The Breaking News feed is for posting and commenting on recent news or opinion articles.
The Religion feed is for posting and commenting on topics on or about Religion.
The Perspectives feed is for our Authors to publish original opinion pieces on a variety of topics.
About our authors…
If you are a regular contributor and would like to be added as an Author in order to publish and edit your own posts (using the much more feature-rich article authoring tool in the backend) then please submit your request here. You will need to provide us with an email address for this, so please have something non-personal that you are willing to use for this purpose.
About our moderators/editors…
We have a team of moderators from mixed backgrounds, politics, countries, genders and beliefs. When we make moderation decisions, they are applied against the rules of engagement and not our personal bias. We are also volunteers; we do this for you! For the most part it is a thankless job and not without it’s rewards or frustrations. Every Disqus comment moderator is also an Editor on this site. They can approve, delete, and edit posts as necessary. Please note that moderators may also feature comments from time to time to enhance and/or promote discussions. The comments of our individual mods or their featuring of comments does not imply any BNR endorsement of specific political or religious views.
Note: Moderators have discretion to ask CM’s to tone down rhetoric/borderline violations of the following rules. Please follow the directions of the moderators and move along if directed to do so. Attacking the moderation, our moderators, or our forum in general will not be tolerated. If you have an issue then please bring it to our attention for resolution at The Den.
Rules of Engagement
- No insults or personal attacks against other posters (including moderators) or their family members. i.e.
- name-calling
- accusations of rape or murder
- accusations of bestiality, incest, pedophilia or sexual activity of any kind with minors
- accusations of being mentally ill
- accusations of being stupid
- accusations of being a supporter of rapists and/or pedophilia
- a meme or image that suggests any of the above
- No racist, bigoted, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, pedophilic, incestuous or bestiality comments/memes.
- Examples of words that are not allowed: homo, tranny, fag, n-words, cracker, etc.
- “Groomer” has been added to BNR’s restricted word list. Moderator discretion will be applied to discern adherence to the spirit/intent of guideline #2.
- What IS allowed with caveats:
- Insulting a politician, public figure or any other subject of an article is allowed. (Moderator discretion will be applied to discern adherence to the spirit/intent of guideline #2.)
- i.e. the President, an actor, the CEO of a company, just some dude in the article
- comments regarding pedophilia, incest, etc may be allowed if the subject has been convicted of or is facing such accusations.
- Insulting a geographical or political group is allowed so long as it does not violate Rule #2.
- i.e. lefties, righties, liberals, Republicans, Russians, Americans, etc.
- Generalized commenting about non-political groups of people is allowed so long as it does not violate Rule #1.
- i.e. religious, gender, racial, people with disabilities, sexuality/gender identity
- Insulting a politician, public figure or any other subject of an article is allowed. (Moderator discretion will be applied to discern adherence to the spirit/intent of guideline #2.)
- What IS NOT allowed at all:
- The word “retard” (or any derivative like “libtard” or “contard”) is not allowed on this forum at all.
- Note: While “dotard” is not a derivative of “retard” it is still an insult and considered name-calling in Rule #2.
- Advocating violence or threatening harm are not allowed on the forum.
- Attacking people for posting articles. You may bash the article or the source, BUT YOU MAY NOT ATTACK SOMEONE FOR POSTING IT.
- “Heil Hitler”, “clown world” or other similar nazi dog whistles. Nazis are not welcome on BNR.
- The word “retard” (or any derivative like “libtard” or “contard”) is not allowed on this forum at all.
- Quality Control:
- English only please. This is an English-language forum. Non-English posts or comments may be deleted at the moderator’s discretion.
- No copying and pasting lengthy paragraphs from other sites (a link to the information, with a short description of where to look will be allowed).
- No promotions of any kind unless pre-approved by a moderator.
- Excessive use of All Bold and/or ALL CAPS may be deleted at the moderator’s discretion.
- General Channel Rules:
- No “sock puppets” (alternate accounts) designed to circumvent a ban.
- No profane usernames or avatars please. Moderators may request a change if necessary.
- Do NOT abuse the flag feature on comments that do not break our community guidelines.
- Comments or discussions regarding moderation actions or events either here or in The Den belong in The Den.
- The following images/memes are not allowed on BNR:
- Pornography or sexually explicit images
- Graphic images of death, gore, blood, feces
- The death or torture of either humans or animals (including lynching images, whether real, historical, or even cartoon)
- Groyper Frog, SS or Nazi rune logos, or any other Nazi symbolism will not be allowed on BNR to promote their hate. (Exception: article photo from an OP). All Nazi symbols are subject to Moderator discretion.
- Pepe the Frog images/memes will be allowed, but will be subject to Moderator discretion as to intent.
- All images/memes that utilize symbols appropriated by hate groups will be allowed/disallowed subject to Moderator discretion as to intent.
- Posting the same meme/image repeatedly on a page.
- Any image the mods deem sufficiently NSFW or violates other community guidelines
All other Basic Rules for Disqus are in force on BNR
Special rules regarding Moderators
- A moderator who is engaged as a regular comment poster in a conversation may not moderate in that conversation the person with whom they are engaged. This is to prevent any appearance of personal bias.
- This restriction applies just to that conversation, not to the whole page or elsewhere where the user has posted.
- A moderator may call upon another moderator to intervene if necessary.
- Any poster taking advantage of this rule in order to troll a moderator will be dealt with harshly.
- Please do not block the moderators
- Blocking a mod runs the risk of not receiving moderation and/or direction from them, which may result in a ban if warnings go unheeded.
- While we do not care to test if you are blocking us, comments about blocking mods WILL be deleted without warning.
- Please note that if you are viewing Disqus on a mobile device, that the Disqus platform neglects to indicate the mod tag for moderators. You will simply have to be aware of who the moderators are. They are listed here: https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/moderators/
NOTE: If you feel the moderation is unfair, then please refer to these guidelines. If you still think it is unfair, then please start a RESPECTFUL thread on our complaint resolution channel:
Update History
2019/08/02 – created (TUS)
2020/04/04 – updated (Løki)
2020-07-04 – clarified rules about moderators modding conversations they are in (TUS)
2020-07-04 – added rule for usernames/avatars (TUS)
2020-08-14 – changed rules to bar misogynistic rather than sexist attacks (TUS)
2020-08-19 – clarified guideline on blood, gore, death images, and lynching imagery. (Loki)
2020-09-11 – added rule about bashing posters for posting articles (TUS)
2020-09-11 – reorganized and condensed some rules, added reference to Basic Rules (TUS)
2020-09-28 – added ‘no attacking CM families’ and added no ‘incest’ comments (Løki)
2020-11-06 – Clarified posting in ALL CAPs (Løki)
2020-11-09 – Updated ALL CAPS and BOLD commenting rule. (Løki)
2021-01-28: Channel Guidelines update (Løki)
* No insults or personal attacks | against other posters and their family members
* No insults or personal attacks | moderator’s have discretion to tone down rhetoric when CM discussions get too personal
* No multi-paragraph (3-4) thesis dissertations. (Verbose comments are difficult to read on mobile devices).
* Excessive use of All Bold/All Caps may be deleted at the moderator’s discretion.
* No posting of the same meme/image more than once on a page. (Moderators reserve the right to dial back excessive meme usage)
* Insulting a politician or public figure is allowed so long as it does not violate this rule. (Moderator’s have discretion to have CM’s tone down rhetoric/borderline violations of this rule).
* No “sock puppets” (alternate accounts) designed to circumvent a ban.
2021-08-02 – (TUS) Mod-blocking no longer a bannable offense, but comments about blocking mods will be deleted, and missed moderation can result in a ban.
2021-10-12 – (TUS) added mod discretion for deleting disgustingly graphic poop images
2021-11-04 – (Løki) Added ‘Featuring’ statement to Moderator Rules
2021-11-05 – (TUS) Clarified the rule against CM accusations of pedophilia to include sexual activity of any kind with minors, murder and rape. These are considered personal attacks.
2022-01-03 – (TUS) Banned Nazi symbols and logos.
2022-01-24 – (TUS) Some rewording of Rules of Engagement
2022-02-16 – (Løki) Groyper frog added to guideline 7.4
2022-07-26 – (Løki) Guideline 7.4 refined to exclude only Nazi memes. Images of Swastikas and Nazi uniforms will be allowed. Moderator discretion still applies.
2022-11-07 ~ (Løki) Guideline 2.0 updated to reflect Mod discretion on the application of the channel restricted word… “Groomer” within comments.
2022-12-06 ~ (TUS) Added bestiality to 1.3 and 2.0.
2023-10-08 ~ (Løki) Debate Club removed from Guidelines.
2023-10-24 ~ (Løki) Guideline 1.6 added. “accusations of being a supporter of rapists and/or pedophilia”.
2024-02-05 ~ (Løki) Channel Guidelines updated with Mod page link.
2024-02-05 ~ (TUS) Moved nazi terms out of the images/memes NOT allowed and into a what IS NOT allowed at all:
2024-10-11 ~ (Løki) Guideline 3.1 Updated.
2024-11-14 ~ (Løki) Guideline 7.4 Updated.
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