Commenting Policy

About the ChinesePod Community

Welcome to ChinesePod! The enthusiastic, active community is one of ChinesePod’s greatest strengths. To keep it going strong, please help us out by following the guidelines below.

The ChinesePod community sections, namely ChinesePod community individual user posts and conversations, lesson discussions, group discussions, and private messages (PMs) are designed to facilitate a collaborative, open, and friendly learning environment. As such, allowed comments do not necessarily represent the views of ChinesePod. ChinesePod reserves the right to remove comments that are deemed to be in violation of specific commenting policies (see below).

Lesson Discussion Comments

For the benefit of all ChinesePod users, ChinesePod encourages focused, relevant comments in individual lesson discussions. “Relevant” generally means comments or questions about the language points or cultural points in the lesson. Comments deemed to be either unrelated to the respective lesson’s learning content or unhelpful in furthering users' learning may be removed by ChinesePod staff.

Out of consideration for Newbie and Elementary users, please provide English translations along with any Chinese (characters or pinyin) written in Newbie and Elementary lesson discussions. Blatant disregard for this courtesy may result in your comments being removed by ChinesePod staff.

Community User Posts/Comments

ChinesePod welcomes users to post comments of a more general nature in the community sections, as an individual post or as part of an existing thread, providing their content does not violate any ChinesePod commenting policies (see below).

Specific Commenting Policies

Technical and Content Fixes

Comments related to temporary technical glitches or problems, typos, or errors in text or audio content will be responded to by ChinesePod staff, then later removed (together with the relevant responses) within a month of the resolutions of those problems. We want the original commenters to know that the problems have been fixed, but leaving the original comments up long after problems are resolved only causes confusion for new users.

Vulgar or Offensive Language

Comments containing inappropriate language will be deleted by ChinesePod staff. A warning will be issued to the user responsible for such language. If the behavior persists despite that warning, the user’s commenting privileges will be revoked indefinitely. In cases of extreme violation, the user’s commenting privileges will be immediately revoked indefinitely.

Abusive Comments

Comments containing personal attacks directed at ChinesePod staff or other users will be removed. Normally, a warning will be issued to the user responsible for such attacks. If the behavior persists despite that warning, the user’s commenting privileges will be revoked indefinitely. In cases of extreme violation, the user’s commenting privileges will be immediately revoked indefinitely.

Libel

Libelous comments will be removed at the discretion of ChinesePod staff.

Spam

Spam (advertisements) will be removed at the discretion of ChinesePod staff. Users who have created accounts solely for the posting of spam will immediately lose their commenting privileges. Promotion of commercial or unrelated products and services will also be deleted from ChinesePod websites.

Language Partners

ChinesePod is proud to facilitate friendships and cross-cultural learning between China and the rest of the world. However, as mentioned above (see “Lesson Comment Discussions”), lesson comment discussions should focus on lesson content. If you are looking for language partners on ChinesePod, please do it through user posts in the Community section or other appropriate groups in the Community section. Language partner posts in lesson comment discussions will be immediately deleted.

Contact

Please note that in order for the ChinesePodStaff to contact you in the event of any issues, you must make sure you have updated your profile with your current email address. “I didn’t know” is not a valid complaint if you do not provide a legitimate, regularly checked email address so that we have an open channel of communication in the event of any issues.