Vanderbilt News Comment Policy

Vanderbilt University News and Communications welcomes comments from its readers, listeners and viewers on its various Web presences, including news.vanderbilt.edu, Research News @ Vanderbilt, myVU, Vanderbilt View, Facebook and YouTube.

On several of these sites, we use a tool called Disqus, that also pulls in tweets about these stories. Our goal is that our Web and social media presences are forums for rich and lively discussion, or just a meeting of the minds, on all of the news that tells Vanderbilt’s story.

We want to hear from you.

To ensure that these conversations remain safe, open and respectful, we moderate comments based on the following principles:

• All comments are reviewed and approved before they are posted. We reserve the right to remove any comment that we consider to be inappropriate for any reason.
• That said, comments that disagree with or criticize Vanderbilt are approved. We draw the line at any comments that use vulgar language, hate speech or personal attacks of any sort, and delete such comments immediately. When necessary, we block those users from commenting again.
• We all spam and any comments that are clearly promoting a commercial site or product that has no relevance to the story on which the comment appears.
• We encourage our users to stay on topic; repeated comments that are unrelated to the discussion may be deleted.
• Repeat offenders of any of these policies may be banned from commenting.
• Occasionally, we may designate a story as closed to comment.

Please direct any questions about this policy to Melanie Moran, associate director of University News and Communications.