Agree or disagree, get it right or get it wrong, AN's administrators and moderators really do try to make the Community Guidelines work as well as possible. One way of showing it is to try to be responsive to the feedback the community gives about what isn't working, and what can be improved.
So in the coming days, AN will be tweaking the guidelines to reflect, as accurately as possible, the measures by which the moderators judge complaints and determine whether a user has crossed the line.
We have also come up with a way to keep the leadership of the blog separate from the "discipline" and that is to have me step away from the CGV system entirely. baseballgirl, who is ticketed for sainthood, has agreed to take over the CGV system, meaning that from now on you can dread seeing her name, not mine, in your in-box. I'm going a step further and removing myself as a moderator, meaning that I will not even be one of the users weighing in on complaints. AN now has enough moderators to keep the system humming along just fine without me, and I do not feel I need a vote; in fact I think it will help avoid a lot of lingering misconceptions if I do not have one.
So the current moderators on AN are, in alphabetical order: 67MARQUEZ, baseballgirl, Blez, Flashfire, gigglingone, louismg, McFood, notsellingjeans, and Taj Adib (gigglingone and McFood have been moderators since the first CGV system was implemented; the rest have been members of the front page "game thread and recap" team). These folks are incredibly fair-minded and thoughtful in their decision-making process, and honestly you couldn't be in better hands.
baseballgirl will be along soon with a WBC post, complete with photos, that should not be missed, and with that it's back to business as usual - what was said and done was said and done, and now it's time to move on. AN is a wonderful blog, and even if yesterday's "free for all" had its unpleasant moments, it's worth noting that upwards of 1,000 times someone felt inspired to chime in; there are worse problems to have. Plus Opening Day is now just 11 days away. Personally, I'm planning to root for the A's.
