs in future upgrades 🙂