We love reading your comments. And we want our readers to see and understand different points of view.
Your comment may be an insight, opinion, suggestion, idea or feedback that is relevant to the subject of the article. It’s not an opportunity to sell, promote, or advertise any product or service. Keeping your comments concise will increase the chances that other people will read them.
Relevance
Comments should be relevant to the article and should not stray off topic.
Can I post links in comments?
We don’t publish external links in comments. This is for the following reasons:
- Stop spam.
- Bad links – we don’t want to edit users’ comments. If we allow external links, we either have to fix broken links or leave them. It probably wouldn’t be detrimental from a SEO perspective leaving bad links in comments as they are always nofollow. But broken links are just annoying from a user perspective.
- Sometimes links are legit to start with, the domain name expires, and a spammer gets control.
- We spend a lot of time fixing links in our articles. We’re a small band of merry open source enthusiasts. Our time is better served publishing high quality articles rather than fixing bad links in comments.
- Links in comments are automatically quarantined. This means there may be a delay in publishing the comment.
Can I suggest additional software to be included in a roundup?
Absolutely.
If we’re missing a program you like in one of our roundups, please include the name of the program, a brief description of what it does, together with reasons why it should be included. As above, don’t include a link; we’ll find the software.
There’s information I’d like added to an article. What’s the best way of going about it?
Post a comment to the relevant article. We’ll incorporate all relevant information into the article.
Are there other guidelines?
Please ensure your comment is relevant to the subject of the article. For example if a roundup includes the text “Free and Open Source”, restrict your comments to software that’s both free (i.e. no charge) and published under an OSI-approved license.
We publish curated roundups, so we deliberately don’t include every program that’s available. Software may not be included for a variety of reasons. For example, it might be substandard, it may be abandoned, or it might not be relevant to the roundup (e.g. its license conditions preclude it being included). This is not an exhaustive list of reasons.