A Note On Comment Etiquette

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: one of the things that makes this site the site it is, is you the reader. That being said some people find it necessary to be negative on a frequent basis. I’ve seen communities come and go and I don’t want to be the ‘owner’ of a toxic community.

I thought I’d share some guidelines on what you should/shouldn’t be doing. First of all we do not censor comments unless they are racist/sexist/homophobic or anti religious (and in those cases we will try to remove the offending words if possible instead of outright removing the comment).

If you’ve never written a comment on the site before, or if you have and your comment contains link(s) then it will go into moderation pending approval from either myself or Chuck. We do our best to approve these as quickly as possible, but there is no need to e-mail us asking where your comment is unless it’s been a few days (in this case it’s likely the spam filter ate it).

Onto the guidelines:

• If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I get that it’s frustrating when people don’t read posts/search for answers before asking basic questions that have been asked 1,000’s of times before – but guess what you can simply not answer those questions and move onto the next comment! Let’s say somebody asks the following question: “does American Express do a hard pull for a credit limit increase?”
  • Bad response: you are a f***ing *****, do you not know how to use the search function?
  • Good response: The answer to your question is here: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/credit-cards/which-credit-card-companies-do-a-hard-pull-for-a-credit-limit-increase/#American_Express. Just for reference in the future you’ll save yourself some time by searching on the site or on google for an answer to questions like this. A lot of information can also be found on this credit card resource page: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/credit-card-reference-pages/
• Criticism is welcome, but keep it constructive. There are often things some readers don’t like about the site and I genuinely do like listening to those complaints as it gives us a chance to improve the site for you. For example, I know some readers were getting frustrated with the number of deals we were posting, so I’ve tried to move more of those to the daily deals page of our site. Readers are also the ones that encouraged us to not use credit card or bank account affiliate links and post less about manufactured spending methods. That being said (and this ties into my first point) if you give criticism that is constructive (e.g “Hey will, have you thought about posting some of the deals on a separate section of the website? I find it a bit overwhelming going through all the new posts and sometimes I miss out on a profitable credit card/bank account because of all the small deals clogging up the site” is much better than “this site sucks all you do is post s*** deals that pay you an affiliate commission”). I also appreciate readers that stick up for us, but if somebody is giving constructive criticism there is no need to attack them. They are entitled to their opinion, if you disagree with them that’s also fine but keep it friendly!
• Don’t randomly post your referral links with no useful comment. Everybody loves it when people use their referral links, some people love it so much that they want to post their links in every single thread even if it’s not tangentially related. The problem with this is that the comments section of every post become filled with links instead of any discussion/sharing of knowledge of what the post actually discussed. Instead we try to create posts where people can share their links (and then hopefully other readers will know to go there when they are looking to apply for a card/or whatever else it is). If you really want people to use your links, leave helpful comments (and give yourself a unique gravatar so people recognize your useful comments and then again when it becomes time to use a referral link).

As I’ve previously alluded to earlier, we’re going to make more of an effort to draw attention to useful comments and also rewarding those comments in the future (more on that at the end of the month). The vast majority of the people that comment on this site are fantastic and I really appreciate the useful, helpful & kind comments they leave. My aim in posting all of this is really just to tell you to be kind to one another, let’s keep this community constructive and helpful rather than toxic.