Website & Forum Comment Policy

Website & Comment Policy for Culture Discovery Vacations

Effective: Jan 01, 2019

You will find that some of our pages offer you the opportunity to leave comments that are available for the public to read. We do this because we know our guests can often add more to the conversation. Perhaps it is a page on which we provide packing tips. We know some of our guests may want to contribute to help others, and that is awesome! As such, we want you to feel at home when you post a comment on CDV's websites. We want everyone to feel at home posting comments here. We don’t know what your home is like, but we know how we expect people to behave when they visit ours. That’s why we reserve the right to delete comments and ban users as needed to keep the comment threads here civil and substantive.

Our No. 1 house rule is simple: Don’t be a jerk. The purpose of our commenting is to help others, but we know from time to time people can get a little "passionate".

Our No. 2 house rule is also simple: No advertising or linking to other sites. We know that gizmo or gadget is fantastic, and if we believe it is worth adding a link somewhere, we would like to be in control of that kind of stuff.

So, if you would like to be the kind of commenter we’d love to bring home and share a plate of pasta and a bottle of wine with, here is what we love to see in comments:

  • Weigh in with smart, informed ideas that contribute further to the story.
  • Demonstrate and share the intelligence, wisdom, and humor we know you possess.
  • Don’t feed the trolls. You wouldn’t dive into a debate with our ill-informed, weird uncle Fred just for the heck of it. And you definitely wouldn’t feed him. (We know you have an Uncle Fred, right?) Downvote and flag comments instead.

Although we can’t be everywhere at once, here are some of the kinds of comments we’re going to do our best to keep off of our site:

  • Promoting ANY brand, product, website, or blog. If you have found something that will change the world and really needs to be on our website, fill out our contact form and allow us to decide if and where we will place it.
  • If you have constructive criticism or spot a typo or an error, could you just fill out our contact form and allow us to fix it? It doesn't add the the conversation, and we will fix it quickly :-)
  • Impersonating authors or other commenters. We can’t believe we have to say this, but: Don’t do that. It’s kinda creepy.
  • Comments that make it clear you didn’t read the article. Enraged that we didn’t mention X in a story about Y? Slow down, Speedy Gonzales. We would love to talk about it, nicely :-)
  • Comments that are completely out of left field. Sometimes discussions veer off a bit, but are still related to the original subject. That is fine. Hijacking the conversation to promote off-topic commentary is not.
  • Threats< — no matter how vague — against the author or other commenters. Remember, we are all people here behind these monitors.
  • Racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, you get the drift. Call us the PC Police, fine, but don’t say we didn’t warn you when you get banned or deleted.
  • Trolling. If you’re just out for a good trolling and are not contributing meaningfully to the conversation, we’ll be pushing you back under the bridge