For the past few months as AN has grown to traffic proportions beyond my wildest dreams, there have been some growing pains to go along with it.
Several people have questioned the community guidelines and said that there was a lot of gray area.
Well, I've set out to change that and also change the procedure for reporting complaints. Together with an AN subcommittee, we've developed a new set of community guidelines (notice the new link in the menu) to try and clarify my position on everything from personal attacks to just having a general respect for your fellow ANer.
The AN subcommittee was formed out of a couple of things: first, longevity on the site and a clean track record in terms of personal attacks. Second, I used the newly instituted rating system and chose people with good ratings.
Why would I create a subcommittee you ask? The truth is that I realized recently that I've often spent more time trying to respond to the insane amount of email I get instead of working on the site quality. I need to somehow lighten that load. Instead of emailing me with complaints or reporting of community guideline violations, I ask that you email the AN subcommittee in the future at cgv@athleticsnation.com. The subcommittee will be reviewing each and every complaint or report of a Community Guidelines violation (thus cgv in the email address). The subcommittee will serve mostly as a filter. I will ultimately have the final decision.
The goal for all of this is to make AN a welcome place for all A's fans and have a clear set of rules. Of course, AN will always get the inevitable troublemaker that surfaces whenever Internet anonymity is in play and in that case, I will use my discretion accordingly.
When I created AN, my goal was to have a place where we could celebrate our Athletics in our OWN online sports bar. But even sports bars have rules. This isn't Thunderdome. We just finally took the time to make these rules more clear.
In the future, if you believe someone has committed a community guidelines violation, please email cgv@athleticsnation.com and be assured that it will be considered. Please don't email me with complaints or concerns directly.
Thanks. My hope is that I can spend more time in the future working on interviews instead of playing community monitor.