Community Guidelines

The Blog Story is a space for focused, long-form writing. These guidelines describe how we expect people to behave here. They apply to everything you publish: posts, comments, your profile, your handle and display name, images you upload, and messages you send us.

The Content Policy sets out what may and may not be published; the Acceptable Use Policy covers how you may use the platform itself.

Write in good faith

Say what you mean, and be willing to be wrong. Argue with ideas rather than with people. Strong disagreement is welcome; contempt is not.

No harassment or hate

Do not target people with abuse, threats, sexual harassment, or campaigns of pile-on. Do not attack people because of who they are — race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability or serious illness. Do not post someone's private information, and do not encourage self-harm.

Keep it lawful

Do not publish content that is illegal, that infringes someone else's rights, or that promotes serious harm. If you believe something here infringes your copyright, use our Copyright & DMCA Policy. For anything else that is unlawful, use the report form — you do not need an account.

Be honest about your work

Publish only what you have the right to publish. Credit your sources and quote rather than copy. Do not present someone else's writing, photographs or illustrations as your own, and do not impersonate another person, publication or member of our staff.

No spam or manipulation

Do not publish repetitive promotional posts, stuff posts with links, or flood comment threads. Do not create multiple accounts to inflate claps, likes, ratings, follows or comment activity, or to evade a suspension. New accounts have a temporary daily publishing limit and a limit on outbound links per post; these lift on their own.

Mark sensitive work

Some subjects are worth writing about but need a warning. If a post contains disturbing or adult material that a reader would want notice of, mark it as sensitive when you publish so readers can decide for themselves.

Comments

Comments are part of someone else's page. Stay on topic, and accept that authors may turn comments off on their own posts. If someone is making the site worse for you, you can mute or block them from your settings without involving anyone else.

Reporting

Use the Report control on any post or comment, or the report form. Choose the closest reason — spam, harassment, hate, misinformation, illegal, or other — and add detail. Every report reaches our moderation queue and is reviewed by a person. Do not use reports as a weapon: deliberate false reporting is itself a violation.

What happens when rules are broken

Depending on how serious and how repeated the problem is, we may hide, mark as spam, or delete a comment; unpublish or trash a post; issue a warning; or suspend or ban an account. We aim to tell you what happened and why.

If you think we got it wrong, you can appeal from your appeals page, and we will look again. We publish aggregate figures about this work in our transparency report.

Contact us

Not sure whether something is allowed? Ask us before you publish:

• Contact form: send us a message — you will get a reference number to quote in any follow-up.