24SevenCities was designed to be a forum for the community. It is a place for debate, feedback, conversation and opinion. We highly encourage user commenting throughout the website, and almost all articles, blogs, news items, and database entries (in other words, basically everything we publish on this site) is able to accommodate user response.

The only items that we edit before it publishes live on the site are our own personal blogs and the feature articles that we assign to writers. The work of our bloggers is generally unedited but closely monitored.

All comments are post-moderated. That means that you can post your comments immediately by clicking “Add Comment” below the entry. As soon as you hit “Submit”, your comment will be posted directly to the site. To ensure accountability, only registered users can post immediate feedback. You can register by clicking on New User at the top right of the screen.

We will not edit an entry without the author’s permission. However, we will remove messages that contain any of the following:

• Potentially libelous statements.
• Abusive, obscene or explicit language.
• Racist, sexist, homophobic or other slurs.
• Personal attacks or threats.
• SPAM
• Commercial product promotions.
• Information taken from another source without permission.
• Private personal information published without consent.
• Off-topic and unrelated comment.
• Hyperlinks to material that is not directly related to the discussion.

Often we will try to notify the user and explain why the comment was removed, however, we reserve the right to take down any comment that violates these guidelines at any time without prior notification. If you would like to know why a comment was removed, or if you wish to report activity that violates our guidelines, please send an e-mail to info@24SevenCities.com.

With this approach, legal responsibility of the content posted in the comment belongs solely to the user that submitted it. Legal liability on our part comes in if and when we have been alerted to a potential problem with the comment. Also, with as much as we try to accomplish here, it would be far too time-consuimg to screen every comment that is posted to the site.

While this makes for a more democratic kind of media, it does not always help in cases where comments are simply mean-spirited or factually wrong. In these cases, our philosophy is to follow up the entry with one of our own, respectfully and intelligently correcting and/or admonishing it. We hope that other users will do the same.