The Narwhal Comment Policy

Our Comment Policy

We all know comment threads can be the lowest of the low when it comes to online conversations. At The Narwhal, we’re trying to change that. That’s why we require all of our commenters to register with Disqus in order to participate in our comment threads. Disqus requires a simple email verification which both helps our team prevent spammers from overloading comment threads and helps hold commenters accountable for what they say.

We’ve got a few dos and do nots listed below for our comment policy, but the topline idea is this: civility and substance rule the day.

PLEASE DO:

  • Provide links to debunk falsehoods and verify facts
  • Contribute to the conversation with background information
  • Notify us of typos! Pretty please
  • Tell us what we’re missing in our reporting
  • Flag but don’t engage trolls
  • Be respectful of different perspectives and opinions

PLEASE DO NOT:

  • Undermine the conversation with derogatory language or profanity
  • Espouse sexist, classist, racist or homophobic language or ideas
  • Be a jerk — i.e. don’t intimidate, insult, defame, threaten or bully other commenters
  • Bully, threaten, name-call or troll
  • Feed the trolls. (But feel free to flag them)
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… which means our newsletter has become the most important way we connect with Narwhal readers like you. Will you join the nearly 90,000 subscribers getting a weekly dose of in-depth climate reporting?
A line chart in green font colour with the title "Our Facebook traffic has cratered." Chart shows about 750,000 users via Facebook in 2019, 1.2M users in 2020, 500,000 users in 2021, 250,000 users in 2022, 100,000 users in 2023.
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