Community Blog Guidelines

The DNN Community Blog should be a place not just for news and interesting information, but a source of conversation and sharing of ideas.  The Community Blog exists for DNN community members to post topics, and for other community members to provide the conversation via the comments.  The interaction between author and commenter is what makes blogging great!   

As part of making the community blog great, and to help keep things on track, some guidance is needed.  This applies to posts and comments equally; there’s no special treatment for authors.  The following guidelines will help ensure the blogs are a source of quality information for the community:

DO:

• Be positive. Communities don’t thrive with a lot of people being negative and depressing.
• Be constructive. If you want to make a negative comment, or a negative post, do so in a constructive manner.  Instead of just saying why something is wrong, bad etc., provide commentary that shows how things could be improved.
• Be respectful. People should feel like their participation is valued, even if you disagree with their opinion or feel they have made a factual mistake. 
• Provide context. If you are posting a link, the context of the link should provide an indication of the destination site, and what the reader is likely to find at the link.  The context should allow the reader enough information to make a decision on whether the link is worth following.  Your links should be a like a term paper reference rather than clickbait.
• Blogging about Open Source modules is acceptable and encouraged. However, you should limit posts about a single module to no more than one or two per month. We don’t want the community blog to be monopolized by a single module, but rather it should provide a good mix of content.

DON’T

• Short comments like ‘wow’ or ‘cool’ or ‘awesome’.   While the sentiment is great, it doesn’t really add value to the conversation.
• Support questions.  A short question to clarify content in a post is OK.  A detailed support request is not.  Please use the Questions and Answers function for asking questions.  It should be obvious that a blog post isn’t the right way to ask a question.
• Multiple questions by one commenter. We know – you’re too busy to write something short.  Brevity is difficult, but please try not to post endlessly and fill the comments with a one-way conversation with yourself.
• Really, really long questions. A close cousin to the support question and multiple question: really long comments break up the flow and actively make reading the comments less enjoyable.  Keep it short. Long comments may be trimmed by moderators to keep the comments readable.
• Personal comments about Dnn community members and Dnn staff members. Don’t be mean or personal.  If you have specific feedback, write them a personal message.  Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want said about a member of your family.
• Off-topic comments. If you have something to say that is unrelated to the post or another comment, say it in your own Forum thread. Don’t hijack the conversation. 
• Self Promotion/Advertising/Solicitations/Business link building. Blog posts or comments which are advertisements for a business or product, or are built as gateway linking pages to the Dnn Store are not allowed.  Use the Announcements forum for that.
• SPAM. We will delete SPAM with extreme prejudice and may ban the poster for repeated or really obvious SPAM. 
• Excessive links. The Community Blog is not a link farm for people to abuse.  Relevant links to source material in a blog post is acceptable as long as it is not excessive. More than one (1) link in a comment may be considered SPAM and we will take appropriate action.  All links in blogs and comments are subject to being automatically modified to include the nofollow attribute.

These guidelines are retroactive for all existing blog content and may be be updated in the future, as necessary. We reserve the right to moderate content as necessary to match the guidelines and ensure the community blog provides content that provides value to the entire community.