Code of Conduct

The Popverse is a website that aims to provide a safe, inclusive and supportive place for people to form a community, discuss topics, and share their enjoyment of pop culture. As such, we moderate comments to ensure that everyone who uses the site is able to feel welcome and respected by others.

While different opinions, discussions, and perspectives are all welcomed, we will delete comments or ban users that we feel do not foster a positive, safe, and respectful environment for everyone.

Our guidelines on what we feel constitutes a positive place for discussion and community are below. However, this list is not exhaustive - the Popverse moderation team can choose to take the necessary action as they feel best reflects the ethos of the site.

Please:

Respect each other: Disagreements happen and debate is permitted, as long as that does not cross the line into personal attacks, offensive language, or compromise the wellbeing and safety of others.
Keep yourself and others safe: Please do not post any material that may harm yourself or others, directly or indirectly. Do not post or engage with spam or trolls.
Try to remain on-topic: Comments under articles should ideally be relevant to the discussion - going a little off-topic is fine here and there, but comments should typically add to and further the conversation rather than steering off-course.
Remember that you are a guest: In most cases, the decision to delete a comment or ban a user is usually final, and is made at the discretion of the moderators and the Popverse team.
Conduct yourself appropriately elsewhere: The Popverse team may actively ban users who are seen to break any of the below rules outside of the website.

Posting the following may result in comment deletion and/or a temporary or permanent ban, depending on the severity and judgment of the moderation team:

Racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, ableism, sizeism, ageism, anti-semitism and other discrimination, including (but not limited to) slurs, hate speech, discriminatory jokes, coded discrimination ('dog-whistling') and other similar behavior, both explicit and implied.
Violent threats or use of violent language.
Personal attacks, abuse or harassment, including sexual harassment.
Attempts to deliberately incite arguments ('trolling').
Deliberate misgendering (intentionally using an individual’s incorrect pronouns).
Personal information belonging to yourself or another person (address, email address, phone number, password, etc.) - or threatening to post an individual’s personal information ('doxing' or 'doxxing').
Sexually explicit or violent material.
Links to illegal copies of media, copyrighted content or other pirated material, including advice on accessing illegal material and circumventing copyright.
Other material that breaks the law, including the encouragement or offer of illegal activities such as drug use.
Spam, including multiple identical posts, unwarranted promotion and advertisements posted by a human or bot.
Links to any sites believed to be dangerous, including phishing, viruses, and other potentially harmful content.
Links to content creators and other individuals who are known to be harmful or actively encourage others to inflict harm, hatred or discrimination on others.
Comments that do not actively add to the conversation or may mislead others, intentionally or otherwise.
Comments from multiple accounts operated by the same user ('sockpuppets') or that aim to impersonate another user.
Anything else deemed by the moderation team to be unsuitable, harmful or offensive, or that doesn’t reflect the Popverse’s commitment to safe, respectful and inclusive interaction.

This is an evolving and non-limited set of guidelines; the Popverse moderation has the right to delete any comment or issue a user ban as they see fit based on behaviour that does not respect and guarantee the safety of others.

If you wish to contact the Popverse team in relation to the above guidelines or anything else, please email us.

Last updated: May 18, 2022