YES! Commenting Policy

We welcome you to join our online discussions—just be sure to follow these guidelines.

Here at YES! our mission is to help you build a more just, sustainable, and compassionate world. That includes providing ways for you to bring your thoughts, ideas, and expertise to the table, to add to our—and each other’s—work. We use Vox’s Coral platform to host conversations about our work, stories, and the pressing issues that we cover. To ensure we can facilitate high-quality and productive discussions, we only allow comments on select stories. Subscribe to our newsletter to see new and active discussions.

If you decide to participate in our commenting community, there are a few ground rules we ask you to follow. Here are the things that we don’t allow:

Intolerance: We do not welcome homophobia, sexism, racism, classism, anti-Semitism or other intolerance. Keep in mind that this does not always take the form of racial slurs. If you find yourself typing “I’m not racist, but…” or “I’m not sexist, but…” you should probably think twice.

Violence: Threats of violence or threats to any individual or group’s safety are always unacceptable.

Name-calling: Insults directed at our writers or other commenters will be deleted. If a post is otherwise well-thought-out, we reserve the right to remove the insult and publish the remainder of the post. If a thread devolves into name-calling, we will delete the entire thread.

Trolling: We hope to attract comments that are intellectually stimulating and interesting to read. If you don’t have anything substantive to add to the conversation, your comment is subject to moderation. Commenters who obviously intend just to pick fights, be nasty, naysay, get attention or get a reaction will have their posts deleted

We may also delete comments that contain:

  • Personal information, such as addresses, phone numbers, emails, etc.
  • Identical, repetitive messages posted on multiple articles.
  • Reproduced copyrighted articles from other sources.
  • Blatantly promotional content.

When you see a comment that violates our policy, please use the “Report” option located in the bottom right-hand corner of every comment. A moderator will then decide whether the comment stays on the site. Keep in mind that moderating can be subjective and final decisions rest with YES! staff.

If a commenter repeatedly violates our policy, they will receive e-mail notification that they are in danger of being banned from the site. If the commenter continues to violate our policy, they will be banned.

Please note that comments may be pre-moderated, so in some cases there will be a delay before they appear.

We reserve the right to use comments posted to the YES! website in our print and digital editions, our digital-only content and our email products. We may edit comments for reasons of space and clarity. We will never publish commenters’ email addresses without their explicit consent.

Finally, we’ll continue to read and respond to messages sent to us in other forums. You can write to our editors by emailing [email protected].