This site is all about sharing ideas, stories, tips and experiences on the journey towards sustainability.

With that in mind, welcome your comments. In fact we positively adore them. They add to the breadth of knowledge and the value of the community, which is the whole point of this site. So share your thoughts, tell the world and have a go.

However, (there’s always an “however”) in order to encourage discussion, keep interchanges on‑topic, civilised and useful for all readers, we do have some guidelines. And these are them…

Responsibility

As you’d expect, the opinions expressed on this weblog, through comments or community‑contributed articles, are entirely the responsibility of the various contributors. They’re not WWF’s comments or words.

We are simply providing the stage and not the script. While we’ll do everything within reason to ensure that anything posted is not defamatory, we simply can’t accept liability for anything that is not posted by us. Not the content nor any of the links included in them.

We may not agree with some things that are put up, so we obviously can’t endorse any views expressed, but we do want keep it open and fair for everyone. And of course we can’t provide any warranty on the products mentioned in the site.

We reserve the right to remove comments in accordance with our moderation policy.

Comment guidelines (Moderation)

WWF moderates comments based on this policy - so when you post a comment it may take a little while before it appears on the site.

If someone’s being abusive, defamatory, obscene, violating trademark or copyright laws, or otherwise generally behaving in an unacceptable fashion, then we are most likely going to either delete, edit or move that message or person.

For example, messages will not be kept if they contain: advertisements, profanity, comments that aren’t relevant to the topic, links to websites with objectionable content, personal attacks directed at story subjects, authors or another commenter. We will also remove "spammed" material that has been posted in multiple places.

We may get in touch with a commenter and invite them to resubmit the comment if we feel something in a comment crosses the line, but other parts of the comment provide value to the discussion.

While sometimes we all say things we wish we hadn’t after cooling down, if it happens too often, we’ll consider your comments as a form of trolling and we’ll delete the offending remarks. If we find someone doing this repeatedly, their IP address may be IP-banned from the site.

We don’t want anyone wasting anyone else’s time with such stuff n’ nonsense, so neither will we waste ours: this means that no public correspondence will be entered into regarding moderation decisions.

However, if a reader or commenter has a serious query about this policy, they can contact us privately. No problem.

Commercial messages, spam and links

Spam won’t be tolerated on this weblog (spam shouldn’t be tolerated anywhere). So we’re going to employ spam filters to automatically catch the majority of automated spam comments, and we will not approve any offending comments as part of our moderation policy.

To avoid being classed as spam in your comments, it’s best to avoid including links in your comments to content that is not related to the topic, even if these links point to non‑commercial content ‑ such links will be considered as spam by our filter and removed (it’s sensitive about such things).

That said, you may post commercially-oriented comments on blog posts when, and only when:

1. The product is directly relevant to the topic of the post;
2. The person posting the comment clearly discloses their relationship with the company/product (i.e. “I work for company XYZ, and thought that our ABC product was relevant to this discussion”).

Please don’t just post a press release or company blurb as a comment - take the time to craft a personal and authentic response to the topic/post.

Anyway ‑ all links will be marked with the rel="nofollow" tag which will cause them to be ignored by search engines. (If you don’t understand what we’re going on about, then don’t worry ‑ it’s only really of concern to a spammer.)

Identity

To make it as easy as possible for you to post a comment, we don’t ask for registration or any of those other annoyances before you can post a comment. We’d appreciate if you don’t abuse this by keeping a consistent identity across posts. It would be tops if you could use a genuine email address (which is only seen by us) so that we may get in touch with you if the need arises - for example to get more information about your ideas.

You don’t have to use your real name, pseudonyms are fine, but if you could use the same pseudonym on all your comments that would be great. Sockpuppets and astroturfing won’t be tolerated.

We also ask that you include any affiliations which you think could reasonably be perceived to affect what you write. For example, if you work for the company that makes a specific product (or a competitor), and you are writing about that product, please disclose the relationship.

Copyright

The text on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

Please note that all text contributions to the site are covered by this license - so if you post a comment, you are agreeing for that comment to be used under the terms of this license. The copyright in all contributions remains the property of the contributer.

Images on this site are sourced from a variety of sources, including WWF’s own photo library, Flickr - sometimes under a compatible Creative Commons license - and iStockphoto. All photos are used with permission for this site and we are grateful for the generosity of the photographers in allowing us to do so. Please check with the copyright owner before re-using any images on this site. Credits for photos and images appear in the alt text of the image tag.