Our moderation approach

Our moderation approach supports conversations and sharing ideas. We ask for your name and get you to answer a question so we know you're human (and not a spam bot). You can use a pseudonym if you wish, but please consider using the same one regularly to support the creation of an online community.

We've tried to make the questions we ask easy to understand, and have avoided a standard "captcha" test to help our visually impaired readers. If you're struggling with our questions, please let us know. We want this blog to be accessible to everyone.

We're a small team and we have to check all comments one by one, during work hours. Please don't get upset if it takes us a little while to process your comments.

There are times when comments might not be published. We're trying to create a place where people feel safe to talk about interesting aspects of our work. Threats, trolling, and general meanness don't fit in with the sense of community we're trying to foster. We also won't be drawn into political discussions, because that would be wholly inappropriate for our Office. With off-topic stuff, we'll do our best to direct you to a site better suited to what you want to discuss. We want to encourage debate, not shut it down.

If you'd like to be part of the discussions, please be nice. Pretend you're at a dinner party - don't yell at people, call people names, be overly silly, bore your dinner guests by trying to sell them something, break the law, or pretend to be a lady called Emerald when you're really a guy called Bruce. Also, slurs and hate speech, attacking someone based on their race, religion, gender, nationality, or sexuality are just not on.

We're open to feedback, so let us know if you have anything to say about our moderation policy and process.

Your privacy

If you choose to disclose personal information in a comment on a blog post, that information will be seen by our site administrators and some staff. If we publish the comment, it will be visible to members of the public. Please don't post or otherwise transmit any sensitive information.

A note about copyright

We hold the copyright on all information available on or through this website, including the blog posts. You can reproduce our material for personal or in-house use without further permission, as long as you reproduce it accurately, do not seek to mislead anyone with it, and acknowledge the source. For any other use, please contact the author (where named) in the first instance or email webmaster@oag.govt.nz.

If you want to reproduce any material on sites that we link to, you must get permission from the copyright owner for that site.