Thank you for being part of the Adventist Today community. Adventist Today believes in the value of unfettered dialogue. For years now, we've made it a practice to uphold free speech and not censor reader comments on our website. However, in the interest of maintaining a responsible forum for the exchange of all opinions that moves the debate or conversation forward in a respectful manner, and due to the rise of spam and trolls, we are following in the new tradition of many other media websites and moderating all comments daily before they are posted.

Our goal is to energize happy readers and grow our community with good conversation, with "good" meaning smart, constructive, informative, entertaining, engaging or all of the above.

Comments that do not follow our guidelines won't make the cut. We also expect a basic level of civility; disagreements are fine, but mutual respect is a must, and personal attacks, "pot shots" or abusive and insulting language are out-of-bounds. And finally, we won't tolerate personal agendas or crusades that kill discussion or steer faithful readers of good conscience away from our forums. Anyone hellbent on trying to sabotage our conversations to push for or against a particular view should be warned before coming to our forums.  

Here are our comment guidelines, which is posted for all registered readers when making a comment. Please make sure your comments follow our guidelines, or they will be edited or deleted before being published:

• No profanity
• No personal attacks, insults or "pot shots."
• Absolutely stay on the topic that began a given blog or article or your comment will be automatically deleted.
• While pseudonyms are acceptable, "anonymous" is not.
• No copying and pasting whole articles from other websites. Use the link button to refer the reader there.
• Rants, tirades and personal crusades for or against any particular point of view (i.e., doctrinal, social, political, scientific, etc.) posted ad nauseam is highly discouraged. Nobody likes repeated tongue-lashings from condescending know-it-alls. Expect to get shown the door in the form of the delete button if that’s you.

We at Adventist Today aim to create a community for dialogue that will strengthen the church and glorify God in the process. We recognize that healthy communities welcome disagreement, but we encourage everyone to be constructive in their participation.

To get a better understanding of why your comment didn’t make the cut, we encourage and highly recommend this article courtesy of Lifehacker. It offers some very good tips on proper commenting etiquette on our website.