ShoutWire Official Guidelines

This is a comprehensive submission guideline. Read it, live by it.

Article Deletions

Articles meeting the following criteria may be deleted:

• Your article contains pop-ups or is more than 60% ads.
• You have posted more than 5 links to your personal blog/site in 7 days.
• A similar article has already reached the front page within the last 2 months.
• Your article is not in English.
• Your article links to a home page rather than actual content.
• Your article contains pornography.
• Your article links to a forum post.
• Your article does not meet ShoutWire's quality threshold (more on that below…)

The link that you submitted may be changed if:

• Your source article has stolen its content from another source.
• The article that you submitted does not contain enough information and another article does.

Your title and description may be changed if:

• The contents are not accurately represented by the title and description.
• Your title is so long that it has been cut off.
• Your description contains links.
• Your title or description is in capital letters.
• Your description is incomplete.
• Your English or grammar is poor.

Our Quality Threshold

ShoutWire strives to provide nothing but the best user-submitted content. As a result, some content may not meet our threshold of quality.

We delete the following crap submissions:

• Articles containing little or no content (less than 500 words).
• False links that redirect to another site.
• Articles containing abysmal grammar or spelling.
• Sites whose layout makes the content difficult to access.

Comments

Comments that meet the following criteria are deleted:

• Spam comments containing links unrelated to the subject of the article.
• Outright, blatant racism or bigotry.
• Annoying comments requiring excess scrolling by readers (eg: 25 lines of white space, jibberish characters).

Bannings

We don’t like banning users, but unfortunately it is sometimes called for.

The following jackasses will be banned:

• Self-promoters who break the self-promotion guidelines (after 1 warning).
• Anyone caught soliciting shouts in order to undermine the shout system (after 1 warning).
• Anyone suspected of being involved in a “shout ring” (a group of people conspiring to undermine the shout system).
• Individuals using social news site submission software / bots.
• Blatant spammers (selling a product or service, linking to a token article for the purpose of increasing traffic to a commercial site).
• Paid SEO submitters.
• Individuals who deliberately break any of the above rules, despite having been warned multiple times.
• Anyone caught using a duplicate account (after 1 warning). The dupe account will be locked without notice.
• People who are an ongoing problem in the comments (spamming, ridiculously bad trolling).

Self-Promotion

Most are under the impression that we have a strict “no self-promotion” policy. This policy died when Scienott left. Why? Because we feel that our readers were being robbed of all kinds of terrific, thought-provoking (or amusing) content.

Nonetheless, we do have guidelines for self-promotion.

• Limit 5 submissions per week to the site that you are promoting.
• You MAY NOT link to your site’s home page. Find content on your site that is interesting – don’t just give us a link to your site.
• You may not use a shout ring or a paid SEO submitter to shout/submit your articles).

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Now ultimately, staff discretion trumps all of these rules. Once you submit something, your submission becomes the property of ShoutWire. We reserve the right to do with it as we please. Luckily, we have morals and ethics. Though we will follow these guidelines 99.9% of the time, there may be occasions when the staff may have to override the rules. If something like that happens, the affected user will be emailed.
These rules are in place to ensure that everyone can enjoy the ShoutWire experience. Our aim is to provide thought-provoking and entertaining content while allowing our readers to express themselves as they see fit.
We will NEVER ban a user for using foul language, having an unpopular opinion or disagreeing with the staff. We want you to enjoy your stay here!
If anyone has any questions regarding content or site rules, or if you have any questions related to ShoutWire, you can reach staff members in the forums, IRC (#tubearoo on irc.abjects.net) or by email.