We’re here to help you understand important issues in Pennsylvania, and we want to know how we’re doing. We rely on you to give us constructive, insightful feedback on our stories and on how they effect you and your community. We also want you to keep our coverage fresh by sharing your own insights and experiences with the community PublicSource readers.

To help facilitate the conversation, we’ve put together some guidelines so you’ll know what we think is harmful or inappropriate. Harmful, inappropriate content will be removed and repeat offenders can be banned from contributing in the future.

These guidelines apply to comments and reactions on any PublicSource site or platform including social media platforms.

We also reserve the right to delete any and all posts that we feel are inappropriate.

No foul language. Foul language includes but is not limited to swear words, racial slurs, sexist talk or homophobic outbursts. Also, please don’t slightly misspell swear words to get them past our filtering. We might not catch you right away, but we will catch you eventually and we will not be pleased.

Aggressive behavior. Please don’t try and harm others with your comments. We consider it aggressive and harmful to disclose personal information about other people. We also consider terroristic threats against PublicSource, our sources, our media partners or any other person or organization to be unacceptable. Smear tactics will not be tolerated either.

Self promotion. Don’t use our commenting section to promote your business. Unless your business is something that directly relates to one of our stories and your post is about public service or helping others, it will be deemed spam, and removed.

Excessive and off-topic commenting. If you post too frequently, if your posts are extremely long or if your comments are off topic, you might receive a warning from us. If you fail to respect our request, we reserve the right to ban you.

Respect. Show it. Receive it. Spread it around.

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact Alexandra Kanik at alexandra@publicsource.org.