Comments at the Orthosphere are moderated by the contributors.
Comments containing personal insults toward contributors or other commenters will be deleted at the discretion of the blogger in response to whose post the comment has been made. By all means feel free to express disagreement, but do it respectfully. Personal insults against third party public figures (e.g., Christopher Hitchens, George W. Bush, Winston Churchill) are allowed, but insults against their families (presuming these are not public figures) are not. One exception is that no disrespect for Jesus Christ will be tolerated. Comments containing personal accusations relevant to the discussion at hand (e.g., claiming that a commenter or contributor is “working for the other side”) will also be deleted unless accompanied by compelling evidence. Repeat violators of these rules will be temporarily or permanently banned.
In some cases we may also delete comments on grounds such as libel, obscenity, incoherence or stupidity, or abuse of English grammar, syntax, or diction. The Orthosphere is meant to be a bastion of civilization, so barbarity of any sort will suffer the editorial axe.
Comments that are not immediately intelligible to a moderator will not be posted.
The Orthosphere 
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You ought to amend the text here to add that comments are moderated.
Dear Orthosphere group. I cannot find an email contact form or link. You might be interested in a recent article of mine published at the Council of European Canadians, that discusses the coronavirus lock-out now in effect around most of Canada, and its Canadian mastermind: Dr. Theresea Tam. The situation is very similar to that in the U.S., and I believe the various bodies discuss the issues cross-nationally, despite the appearance of disagreements. Here is the link – https://www.eurocanadian.ca/2020/04/who-is-dr-theresa-tam.html
Please, please install the plug-in that permits commenters to edit and delete their own comments. It’s easily installed. Many times, I have missed a spelling error, even though I’ve proofread; or, I’ve changed my mind about phrasing. I also want to be able to delete my own comments. Most other sites have this function. If you’re having trouble installing it, let me help you.
Richard, I’d be happy to install it, but I can’t find it in the list of plug ins or options offered to us by WordPress. Do you happen to know the name of it in WP? If not, I’ll give them a call and ask.
Wonderful! There are several really good ones, depending on the functionality you’d like. This one, for example: https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-comment-editing/ And you can get the options free with a 1 site license: https://mediaron.com/simple-comment-editing-options
I’d first back up the site (which my guess is you’re already doing periodically), then apply the plug-in without options to see how it works. Then add options. There are other commenting plug-ins that usually cost some money, but they have many features: https://winningwp.com/best-commenting-plugins-for-wordpress/
OK, thanks, you’ve saved me some time. I’ll look into this as soon as I can.
My pleasure!
The comments policy is low-key funny in some kind of a weird cosmic way I can’t really describe in words.
Its probably the level of detail and thought put into it, not to mention the phraseology, flow, and use of examples to illustrate the points.
Orthosphere writers be like: “THE INTERNET = SERIOUS BUSINESS!!!1”
Most blogs would just be like “don’t be a jerk, yo”, but not The Orthosphere.
We’ve had some pretty recalcitrant commenters for whom we’ve had to spell things out in great detail. Plus, many internet comment boxes are dark places of the earth, haunts of violence. We wanted to rule out the descent into that which so often carries blogs into oblivion. That being perhaps the intention of such uncivil commenters.
Oh believe me, I know the struggle.
I used to run a workout / nutrition / life advice group that was de-facto dominated by alt-right and AR-adjacent people .
It eventually got to the point to where I had something like, close to 20 rules, adding them in one-by-one as needed. That way, instead of having to explain why I was locking a thread for not being relevant to the discussion, I could just quick respond: “thread locked, see rule #3, political discussions not allowed, we’re all on the same page anyhow, and there’re a million other groups catering to that”.
The list of rules eventually got so massive I ran out of space according to Facebook’s max-character limit. I had to resort to text message speak to save space and cram them all in.
You’d be amazed at how people on the Internet, especially the types who gravitate towards our spheres, have such trouble following simple rules and staying on-topic.
I guess it comes with the territory. Our views are extremely marginalized by the mainstream, so the sorts who are of the spirit to resist the zeitgeist of the aeon are, by definition, extreme rebels. And those who’re rebellious against the mainstream are probably rebellious in most other areas of their life too. Which isn’t necessarily bad. Just that rebellious spirit needs to be channeled correctly, towards productive things. Like what Plato said about how heroism is merely the refined version of what happens inside of a high-energy troublemaker type of person when he learns how to control his urges and impulses– something that’s taken me a very long time to do myself.
I have found that, slowly, as I’ve gravitated towards Christian-centric websites, the number of headaches I experience has dropped dramatically, both on account of my more calm, collected and civil manner of dealing with other people, and not having to deal with others who’re only out to start trouble or be edgy for the sake-of– “by their fruits ye shall know them”
More broadly, I’m glad to see Nick Fuentes and his America First / Groyper club, a non-explicitly ethno-nat Christian movement, has subsumed the former White nationalist and AR scenes. Seems as though our broad collective is finally getting its stuff in order, took us long enough. Not that I haven’t also been guilty of edgy-posting and unnecessary divisiveness in the past