Our Participation Guidelines are written to make clear our approach to community interaction at WestEndTheatre.com, including moderation of comments and other content submitted by our users.
Our aim
We provide opportunities for users to discuss articles that we publish and leave reviews for shows that we have covered. Our objective is to provide an environment where users feel that they are able to contribute and that as many as possible actively get involved on a regular basis. We hope that these guidelines will explain the standard of behaviour we expect from users and encourage more people to join in with the discussion. They work in tandem with our website terms of use.
In these guidelines, the following words and expressions will have the following meanings:
- Content means any text, files, images, graphics, photos, video, sounds, musical works, or any other material that a user posts on or through our services.
- Real Name means your first name and last name e.g. John Smith. You must use your surname in full. Your first name should either be your full first name, or a commonly recognised variation (i.e. “Liz” for “Elizabeth” or “Will” for “William”) or the initial of your first name. You may include your middle name, if preferred, either written in full or as an initial, though a middle name is not a substitute for first or last names.
- Us, our, we means WestEndTheatre.com.
Community standards
There are community standards that we expect users to follow when interacting with us. These are:
- Subject to certain exemptions required by local data protection and privacy laws, users that post or engage with comments must use a Real Name as their display name, as defined above.
- Please ensure comments are legal, tasteful civil and respectful. Personal attacks, harassment and inappropriate behaviour will not be tolerated.
- Choose your words carefully and do not use language that is threatening, defamatory or offensive to any individual or groups. Understand that words which you deem acceptable may be offensive to others.
- We acknowledge that there may be criticism of our journalism but personal insults or repeated attacks directed towards our journalists will not be tolerated. If you would like to comment on the impartiality of an article, please contact us.
- Maintain a respectful tone, especially when discussing heated or controversial issues. We realise this can be hard and we recommend that users re-read comments before posting.
- Help us take responsibility for the level of conversation on the website by ensuring comments are relevant and on topic. If you think discussion on an article is moving away from the intended topic, please email us and we will investigate.
- Where you refer to reports, studies, other articles and additional information, do your best to link to the original source. This extra context is conducive for having interesting and useful discussions and will result in better feedback from our other readers.
Moderation of user generated content
We moderate comments made by our users in accordance with these Participation Guidelines and content that does not breach these guidelines may be published. Our aim is to ensure that all users enjoy our services.
In order to ensure our users remain compliant with our Participation Guidelines, we have created a list of prohibited interactions. These do not necessarily cover all prohibited interactions. Interactions must not:
- promote discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, gender or age, or links to articles or websites that do the same;
- harass, threaten or attack anyone or otherwise behave in a way that could cause annoyance or distress to our users;
- be obscene, vulgar, offensive, pornographic, profane, sexually explicit or indecent;
- use swear words, act in a threatening or abusive manner or promote violence;
- make libellous or defamatory comments about others;
- contain any information which personally identifies another individual (such as name, phone number and address) or breaches data protection law, unless it is editorially justified, in the public domain or express consent has been obtained;
- constitute or encourage conduct that would be a criminal offence, give rise to civil liability or otherwise violate any local, state, national or international law;
- prejudice pending or on-going criminal or civil court proceedings;
- violate, plagiarise or infringe the rights of third parties including any copyright, trademark, patent, rights of privacy or publicity or any other proprietary right;
- breach any legal duty owed to a third party, such as a contractual duty or a duty of confidence;
- contain any information, software or other material of a commercial nature;
- contain advertising, promotions or commercial solicitations of any kind, unless editorially justified;
- be likely to upset, embarrass and alarm any other person;
- constitute or contain false or misleading indications of origin or statements of fact;
- be used to impersonate any person, or to misrepresent your identity or affiliation with any person;
- contain any virus, Trojan horse, worm, time bomb, cancelbot or other similar harmful programming routine;
- contain emojis (pictographs of faces, objects, and symbols).
We will refrain from publishing content that breaches these guidelines and may edit or remove a comment we feel has caused offence to our users. This is in the interest of keeping our community areas appropriate for the vast majority of the people who visit.
If a user seriously or repeatedly violates these guidelines, we will take whatever action necessary to ensure these violations are prevented from continuing and we reserve the right to remove, suspend or discontinue your opportunity to submit, post and/or upload content at our sole discretion and without further recourse to you.
At all times, we reserve the right to take actions that we think will benefit our users. We will always try to communicate any changes that affect our users, although this is not always possible. All actions taken by us are final. If you have any queries or suggestions about how to improve participation with us or about any aspect of our Participation Guidelines, please contact us.
General
We may amend these Participation Guidelines or any of our terms to ensure that we remain compliant with relevant laws and regulations and to ensure that we are constantly improving your subscription experience.
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