Commenting Guidelines

The Cycling Independent’s comments section is a place for intelligent conversation. The more civilized and cordial your comments are, the more likely others are to join in the conversation.

So, here are a few requests:

1)    Think of TCI’s Comments Section as a dinner party, an event at which polite engagement is the norm. I expect everyone present not to insult my family (contributors), friends (readers) or the food (posts). That’s not to say you can’t disagree; we just want the comments to remain civil and be constructive so that they drive the conversation forward, rather than shutting it down. Put another way, think of the comments section as a paceline. We’d love for you to take a pull and contribute, but if you’re not going to help, please don’t screw it up for everyone else.

2)    Similarly, please contain your comments to the subject at hand. That also means that if we review a jersey from Company A, your review of a jersey from Company B isn’t an appropriate comment. We clamp down on this especially hard because we have no way of knowing if said review is written by an employee of the manufacturer in question.

3)    If you feel a need to review something yourself, or your comment is turning into a 500-word essay on the nature of man, we ask you to reconsider it. Brevity helps the conversation move. If your comment is more than a couple of hundred words, you might be in need of a blog of your own, or you might consider sending us a query. Robot got started with a query out of blue, and I’m glad he did.

4)    Just to reiterate: Feel free to disagree with us or with another reader; all we ask is that your comment be both civil and constructive.

Because TCI is a private enterprise we are under no obligation to publish comments from trolls. If we can’t find anything constructive in your comment, it will be deleted.

—Padraig