Acceptable Use Policy

Home » Acceptable Use Policy

The Pocono Review — poconoreview.com

This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) governs how you interact with poconoreview.com (the “Site”) and any features we make available through it — including comment sections, tip submission forms, contact forms, newsletter signups, and any other interactive tools.

This AUP is part of our Terms of Service. If anything here conflicts with the TOS, the TOS controls. By using the Site, you agree to follow this policy. If you don’t, we can restrict or terminate your access without notice.

The Short Version

Read the articles. Share them. Disagree with them. Send us tips. Tell us we got something wrong. All of that is welcome.

Don’t use the Site to harass people, break the law, spam us, scrape our content, or waste our time with bad-faith complaints designed to chill our reporting. Don’t try to figure out who our sources are. Don’t flood our systems. Don’t be the reason we have to write a longer version of this policy.

Comments and Public Submissions

If the Site offers a comment section or other public posting feature, the following rules apply to everything you post.

What’s allowed

Substantive engagement with our reporting. Agreement, disagreement, additional context, questions, corrections with documentation, personal experience relevant to the story. You can be critical of our reporting, of public officials, of institutions. You can be blunt. We don’t require politeness — we require good faith.

What gets removed

We reserve sole discretion over what stays up and what comes down. Content that falls into any of the following categories may be removed without warning:

Threats and harassment. Direct or implied threats against any person, including reporters, editors, sources, subjects of reporting, or other commenters. This includes doxxing (posting someone’s private address, phone number, workplace, or family information), stalking behavior, and any language that a reasonable person would interpret as a threat of physical harm.
Defamation. Statements of fact you know to be false, or statements made with reckless disregard for their truth, about identifiable individuals. Opinion and rhetorical hyperbole are not defamation — but fabricating specific factual claims about a named person is.
Bigotry. Slurs, dehumanizing language, or content whose primary purpose is to demean people based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or national origin. We’re a news site covering real communities. Keep it above the floor.
Spam and commercial solicitation. Unsolicited advertising, affiliate links, promotional content, chain messages, and SEO spam. If you’re selling something, buy an ad.
Impersonation. Posting under someone else’s name, posing as a public official, or misrepresenting your identity or affiliation in a way that’s designed to deceive.
Off-topic disruption. Persistent, deliberate derailing of comment threads with unrelated content. One off-topic remark isn’t a problem. Turning every comment section into a platform for your unrelated grievance is.
Attempts to identify confidential sources. Speculation about the identity of unnamed sources in our reporting, or posting information designed to narrow down who a source might be, will be removed immediately. This isn’t a game. Source protection is a legal and ethical obligation we take seriously. See our Terms of Service, Section 8 for our full source protection policy.
Content that violates any law. Including but not limited to content that infringes copyright, violates court orders, discloses sealed records, or constitutes witness tampering or obstruction.

Moderation decisions are final

We don’t negotiate moderation decisions. We don’t owe you an explanation for removing a comment. We don’t run a public forum — we run a newsroom that sometimes lets people talk back. That’s a privilege, not a right. If your comment was removed, assume it fell into one of the categories above and adjust accordingly.

Repeat violations

Users who repeatedly violate this policy may be permanently blocked from commenting. Blocks are applied by IP address, email, or any other identifier available to us. If you create new accounts to circumvent a block, that itself is a violation of the Terms of Service, Section 3.

Tips, Story Leads, and Newsroom Contact

We want to hear from you. Tips are how local journalism works.

How to submit tips

General tips: tips@poconoreview.com
Sensitive or confidential tips: Contact us at tips@poconoreview.com and state at the outset that you wish to remain anonymous. Confidentiality must be explicitly established — don’t assume it.
Contact forms on the Site: Anything submitted through a public-facing contact form is non-confidential unless we agree otherwise in writing.

What we do with tips

We evaluate every tip. We don’t respond to every one. If your tip leads to reporting, we may or may not credit you, depending on the circumstances and your preference. We don’t pay for tips.

We will never knowingly burn a source. Our source protection commitments are spelled out in our Terms of Service, Section 8.

What not to send us

Don’t send us stolen documents you obtained through unauthorized access to someone else’s accounts or systems. Don’t send us material subject to a court order prohibiting its disclosure if sharing it with us would put you in violation of that order. Don’t send us material solely to harass or embarrass someone with no public-interest justification.

If you send us public records, court filings, or documents obtained through lawful means — including Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law — we welcome them.

Automated Access and Scraping

Automated access to the Site is prohibited except as expressly permitted by our robots.txt file.

You may not:

Scrape, crawl, or systematically download content from the Site.
Use bots, spiders, or automated scripts to access the Site at a rate or volume exceeding normal human browsing.
Mirror, cache, or reproduce the Site or its content on any other server or service.
Use any automated tool to monitor the Site for changes, new publications, or updates, except through RSS feeds we explicitly provide.
Use the Site’s content for AI training, machine learning, or any purpose described in Terms of Service, Section 2.2.

We enforce these restrictions through technical measures (rate limiting, IP blocking, bot detection) and through legal action where warranted. Violations constitute both a breach of contract under the TOS and may give rise to claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030) and Pennsylvania’s computer crime statutes (18 Pa. C.S. § 7611 et seq.).

Email and Newsletter

If you subscribe to our newsletter, you agree to receive editorial emails from The Pocono Review at the address you provide. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in any newsletter email.

You may not:

Subscribe other people to our newsletter without their consent.
Use our newsletter signup to submit spam, phishing attempts, or malicious content.
Harvest email addresses from our newsletters or Site content.

Our handling of subscriber email addresses is described in our Privacy Policy.

Retaliation Against Our Journalism

This section exists because it needs to.

Using the Site’s interactive features — comments, contact forms, tip lines, DMCA notices, correction requests, or any other channel — to intimidate, retaliate against, or exert pressure on The Pocono Review or its staff in connection with published reporting is a material violation of this AUP and the Terms of Service.

This includes:

Filing frivolous or pretextual DMCA takedown notices targeting our original reporting.
Submitting bad-faith correction requests designed to create a paper trail for future litigation rather than to identify genuine errors.
Flooding our tip line, contact forms, or comment sections with abusive or threatening messages in response to specific articles.
Coordinated campaigns to mass-report content, overwhelm moderation, or otherwise disrupt the Site’s operation.
Contacting our hosting provider, domain registrar, ad networks, or other service providers to pressure them into restricting our operations.

We document everything. Abusive communications may be preserved, reported to law enforcement, and may themselves become the subject of reporting. See Terms of Service, Section 9.2 and Section 11 for our content removal and anti-SLAPP policies.

Reporting Violations

If you see a comment or behavior on the Site that violates this policy, email legal@poconoreview.com with the URL and a description of the issue. We review reports but don’t guarantee action or a response.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this AUP at any time. Changes take effect when posted. Continued use of the Site after a change constitutes acceptance.

Last updated May 2026.