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Sphinn: Discussion & Comment Guidelines
Our two biggest guidelines when it comes to discussions and comments are these:
- Be respectful and polite
- Drop links only if they are relevant
We will merrily nuke any post if we feel people are behaving in some type of aggressive or immature manner that they'd never do to someone in person. Debate with each other. Disagree with each other. Argue forcefully with each other. Just keep it respectful.
As for links, Sphinn already provides a way for anyone to drop a link -- as part of the news story submission process. See the Sphinn: News Story Submission Guidelines for more more advice about this.
Of course, not every news story submitted will make it to the more Hot Topics page. One thing that helps is the Related Links feature, which looks for Sphinn topics that have the categories and tries to group them with similar things in Hot Topics.
A more direct and guaranteed way to associate a link to your own story with a Hot Topic is to add a comment to a Hot Topic story about it. That's fine to do. In fact, we encourage people dropping relevant links that help make a topic even better. Really! Here are some good examples drawn from our experiences with commenting at Search Engine Land:
In this interview with Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, Don Dodge came along and mentioned a great interview he'd done with Gabe last year. Excellent. We want people to know that. Thanks for dropping the link, Don -- it makes the story better!
In this story about Microsoft's eye tracking study, Gord Hotchkiss had a good follow up post that extended what was written about and added other useful observations. We asked him to please come by and link drop. He did. And the story was better for it!
Overall, if you're considering a link drop, just ask yourself if people heading over to your site are going to learn something new, unique or different on top of what's already being discussed. If you honestly believe so, drop away! You're not going to get banned. If you somehow seriously miss the mark with relevancy, we'll give you a heads-up.
Other guidelines:
- Discussions must be related to search,
social media, search marketing and internet marketing per our categories or
subcategories.
- The Water Cooler area allows for some off-topic conversations of a light tone, but sorry, no politics because of moderation difficulties.
- Give your topic submission a good title and description that helps
others at Sphinn know what it is about. We prefer that titles be done in
Title Case -- Upper Case The First Letter Of Each Word, Even The Small Ones
Like And But & Or.
- Please choose the most appropriate subcategory from the drop-down box on the submission form. Subcategories are those indented under a top-level category (such as Google SEO indented under Google). If you submit to a top-level category, an editor is just going to move it to the right subcategory. Save us time (please!). Pick the right subcategory. If you're uncertain of a subcategory, use the "other" option within any category.
- Sphinn is an evolving community. Please consider reading these threads for the latest comments regarding submissions:
