As Lookout Landing has grown, so have our standards and guidelines and they have spawned separate posts as issues have flared up. Those posts get added to our membership agreement and each time it gets harder to read through and follow. We have lacked a thorough pruning and so here it is.

There is probably nothing new in here to anyone who has posted here. This is an attempt to get everything into one place and explained so that it is more streamlined in alerting new people what the community expects. The aim here is not only to itemize all the rules governing behavior here but also to flesh out the reasons behind them. In doing so, I hope people will see that our standards come not from a zealous glee of exercising power or putting down others, but rather are an extension of the same goal that LL has with its content.

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Another year of baseball and another year of series previews. It surprises me this will be the fourth season of them. Based on the previous three seasons, the Mariners will finish 85-77 this season with good run prevention but a lackluster offense that we will enter 2012 thinking cannot possibly get worse.

Did you know that if you order the 2009 Mariner hitters by plate appearance, 12 of the first 14 are no longer Mariners? Rob Johnson (Padres), Russell Branyan (Diamondbacks), Jose Lopez (Rockies), Yuniesky Betancourt (Brewers), Adrian Beltre (Rangers), Wladimir Balentien (Reds), Ken Griffey Jr (Golf), Mike Sweeney (God), Kenji Johjima (Japan), Ronny Cedeno (Pirates), Endy Chavez (Rangers) and Jack Hannahan (Indians). We're a Josh Wilson away from it being 14 of the top 16. Sooooo close!

Anyways, stay on topic, Matthew. Here is your annual thread to offer any and all feedback on the series previews for the coming year. Most of it I will not implement because it requires way too much work, but some of the ideas I can actually do and some of them might spark other ideas. You never know. If you did know, you would know the future and you should be spending your time doing things other than reading this website. Go save a child or something. Keep an eye out for Panther the Cat.

To review, you can always browse through the Series Preview sectional archive but as a favor to the community, I pulled three example previews from each season as close to the same date as I reasonably could in order to illustrate the evolving nature of the beast. Here's 2008, 2009 and 2010. Have to say that I am glad I did because now I am aware that come late May I will be an extraordinarily bitter person. The Mariners make me angrier than I remember.

This is our response to the feedback thread a week or so back. Though both Jeff and I attempted to address the issues in the thread as they were raised, we wanted to have a separate post detailing our feedback to the community's feedback and suggestions. We went through the entire thread for a fresh look and made an attempt to cull and categorize the ideas. The suggestions for new SBN features and the comments about the game threads are not included as both will get their own posts. Below the jump is what we felt to be the major themes.

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What a slow day. Back from the long weekend, with winterful weather abound and little to no news substance to digest, today is dragging along. So it seems a perfect time to get some community feedback and not in the way of my usual poll form.

For the past two months or so, Jeff and I have drafted and redrafted a post to streamline the rules here at Lookout Landing. Essentially, we'd prefer there to be fewer rules and for them to be easier to find and digest. Right now it is a bit spread out over too many different posts and some of the problems at the time of those posts have disappeared while others have surfaced.

This has been an ongoing process and the general aim is to encourage more of a process to posting (i.e. related to height limits on images see: this and this) than a checklist of rules to abide or specific mistake to avoid. Before we finalize anything however, we would like feedback from the community. For reference, the general list of rules is housed in the "Membership Agreement" widget on the left sidebar of the main page below the AL West Standings widget.

Please note that this is not the third annual LL QC thread, that's coming later. Those threads are aimed specifically around the community experience and while the rules and standards of Lookout Landing play a big part in that, we're trying to separate the feedback here. CougCenter has a recent spate of posts relating to site policies and how they are enforced and I think they do well to encapsulate the scope of discussion that I'd like in this thread. See their threads here, here and here if you are interested.

Examples of what is relevant here would be discussion of the current set of rules; which can go, which need to be reworked, if any new ones need to be adopted, etc. Also, enforcement of said rules and anything related to that. If you have specific examples, links are always helpful. If you feel uncomfortable discussing any of this in public, we encourage you again to e-mail both of us (both is better than just one) privately using the links at the bottom of the site.

I cannot emphasize that last point enough. I respond to each and every LL-related e-mail I receive to the best of my ability. It's a method of contact open and available to anyone.

In case you want to discuss things about the event, here's a handy thread.

Please do not talk openly about what was said however as we try to keep these things privy to those able to attend and to encourage our guests to be comfortable with being candid. What you can talk about are ideas to make these better or how strikingly attractive Jeff and I are.

We have a problem in the game threads right now. Comments move too fast and there is too much bickering. When a game thread is going bad, people get cranky and that can cause them to harp on minor infractions more harshly. The person attacked can easily get defensive in response and then things spiral out from there, making the game thread even worse. It's an easy whirlpool to get drawn into, but we can break that cycle. We can make game threads enjoyable again.

We cannot go back to the game threads that we had in 2007 or 2008; there are vastly more people around now. That's not a bad thing though! Having more people commenting is a good thing. More people means more ideas. More people means more humor. More people means more styles. More people drives us all to be more informed, quicker-witted and better writers.

I don't want to lecture on the rules and guidelines of the site; I want to focus on the solution. The good news is these issues are almost exclusively confined to the game threads and those are the easiest to remedy. We have done it before. April is always a rough month integrating new people into our manner and style of commenting on games and we must all remember to be patient.

To the newer people: coming into Lookout Landing is a difficult endeavor, I know. Our standards are high when compared to the rest of the Internet and I do not blame you for not being 100% on board from the beginning. Do not get discouraged, but do take time to figure out how to better assimilate into our community. Ambrose counseled Augustine that, "if you are in Rome, live in the Roman way." Try reading game threads from the middle of last season to get a better feel for we prefer them to go.

Take advice from those that have walked the same path before. There's a very good post about our general principles from our of our most esteemed statesmen, pdb. Do not miss an extraordinary comment inside that post by CapSea who is also someone who has been around here for a long time and gone through some of the same growing pains that some of you are enduring right now. It takes time to get the hang of a new place, and you will be given that time, but you will also do yourself a great service if you observe first before jumping right in.

To the veteran posters: I remind you that if you go searching through the archives, you can assuredly find examples of yourself acting in ways that we collectively no longer deem acceptable here. I know I can. When someone breaks one of our rules remember your own past transgressions and strive to maintain patience. Before you rush to correct someone who posted without a subject line, exceeded the maximum image height or used chat speak, pause for a moment. Chances are, someone else is writing that same response and if we restrain ourselves, we avoid piling on and treating new posters - who just want to contribute - to a dozen replies highlighting their infraction.

To everyone: try to err on the side of not posting as much during game threads. We have a tragedy of the commons on our hands. Self-restraint is a useful skill in all facets of life and you can exercise it to great benefit here. Hundreds of people inhabit the game threads all at once. When a big event happens, you can count on many people to post something and try asking yourself if there's something original that you can contribute. When a small event happens, ask yourself if it's worth acting as if a single blown strike call is really on par with the Tartars demanding personal tribute from you in exchange for your sovereignty.

I understand; sometimes you want to express a hilarious new way that you want to pleasure Franklin Gutierrez after another terrific defensive play. Will people see your witty comment though? If 50 comments fly by after even minor developments in the game, good comments are missed; needles lost in a haystack. Without people willing to sacrifice a little of their desire to share every emotion for the greater good that is thread readability, everyone suffers. That's not to say you should completely neuter yourself. We don't want fewer needles. We want a smaller haystack.

That deluge of comments also drowns out the back and forth that is essential to building a community. That's where shared jokes are developed and personal interactions formed. It's where we get a sense of community and it's that sense of kinship that makes game threads so damn fun. It unites us and heightens our joys. It helps blunt our disappointments because we share them together. Let's keep that goal in mind as we go forward this season.

Note: this post is written more for the benefit of visitors and will be used as a reference. Regular LL contributors do a fantastic job complying with the rule.

Back on January 1, I wrote a post cajoling the community to help us when it comes to moderating the site by making an increased use of the flag link when appropriate. Traffic on this site has grown tremendously and continues to grow and I'm sure many of us tremble with anxiety about what the new season of game threads will entail. Even beyond those threads, there are roughly four front page posts per day on average plus a whole host of diaries and the 1,000 or so comments that go into the OTs. It's a lot of ground for us as moderators to cover and we need the community's assistance. Which is where flagging comes in and I refer you all back to the linked article above for more on the subject.

What does flagging have to do with subject lines? Why do we require them in the first place? It's been asked many times before, and we give the same general answer each time; that it allows people to collapse comments (very useful when comments are images, GIFs or walls of text) and that it helps with moderation by giving us direct links to flagged comments. I've seen some people, even other moderators, express surprise at the second part so I decided to provide a direct illustration.

To do so, I flagged two comments by user westbrook; hopefully he doesn't mind*. When I, as a moderator, view our moderation dashboard, there is a section where all recent flags are displayed. If flags are appropriately used, that dashboard is by far the single easiest way for us to keep tabs on the comments. Here is what it looks like:

With the subject line present, I can monitor the dashboard and quickly jump to flagged comments to investigate if any action needs to be taken. Without a subject line, I get nothing and have to manually hunt for the flagged comment.

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Welcome to 2010, everyone. Gone to the gym yet? Are you having trouble coming up with some more resolutions to pay attention to for a week and then disregard? If so, boy are you lucky to have surfed here this afternoon because I will be providing you with a pair!

Over the past year, the sheer size of traffic that LL receives has grown tremendously. Despite a large increase in the number of users and comments, I think everyone did a fantastic job in working to keep the tone polite, the site informative and welcoming. Thank you.

The work isn't over though and with a better team, the trend of growth is only going to continue. In addition, some of the new traffic comes to us via sites like Yahoo!, and with the ease of joining SBN blogs, we're bound to face a tougher time maintaining the community standards that I think we all appreciate here. Pursuant to that, we have two suggestions for the community at large to assist us mods in continuing to foster our little garden of reason amidst the vast wasteland of the internet.

Situated east of the "reply" link in comment threads is the "actions" link. On the screen capture provided to the right of this paragraph you can see the "actions" link highlighted and above that, an example of what happens when you click on it; the actions link goes away and is replaced by a couple other links: rec and flag. Don't worry about the delete or hide links, they only appear to those with super powers and a decoder ring.

THE FLAG LINK

Comments that get flagged appear to us in red just as comments that get five recs "go green" to everyone. That makes such comments very easy for us to spot when moderating threads and a great help when such threads are long. In addition, our moderation dashboard keeps track of all flags and creates a link directly to said comment via the subject line.*

In case you missed it being mentioned elsewhere, that's one of our biggest reasons for mandating subject lines on all comments. Without a subject, a comment can still be flagged, but we no longer are provided a direct link to it.

How do you flag a comment? Clicking on the flag link pops up an input box which you can use to spell out the reason you are flagging a comment. There is also a drop down with three choices: spam, troll or inappropriate. We don't really care about the category, as the display of the flag does not differ based on that choice, but we do appreciate a quick couple words or sentence explaining the reason for the flag. If you find yourself writing out paragraphs, you should probably just e-mail one or all of us.

Why, or when, should you flag a comment? Essentially, whenever a comment breaks a site rule* or violates one of the principles covered in:

here, such as LLLJ (see link for examples),
or here, such as: non-use of the reply link, URL link button or image height excessiveness
or here, such as being an ass

it's a good candidate for a flag. We do not want flagging a comment to take the place of gently reminding people of the site rules - we mods rely on the community to self-police a lot - but in the case of repeated violations or comments you think are inappropriate, off-topic, needlessly hostile, etc., we'd prefer you use a flag instead of creating a flame war inside the thread.

As a refresher, the site rules are:
--Politics and religion are off limits.
--Utilize proper capitalization, make an effort at correct spelling (meaning no chatspeak) and comprehensible grammar.
--Trolling other SBN blogs gets you banned here if we find out.
--No unwarranted hostility.

Besides the obvious short-term benefits to us that flags provide, there are useful long-term benefits if flags are utilized well. Because we are able to inspect user profiles and see a history of all flags the user has received, proper flagging helps us to quickly ascertain any patterns in behavior that need to be remedied. For example, if we see someone has multiple flags for trolling, it helps us to decide if said person needs to be reprimanded. Without that history, our job is much more judgmental and time consuming.

THE REC LINK

I imagine every regular contributor here knows the rec link and what it does. It's fairly self-explanatory as well, you can see the rec count on every comment. I am not going to get into the gritty details like for the flag link, but I do want to take a moment to ask for expanded use of the rec link as well, but in a slightly different manner.

I ask you all to consider using the rec link whenever you come across a solid logical comment as well as humorous or informative comments. If someone gives a good answer to a baseball question, rec it. That both highlights the answer and gives positive reinforcement to those that take the time to help educate.

For example, if a user drops in on a Jose Lopez discussion and comments "You people are all idiots. Lopez is our only clutch hitter. Look at how many RBIs he had!", that comment* is likely to get a deluge of responses pointing out various criticisms of RBIs, clutch hitting, and so on. A large set of responses validly attacking the user's comment can cause said user to become defensive and lash out, leading to more criticisms, more lashing and an inevitable flame war.

Comment provided for illustration purposes only. In an actual comment from this hypothetical user, there would probably be more spelling errors and exclamation points.

What I'd prefer to see is someone respond with the valid criticisms of using RBIs, clutch hitting and so on and for subsequent users who see the subthread to just rec the response instead of adding their own if they feel that response adequately sums up their thoughts. A highly recced response (especially one that turns green) should send the same message as 15 similar responses and it carries the benefit of both removing some clutter and diffusing possible flame wars.

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These are pretty minor (the flag link is a slightly bigger one) issues. And that they're about all we came up with as areas of improvement for 2010 speaks massively to the greatness of this place. Y'all are awesome.