Community Guidelines

Wide Open Spaces wants to hear what you've got to say. Your active participation is key to growing the fish-obsessed, buck crazy, outdoor fanatic community we love so much. What makes WOS such a great community? Our ability to maintain a fun, respectful, engaging and informative site everyone can enjoy. We ask that you uphold the same goals for our site when you choose to comment on our news stories and blog posts. To keep the good times rolling, please stick to the following guidelines:

1. Say what you think, but don't be a jerk about it.

We invite readers to intelligently discuss and debate our content. While it's easy to get heated when someone knocks down your opinion, please be respectful in everything you say. Readers are encouraged to voice their thoughts regardless of identity, politics, ideology or religion. Remember: this site belongs to everyone.

If you continue to act like a jerk despite what we just said, we'll know. Any intentional attempt to derail, hijack, directly or indirectly attack, troll or bait others will be removed. If you, for some reason, still feel the need to be a complete jerk after that, we'll permanently exclude you from the WOS community. Forever. No, we're not kidding.

2. Give your patience a little exercise.

If you wrote a comment and it's pending approval, don't worry — we're working quickly on it! We have a smart team of moderators that makes sure only appropriate comments are posted on our site. Approval times can vary depending on the site-wide comment load, so please be a little patient while we get your comment posted. We try to tackle each comment as speedily as possible.

3. Capture the "flag" (and the "favorite").

You have the power to make the WOS community exactly what you want it to be. We provide "favorite" and "flag" actions for every comment so you can be a part of the moderating team with just one click. Favoriting a good comment will help boost its visibility to the top, while flagging a harmful comment will immediately notify a moderator so it can quickly be removed from our site. While these actions are simple, they are pivotal to maintaining a positive site experience for everyone.

4. We know it sounds cheesy, but just be yourself!

WOS fosters a diverse community with members of every age from every region of the US. We love our readers for who they are, so just be yourself! Please don't confuse us by having multiple identities (creating multiple accounts), pretending to be someone else or misrepresenting yourself in our community. If you do, we will remove you from our site indefinitely. Once again, no, we're not kidding about that.

We strive to make the WOS community a fun and safe place where readers can feel free to share their ideas, discuss their opinions and most of all, engage with other people who love hunting and fishing as much as we do. The above guidelines serve as a helpful handbook for making our community one you're proud to be a part of.

If you have complaints, concerns, questions or feedback, don't hesitate to contact us! Give us a shoutout at [email protected].