Moderation policy and process

We welcome comments to data.gov.au and aim to publish most comments immediately. To help us do this, please make sure:

• Your comments are relevant or on-topic
• Your comments are not inflammatory, unreasonable or obscene
• You are civil and respectful of others and their opinions (including not impersonating anyone and not posting someone’s personal information without their permission)
• Your behaviour is in line with relevant laws.

The site uses a post-moderation process to help ensure that spam or comments that breach this moderation policy are not published. This means that your comment will generally be published immediately – after going through some automated system checks.

The first is a human verification step to deter spam bots: when you submit a comment, you are asked to include a user name and an email address. You don’t have to include your actual details; you may post under a pseudonym.

Offensive language is automatically checked by the system and comments with many links in them may be automatically held for moderation (links being a major part of most comment spam). Comments being held in the system are manually checked by a moderator to determine if the comment should be published, edited or deleted. The same manual process is applied to a published comment found to have breached this moderation policy. If a comment is edited, we will include a reference so you can tell.

If we make a mistake, please contact us and we will deal with it as quickly as we can.