SDA ~ Reader Tips ~ Principles & Guidelines

1. The daily Small Dead Animals Reader Tips page exists for the specific purpose of providing a place for readers of Small Dead Animals to post tips ~ that is, items that they reasonably think may be interesting to other readers ~ in cases where such tips would be off-topic in the other current pages at SDA.

2. Since there is no page-specific topic in scope in Reader Tips, the signal- to- noise ratio there needs to be managed in such a fashion so as to mitigate readers' legitimate tips from being drowned out by concurrent discussions of multiple topics, otherwise said readers may as well post their tips somewhere else, off topic, where at least they might not be drowned out. But that would entirely defeat the reason for Reader Tips in the first place.

3. Therefore, Reader Tips is not an "Open Discussion" or an "Open Forum" or that sort of thing. And, per the broader SDA commenting guidelines: it's not a debating club; it's not a chat room.

4. In order to respect the sensibilities of other SDA readers, when you post a tip you should, if possible, include a link to relevant source material and/or additional information thereto. If posting a tip is not important enough for one to be that responsible to one's readers, then one should not post that tip.

5. Each Reader Tip should include a brief description of the item or the story and/or why the other end of the link(s) may be interesting (a sentence or two, or paragraph, or short quote). References to other published articles should be reasonably attributed. Tips that do not provide a reasonable description of their link, tips with extended quotes, and copyright infringements, are not acceptable.

6. Comments on the tips posted by others are acceptable (within the broader SDA commenting guidelines). But run-on discussions, debates, arguments, flame-wars, &c, that destroy the Reader Tips signal- to- noise ratio, are not acceptable (per the reasons described above).

7. A Late Nite Radio show used to open a Reader Tips page is simply a seed (in this case usually musical) tip, otherwise it is the same as other tips: it can be commented on but please don't add to the noise in regard of it.

8. Reader Tips and comments thereto that do not meet the spirit of these guidelines, as above and previously described, or that otherwise do not fall within the general SDA commenting principles and guidelines, may be unpublished.