NGOs, Coalition Building and the Campaign for a Minerals Management Policy in the Philippines*

COMMENT RULES:

Hi everyone,

I'm the national coordinator of Alyansa Tigil Mina (ATM), the owner of this site.

We will always respect views and opinions posted on this site, as much as we encourage open discussion and intelligent debate on the issue of mining. ATM has its stand on this issue very clearly, and we welcome the comments from those who do not agree with us.

However, we have observed that in the past few days, this forum has gone way beyond acceptable behavior of netiquette.

I will request and strongly encourage all posters to at least follow the following rules:

1. Be civil. Basic courtesy and privacy norms should be practised by posters in this forum. Make your mom at least proud by showing you still remember to be polite, even if you're not required to say "po" or "opo" in every post you make. We wouldn't mind that either, if you do so. Then again, I am assuming here that you're already an adult.

2. Personal attacks will not be tolerated. This also applies to flaming. Just in case you don't know what flaming is, its deliberately insulting or personally ranting against a poster (or a thread) simply because you are losing the arguments.

3. Avoid being anonymous. Since you have enough time to post long comments, you would at least have a few seconds to type even an alias. You also help people conclude that you are not a paid hack from a PR firm by Intex (or any other mining company)

4. Do not shout in the forums. Do not use ALL CAPS in your posts. A single exclamation point should also suffice.

We will observe the forum in the next few days. Should these rules be disregarded, we will transform this into a minimally-moderated forum. We hope we will avoid the situation that we will decide to make this a closely and strictly moderated forum. We value everyone's insights so much.

We'll check up again on this new rules after a short while. Of course, we expect the Intex ECC to be revoked in a few days. In this case, I suspect that the "excitement" in this thread would have died down.

Jaybee Garganera
National Coordinator
ATM