However, I’d love to hear what others of you are up to lately – feel free to comment here about whatever is going on in your busy lives!

1. If you write it, I’ll read it. Perhaps this is more a ground rule for me than for you guys, but I want to make it clear that I really appreciate your comments, and I read every one of them. I don’t have time to reply to everything, and sometimes I mean to reply but I forget or real life interrupts or, or, or… But I do promise you I’m reading all of them. If you really need to get my attention, and I haven’t responded to your comment, try emailing me at gorigirl.admin@gmail.com
2. I don’t mind criticism. If you disagree with me, and want to say it, you’re free to do so without fear of banning or censorship. I don’t even mind if you’re less than tactful in your criticism – sometimes I get in a huff and lose all tact too. Yes, that means I’m not going to censor anything, even if you’re insulting me or my husband or even delicious CoffyBite… as long as it’s somehow on topic. That said…
3. I don’t like insults for the sake of insults. What got Akshay/Amit banned wasn’t that he was criticizing me or Adtiya (you can see some rather negative posts of his that I left up because they were discussing his views on the site), but that he just started throwing out random (and crazy) insults. So if your post is just an insult, without a shred of value to the discussion, expect it to get deleted. If there’s even a teeny tiny bit on topic, though, I’ll probably bleep out cussing and insults and leave the bit that’s useful. If there’s a continued trend of straight-up insults, you might get banned, but I’ll still read your comments from the spam filter (see Rule Number 1). If the insult is particularly witty (and targeting me, rather than some poor innocent) I might even de-spam it. *grin*
4. Insults against other commenters or whole classes of people are not acceptable, ever.
   While I don’t particularly mind you attacking me if you so feel the desire, others do not have as thick skin as I do. I want everyone to feel that Gorigirl.com is a welcoming place where they can respectively voice their thoughts without being insulted or attacked. So don’t sling mud around at others – critiquing or arguing in a rational manner is fine, name-calling and hateful speech is not. Likewise, applying stereotypes to groups of people is not acceptable. You can discuss statistics, discuss personal experiences, and the like, but statements like “All Americans are stupid” or “Why are all Indians so smelly?” are just not cool. For more on how to carefully discuss stereotypes and generalizations without giving offense, read this post.
5. Sometimes your (innocent) comments don’t make it through the spam filter – it’s not intentional. This happens most often when you comment with a lot of links, but sometimes for no reason that I can tell. If your comment doesn’t appear immediately, don’t panic (or forget your towel)! It probably got eaten up by the spam filter, and I’ll clear it through as soon as I notice the problem. If you don’t see the comment appear in a day, email me.
6. Try to play nice, and keep it PG-13. I’m not a prude, I don’t mind cussing for the most part, and I’ve been known to throw an insult or two around on forums & blogs when I thought it was really warranted (and I was grumpy). So I’m pretty lax about those sorts of things here. For the most part, though, I’d appreciate it if you guys can self-edit enough to keep it PG-13 (I think that means you get one allowance of the F-word), and not get into spats. This hasn’t been a problem at all so far (barring today’s exception), and I’d love to keep it that way.
7. I won’t pull your comments up into a proper post without your permission. Again, here’s a rule for me, rather than you guys. I think it’s a bit presumptuous to pull up a person’s comments into a post without their permission (maybe they don’t want that much attention…), so I won’t do that unless I get your permission via the comments or email. That being said, if you’d like to have a post address your issue ( or if you guys would all just like an open thread to discuss Lahiri’s latest novel or whatever), just let me know and I’ll make it happen.

I think that covers it all, at least for now. I’m very, very, very anti-censorship so I’m going to give everyone as much leeway as possible… but don’t use that extra rope to hang yourself. If anyone has any questions, just let me know.

Tomorrow there’ll be another great guest post up from NeoKalypso, and Aditya will be writing something over the weekend, so be sure to check back. Thank goodness they’re willing to pick up the slack from me! Also, by popular request I’ve made some minor improvements to the blog: the email option for subscribing now works, and there’s an rss feed for the comments if you’d like to keep track that way.