Comment Policy

Adapted from Guardian Unlimited

Snack Girl provides a number of opportunities for people to interact with each other around content published on our site. This include discussions related to specific blog posts as well as our talk boards. Our aim is to ensure that this community is inclusive and safe, as well as being a platform for vibrant discussion. We want Snack Girl to be a place where you will always find lively, entertaining and, above all, intelligent discussions about snack foods.

There are 9 guidelines we would like you to be aware of, and which we expect all participants in the community areas of Snack Girl to abide by:

1. We welcome hearty debate and dissent, but the key to maintaining Snack Girl as an inviting space is focusing on intelligent, insightful and passionate discussion of issues.
2. Please respect other people's views and beliefs. We understand that people often feel strongly about things, but we will consider removing any content that other members might find extremely offensive or threatening. We actively discourage obscenity and mindless abuse. Personal attacks on other members have no place in an intelligent discussion.
3. We will not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of hate-speech, or content that could be interpreted as such. We recognize the difference between criticizing a particular government, organization, community or belief and attacking people on the basis of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.
4. We will remove any content that may put us in legal jeopardy, such as potentially libelous or defamatory postings, or which is posted in potential breach of copyright.
5. We will remove any posts that are obviously commercial or otherwise spam-like. Our aim is that Snack Girl should provide a space for people to interact with our content and each other, and we frown on commercial entities passing themselves off as individuals.
6. Think before you press the publish button. Remember that this is a public forum, and your words will be archived on this site and available for anyone to find for a long time - the web has a very long memory.
7. Keep it relevant. The vast majority of conversations on Snack Girl relate to a specific blog post or topic within a talk board. We know that some conversations can be wide-ranging, but if you post something which is completely unrelated to the original topic then it may be removed, in order to keep the thread on track.
8. The platform is ours, but the conversation belongs to everybody. We want this to be a welcoming space for intelligent discussion, and we expect participants to help us achieve this by notifying us of potential problems and helping each other to keep conversations inviting and intelligent.
9. And remember... Text isn't always a great medium for conversation. Remember that tone of voice - sarcasm, humor and so on - doesn't always come across when using words on a screen. Be aware that you may be misunderstood, so try to be clear about what you are saying, and expect that people may understand your contribution differently than you intended.

In short, if you act with maturity and consideration for other members, you should have no problems.

If you have suggestions or questions about any aspect of community participation on Snack Girl you can write to service@snack-girl.com.