Oakland Local is a community resource for everyone 18 and over who lives and/or works in Oakland. We welcome a wide range of views, and support civil discourse. But we don’t like assholes, hate speech, or trolls. That means we have some rules: Civil disagreement, as BlogHer calls it, is just fine. Hate speech, curses, being a bully or a jerk is not fine. We’re about giving Oaklanders an opportunity to share views, information and news and to connect around issues important to Oakland. We welcome multiple viewpoints, but you have to play nice. Specifically, Oakland Local will not publish unacceptable content. Further, we remind you that the opinions you read here will belong to members of the Oakland Local community, but not necessarily reflect our views. Oakland Local defines everything that is published on the site as content. That includes posts, comments, forum posts, poll responses, audio, video, images, twitter streams, map links, and so on.

What is unacceptable to us?

• Content that is abusive, defamatory, threatening to a person or persons.
• Knowingly defamatory or libelous assertions.
• Items that violate a copyright law, or that infringe on a third party’s trademark, trade secret, proprietary data or patent.
• Being used to abuse, harass, stalk or threaten a person or persons.
• Libelous, defamatory, knowingly false or misrepresents another person.
• Opinion presented as fact with no substantkon (clearly label as opinion, please.)
• Violates confidentiality, and/or the privacy, publicity, moral or any other right of any third party.
• Contains original or repurposed content that has been commissioned by and/or belongs to a third party and strikes us as spam, off-topic for sale shilling, or malware.

We reserve the right to decide what is unacceptable and to act accordingly; definitions are not limited by this list since human invention is endless. As you might imagine if you are reading down this far, we reserve the right to change these standards at any time without notice. We also reserve the right to remove links to any content at any time. We welcome your involvement in developing our online community, We invite you to share concerns and thoughts by sending them to feedback@oaklandlocal.com and to flag spam posts and comments if you see them. We also invite you to contact us whenever you see content here that violates these guidelines. Thanks.