Expectations:
http://malayal.am believes in crowd sourcing. Our readers are very much part of us and we encourage every sort of activity that creates dialogues. We together take up the responsibility of indulging in informed debates. We welcome respectful, engaging and informative conversations.
Language policy:
Civil language is advised and swear words will be treated with contempt. Insults and / or personal attacks will not be allowed. The posting should not contain obscene, indecent or profane language in it, unless the content in discussion is about obscenity and profanity itself.
Threats:
Hate speech directed at identity, politics, ideology, caste, class, religion, race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, ethnicity, age, disability etc are discouraged and often disallowed. But if this helps making a point clearer, we may reconsider posting it, making sure that, no further insinuations are delivered. Threats on work, life and family of a contributor/commenter might lead to legal action. Defamatory statements and slander are disallowed. Spreading misleading or false information is prohibited. Responsible commenting is the norm and unsupported accusations are least welcome.
Spamming:
Spamming, self promotion and endorsement of products / services will face immediate rejection and the user might be banned from commenting further. Repetitive posting of the same content under different stories as separate comments will also be considered as spamming. Users could mark spam a comment posted using malayal.am's default comment interface and a comment marked spam by multiple authenticated users will be hided.
Copyrighted material:
Do not indulge in copyright infringement while posting a comment. Any link towards a proprietary material, posted, should be done only with the permission of respective copyright owner.
License terms:
The content you post will be treated as non-personal, non-confidential, and non-proprietary information. By posting your comments or other work, you grant http://malayal.am and anyone viewing this website, an irrevocable permission to copy, distribute, make derivatives, display or perform the commenter's work publicly and free-of-charge. This means that, the license terms will be akin to the copyleft norms advocated by creative commons attribution sharealike license version 3.0 or later.
How to comment:
To comment on a story in malayal.am, the readers have currently two choices. One is the facebook social plugin and the other is the default drupal comment module which make use of the content management system. Users are free to comment in either English or Malayalam or both. But please refrain from using Manglish in comments. Also, avoid all-caps, when commenting in English.
Facebook social plugin:
Facebook social plugin helps spread our content and keep your comment with your own facebook account. Legal responsibility over the content, you post using your facebook account is governed according to the terms of facebook user policy and malayal.am will not be liable for any irresponsible / unlawful / derogatory activities in which, a facebook user involve. We just display whatever content you post using this plugin with the help of an API, but are not retrieved or saved in our servers. Comments posted using this system is free from moderation as we have no control over the stuff provided. If a user who once commented using facebook social plugin delete their facebook account, the comments s/he put shall be automatically removed from the stream.
Drupal comment system:
The default drupal comment system make use of our CMS. Though, anonymous comments are allowed, we encourage commenting using your legitimate malayal.am account. You could register/sign-up for an account here. We expect all contributors to be respectful. Users are responsible for what they post and we share the responsibility of what is published.
Comment moderation:
Content posted using drupal comment system will have to go through a moderation queue as it is stored in our database and served from our servers. It may take some time for us to view your comment and either approve or reject it as the case demands. As a rule, we would try to correct any spelling / grammatical errors in comments and usually refrain from further editing the content. But we retain the right to edit it and publish only what is deemed appropriate. We retain the discretion to determine which comments violate our comment policy. We also reserve the right to remove violations. Intentional attempts to derail, hijack, troll or bait others into an emotional response would just invite a cold shoulder from the administrators.
Off-topic comments:
Users are advised to comment to the topic in discussion. Off-topic comments may or may not face rejection. This is a service provided by malayal.am and should not be used for hate-speech, abuse, derogatory remarks, unlawful activities and the like.
Tracking of comments:
We will keep track of the user accounts and corresponding IP addresses for matter of legal discourse as long as any law in the country of our operation demands. Users can also track their content through their profiles where all the articles and comments of the logged-in users would be listed. Any user would have the permission to view the content posted by any other user using this service.
Privacy:
We respect user privacy. Unless legally mandated, we will not reveal your email ID or any other identifiable information to a third-party and we will never use your private email as a target for spamming/promotion. Users are advised to never post any identifiable information like telephone numbers or email IDs inside the body of a comment. Please review our privacy policy here.
Feedback:
If you want to comment on a topic, but do not want the comment to be published, refrain from using the comment system and send us a feedback, instead.
Terms of Service:
Users are adviced to read and comprehend our Terms of Service which would supercede any other policy stated otherwise.
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