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Eater Community Guidelines

Eater Community Guidelines

Welcome to Eater

Our goal is to foster conversations that are helpful, informative, and fun. Here are some guidelines for how to participate.

The short version

  • We hope you will help create great conversations in our community.
  • Don’t be a jerk, call people jerks, or react to jerks. We’ll remove bad stuff when we see it.
  • Respect and help the moderators.

How to interact with Eater

There are several ways to connect with us:

  • Follow us: Follow us on Twitter, DM us on Instagram, “like” us on Facebook, and subscribe to our newsletters (which you can reply to).
  • Participate at an event: Eater hosts multiple events every month, many of them “virtually” over Zoom or Instagram Live, and we keep the chat boxes open for your comments and questions.
  • Get in touch directly: Have a news tip? Want to contact the moderators? See a bug? You can do all of that right here or email tips@eater.com.
  • Post a comment on the site: Some of Eater’s sites have comments, and you must register (see below for instructions how) to comment on a story. Comments are organized into collapsable threads to make it easy to follow a conversation. There are also some keyboard shortcuts on comments — they’re listed on the right of the comments area. If you realize you’ve made a typo, you’ll have 90 seconds to edit your comment before it’s set in stone. New users may have to wait 24 hours before they can post a comment.

Rules of the road

Whether it’s at the bottom of an article or in the chat at a Zoom event, here are things that will get your comment removed and quite possibly get you banned. Note that this is not a comprehensive list. Our moderators reserve the right to remove anything we deem inappropriate.

  • Spam: We have a zero tolerance policy. Whether it comes from a human or a robot, spam will be deleted. This includes self-promotion. Generally speaking, promoting your projects here will be treated like any other spam.
  • Personal attacks: Don't attack/insult another user or editor. It's not helpful and it doesn't make Eater a friendly place. This includes calling other members trolls.
  • Illegal activities: Posting links to illegal downloads, ways to steal service, and other nefarious activity is not okay here.
  • NSFW material: Not allowed. Even images or links that could be considered borderline are not acceptable. A good rule of thumb is that anything beyond PG-13 will get you in trouble, but we reserve the right to remove any post we deem offensive. This goes for pornographic material, vile language, gore, and generally gross stuff.
  • Racism, sexism, and other discrimination: Attacking entire classes of people is just like attacking a single person: we'll ban you for it.
  • Trolling: "Trolling" is a big, messy term, but we know what trolls are and we won't tolerate it. If you're abusing the good conversations here at Eater, we will take your comments and posts down. This includes taking a thread off-topic.
  • Multiple accounts and throwaway emails: We don't allow multiple accounts per user. Using a disposable email address signals to us that you might not be here for the right reasons. You also may not create accounts designed to impersonate another person.
  • First post ban rule: If your first post on Eater is in violation of our community guidelines, it is clear to us that you have no interest in following the rules. The moderator team then reserves the right to ban new members who immediately violate our guidelines.
  • Promotional posts or comments: We don’t allow our commenters on any platform to promote deals or businesses.

Above all, our team of moderators works to keep conversation here friendly, engaging, helpful, and productive. If we feel a comment is harming that endeavor, we’ll take action.

See any of the above? Help us out by flagging (more on that below). Any comments that are a reply to spammy / inappropriate / trolling comments will be deleted with the original comment, so don't reply — just flag.

How to register and customize your profile

You can register by clicking “Join” at the top of the page and then you can either register directly or register with your Facebook, Google+, Yahoo, or OpenID. You may be interested in checking out our privacy policy and Terms of Use if you’re the legalese type. The next step is to customize your profile. You can upload a photo and tell everybody a little about yourself. You can also edit your account settings to link your Facebook and Twitter accounts and set up how you’d like to read comments.

Moderation

  • Isn’t this censorship? We’re trying to foster great conversation and we will remove comments that harm that endeavor. Editors have the final say on whether something fits within our community guidelines.
  • Questions about moderation: If you have a question about moderation, reach out via our contact form and we’ll talk.
  • Helping out our moderators: Please flag inappropriate comments for moderators to review. And take heed when moderators ask you to change your behavior.

Account alterations

Need to disable your commenter account, request a name change? Just get in touch with the moderators and they can help you out.