Wrangle is a place where you can argue and debate on the Internet, without worrying about derailing conversations or upsetting the community.

Wrangle aims to improve the state and quality of discussion between people, between groups and between cultures.

We're a work in progress and we've set ourselves an ambitious goal, so we'll be improving and fine-tuning our product as we go along.

Arguments that go on forever soon become repetitive and tiresome, and they don't help anyone. All Wrangles have a time limit after which there's a clear winner and loser.

At the moment, the shortest Wrangle you can have is a day, and the longest is a month. We may add or change these options based on your feedback.

You can schedule a Wrangle to start in the future, if you're especially conscientious and want to give your opposition a chance to marshal themselves before it kicks off.

On Wrangle, all your words and actions are metered: there is a monthly limit to how much you can do and say.

This limit affects the number of words you can write in a comment or on a Shred, and it also curtails the number of votes you can cast. You get 2,500 words and 20 votes allowance on the first of every month. (We may change these values based on monitoring and feedback.)

We do this to encourage quality. If a resource is constrained then it becomes more valuable. You can say what you want without limitation, but you've got to make every word and vote count.

If you've run out, you can always get more by topping up. We're happy to let you do this because we think if you've spent money on something, you'll naturally be more careful with how you use it - so the effect is the same as the metering.

To top up, just choose any offer from the Top Up popup, which you can find on any comments panel and is also available from your accounts page.

Once you've bought words or votes, they are yours until you spend them. They carry over from month to month, so if you buy 1,000 words in May but then stay within your 2,500 allowance, you start June with 3,500 words.

At present our comment system is very straightforward and doesn't need further explanation. We will ultimately be bringing in more features to improve the quality and clarity of discussion, and will be monitoring closely how they're used.

Shreds let you to offer a more measured, critical response than forums or comments allow, without forcing you to respond with a whole essay or article of your own.

A Shred is a collection of notes (hits and misses) about what the author gets right and what they get wrong. You can set how much each note matters, and come up with a final score for how credible their argument is.

This really allows you to cut to the chase, and will save you from having to repeat yourself or waste words on excessive preamble. Notes also provide a structure that lets you think about how best to articulate what it is you want to point out.

A Shred is actually considerably more polite: if the person you are responding to was off-topic to the original discussion, writing your own post to correct them would only derail it further. This may even earn you the enmity of people who might have agreed with you otherwise.

Instead, you create a Shred, then paste the link back to the discussion you were having.

You can respond in a single line ("Here's what I think of that: [link to Wrangle]. Now let's get back on topic.") or follow up with an argument of your own - whichever suits the situation best.

It is up to you how you behave on Wrangle. The public discussion is a stage, and you are representing your Team: the way you act may sway or put off potential voters from joining your Team.

On the Internet, many things are reversed. Aggression just makes you look impotent online, while measured politeness often signals intelligence and superiority. Dealing with verbal attacks without getting emotional is a high virtue. Dealing with stupid people without stooping to their level is a valuable and under-represented skill.

But far be it from us to tell you what to do, it's on your head (and those of your teammates).

Escalated aggression is not allowed. By this we mean, anything that takes the fight beyond Wrangle. Get heated, get passionate by all means; but don't fight dirty, and don't keep fighting after the debate is finished.

So you can vent your anonymous, undirected aggression, if it makes you feel better (it probably won't.) You can even humiliate someone by their Wrangle username, if they've just posted something catatonically stupid (who could blame you?)

But the minute you post someone's real name, or their username on another site, or their company contact details, or you suggest boycotting their business, harming their reputation, harassing their friends, etc, we have to act.

In this vein, NO PERSONAL INFORMATION to be posted about anyone, no matter who they are or how you know them. No matter how friendly and innocent you make it, we have to assume you're trying to coordinate a doxxing campaign.

Ditto with threats, really. We have to assume all credible threats are real, so don't make them even in fun. "Die in a fire," is not a threat. "I know where you live," is a threat. Tone of voice doesn't carry across the Internet.

The rest is pretty boilerplate. Don't break any actual laws, cause we won't have your back if you do. Don't post Iran's nuclear codes. Don't repeat tired memes. Please.