Welcome to Athletics Nation!

Hello! Welcome to Athletics Nation, the original fan blog of this wacky SB Nation network and home of what we hope is the best place for fans of the Oakland Athletics to talk about our wild and wonderful team.

Visitors to Athletics Nation come to us in many ways, and we want to help you get involved in the site as fast as possible, so we wrote this guide (a thank you for the template from our sister Tigers blog, Bless You Boys) on the who's and what's of Athletics Nation.

The people

Editor-in-Chief: Alex Hall (@AlexHallAN)

Blogfather: Nico

Front page writers: baseballgirl, Billy Frijoles (@animalhiphop), Bill Moriarity (@AthleticsFarm) Jeremy F. Koo (@jfkooan), Duncan Morrow (@DunxMuro), Tim Eckert-Fong (@teckertfong), bernie_till_i_die (@jive_oak (Josh Iversen)), Peggy Raun-Linde (@praunlinde), Spencer Silva (@wordsmithsilva), Joseph DeClercq (@JosephThomasD), fatrolf (@fatrolf) and more to come soon from our spring training auditions.

Podcast host: Phil Naessens (@flashtennis31)

Twitter and Facebook

As long as we're sharing Twitter handles, you can find Athletics Nation at @athleticsnation, where some of us on the front page crew will share their thoughts, particularly during games or breaking news, and where we also promote new stories getting posted to Athletics Nation.

You can also like our Facebook page, where we're posting our stories and occasionally a little bonus shareable content that might not necessarily make the front page of our fine website.

Commenting and the rules

What makes Athletics Nation so strong are the commenters and the community we've built here over the years. We're looking forward to you joining the conversation in the game threads, below our articles, and in FanPosts. Besides our articles and game threads, we also have a Lounge for off-topic mostly non-baseball discussion.

You can find our community guidelines here. Our goal is to celebrate a diversity of ideas and of people on Athletics Nation. To accomplish a healthy community atmosphere we have some rules like avoiding personal attacks against community members, intolerant or prejudiced comments, harassing behavior, relentless negativity, and political speech. There are a few other things in there that are helpful to read, like instructions on how to appropriately resize any photos you might post in our comments and how our community panel of moderators operates.

The nuts-and-bolts of commenting are simple enough once you've joined the site through the form at the bottom of every post. To reply to something directly, hit the "reply" button to keep the threads organized. To go through new comments quickly, just hit the "Z" key.

FanPosts

FanPosts are where if you've got something to say and you're sick of waiting for the front page crew to write about it, you can write about it yourself and drive the conversation yourself. We'll often pull quality FanPosts to the front page, and if you're interested in writing for Athletics Nation they're a good way to get your name known to us.

To write a FanPost, first visit this page or click the "Write a FanPost" button on the right menu from the front page. Give your post a catchy headline, and write a nice post. Please feel free to make liberal use of paragraphs by pushing the enter key. Then scroll down a bit and hit "Publish"!

Get started!

Join our site through the signup forms at the bottom of every post at our website. While there's a 24-hour waiting period to comment (it keeps the spammers away), take a look around and get a feel for our culture. Once you're in, ask questions. Share your thoughts. If you like something someone else has said, hit the "rec" button on their comment. Most of all, have fun talking about and following your favorite baseball team.

Introduce yourself

The first thing we can do here, whether you're a longtime commenter or brand new, is introduce ourselves in the comments to this post. Feel free to answer all or none of these prompts:

• Tell us what you're doing when you're not thinking about the A's.
• Tell us what burning question you hope the Athletics Nation front page staff or a fellow commenter answers in an article or FanPost this year.
• If you could have an endless supply of any food, what would it be?
• If you could choose to go anywhere in the world to visit, where would you go?