Thank you for being part of the Adventist Today community. Adventist Today believes in the value of unfettered dialogue. For years now, we've made it a practice to uphold free speech and not censor reader comments on our website. However, in the interest of maintaining a responsible forum for the exchange of all opinions that moves the conversation forward respectfully, and due to the rise of spam and trolls, we are following in the new tradition of many other media websites and moderating all comments daily before they are posted.

Our goal is to energize happy readers and grow our community with good conversation, with "good" meaning smart, constructive, informative, entertaining, engaging or all of the above.

Here are a few key examples of the types of comments we appreciate:

• Comments that exhibit respectful listening skills.
• Comments that are constructively critical.
• Comments that add value with additional insight, information, links and sources.
• Comments that show open mindedness to see another viewpoint.
• Comments that express appreciation in a learning and diverse community.

We also expect a basic level of civility; disagreements are fine, but mutual respect is a must, and personal attacks or abusive and insulting language are out-of-bounds. And finally, we won't tolerate repeated personal agendas or crusades that kill discussion or steer faithful readers of good conscience away from our forums. Anyone trying to sabotage our conversations with an agenda for or against a particular view or person should be warned before coming to our forums.  

Here are our comment guidelines, which is posted for all registered readers when making a comment. Please make sure your comments follow our guidelines, or they will be edited or deleted before being published:

• No profanity.
• No personal attacks.
• Absolutely stay on the topic that began a given blog or article.
• No copying and pasting whole articles from other websites. Use the link button to refer the reader there.
• Repetitive rants and tirades for or against any particular point of view is highly discouraged. Nobody likes repeated tongue-lashings from condescending know-it-alls.

We at Adventist Today aim to create a community for dialogue that will strengthen the church and glorify God in the process. We recognize that healthy communities welcome disagreement, but we encourage everyone to be constructive in their participation.

To get a better understanding of why your comment didn’t make the cut, we encourage and highly recommend this article courtesy of Lifehacker. It offers some very good tips on proper commenting etiquette on our website.