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Responsible, respectable commenting

As part of our community, we want you to feel free to share your opinions, and have your voice heard, but we reserve the right to accept, reject or delete any comment in whole or in part in order to maintain a positive, safe, non-threatening space for debate and discussion.

Please participate in the Washington Blade community with respect and good humor. Please do not use our comments sections to promote other websites or organizations, to bully or harass other commenters, article subjects or Blade contributors, to promote non-germane or irrelevant content, or use offensive language.

If accepted, we will not edit your comment other than to remove elements that violate our terms.

Elements of your comment that may be deleted before posting:

  • Profanity
  • Links to outside sites
  • Name-calling
  • Spamming or posting the same or similar language in comments on multiple articles

Comments accepted in part with elements removed will be clearly noted as such.

Comments that will be rejected:

  • Text of articles from other websites
  • Comments deemed racist, sexist, xenophobic, or otherwise defamatory
  • ‘Comment spam,’ or comments posted verbatim in several places
  • Ads or promotions by other organizations
  • Comments whose contents show an excessive use of CAPS LOCK

Comments may be automatically held for moderation by our system, depending on certain variables. If you are a first time commenter your comment is automatically held for moderation as well. If a comment is held for moderation, it may appear as if it is not posting properly, or the comment may disappear after a page refresh. This does not mean your comment has been removed, it simply means it is waiting on manual approval from one of our editors. Editors check for pending comments several times daily, however, your comment may take several hours to appear in some cases. There is no need to contact us in these cases.

Citing and quoting on your website

We welcome fair use of brief, choice excerpts of text content from the Washington Blade’s website with attribution. However — if you are thinking of quoting content from the Blade — here are some guidelines to be sure you are doing so appropriately.

Attribution:

All text lifted from the Blade should be attributed to both the Blade and the author of the piece and linked to the original article. If possible please link back to the original text that the quote is lifted from. For example:

Jon Doe at the Washington Blade writes “This will open a door for the community in the future.”

Quoting:

When quoting more than two or three sentences in a row, we prefer the quote be offset in block quote style, to separate the lifted Blade content from your original content.

Please do not quote more than two whole paragraphs of text at a time. If you’d like your readers to read more of a piece, please refer them to the original piece and provide a link.

Modification:

Quoting accurately is very important, and if modifications are made to the text lifted from the Blade, the modifications should be made clear and obvious and remarks included with the quote should make clear the text has been modified. This includes adding bold, italics, or strike-through elements, underlining, substituting words, or other modifications. Word or capitalization substitutions should be made within brackets or outside of quotation marks, and if sentences are only being used in part, an ellipses should indicate the abridging.

Sharing on social media networks:

Sharing links to Washington Blade content on social media networks is permitted and encouraged. Please use built-in link-sharing mechanisms on sites like Facebook and Google+, rather than copying and pasting full text of articles, which is a violation of copyright.

Republishing of RSS feed

The Washington Blade explicitly does not allow the republishing of our content through RSS feed or otherwise without express permission. The Washington Blade does not allow the republishing of full articles or similar behavior without express permission. The Washington Blade reserves the right to pursue legal action against violators of fair use, instances of plagiarism, copyright infringement or other instances of piracy.

Special arrangements

In order to create special arrangements for other terms regarding using Blade content, please contact us. We have created special relationships with non-commercial entities to allow unique terms for short-term content use.

Using photos

The Washington Blade employs several photographers and creates thousands of original images a year which many publications have requested to use in the past. When using images on the web, its important that you know that you have rights to use the images to keep yourself safe from legal action.

Washington Blade file photos are copyright protected and are not free to use. Fair use does not apply to most Blade file photos in most situations. We do have photos available for sale for one time use with a commercial license at our web store. If you would like to make a special arrangement to use one or several photos in a way that does not apply to our commercial license policy, please contact us and we will try to come to an agreement with you.

Purchase of a commercial license photo does not include permission to modify, nor does it include unlimited use. In order to obtain special photo permissions, please contact us to arrange terms.

The Washington Blade reserves the right to pursue legal action against instances of copyright infringement.

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