Letter from the Publisher

By jake dobkin in Miscellaneous on Jun 30, 2004 5:00AM

Hi. These letters from the publisher will be very infrequent on Chicagoist. We plan to use them to let you know what is going on with the site, and solicit feedback about ideas we are planning.

1. Comment Policy: it goes without saying (even though it is printed right there at the top of the comment form) that all offensive comments on Chicagoist will be immediately deleted. After launching Gothamist, we ran into some questions about what constitutes "offensive" commenting, so we drew up a little Comment Policy page to outline our thoughts. We have reprinted that page here on Chicagoist. Gothamist is all for productive, stimulating discussion, and we realize that decent, friendly people can differ strongly in their opinions. But to maintain an atmosphere of civility at this site, we reserve the right to delete offensive comments immediately, blacklist IP addresses, and vigorously use the blacklist filters to keep the site clean. It's worth noting that deleting comments is pretty much effortless on MovableType- it takes about 30 seconds whether it's ten comments or ten thousand, so spammers be warned. Finally, if you have any questions or complaints about the policy, please direct them to the person who wrote and posted it: Jake.

2. T-Shirts: we are printing up some Chicagoist T-Shirts. Does anyone have preferences on colors or sizes? We were thinking of finding a tan color that matches the site background, and getting girls and boys mediums.

3. Events: in New York, Gothamist has a pretty regular series of events. Mostly happy hours, where we meet for drinks with whoever feels like throwing back a few, and Blogger Events, where we have a bunch of bloggers or photobloggers present a panel on their sites. If anyone out there feels like collaborating on Chicago flavors of these events, please let us know.

That's it- Chicagoist is off to a great start. Here's to the next 6 months!