As Bleacher Report’s resident Community Coordinator, I deal with comment threads on a daily basis. I felt it was time to share some of my thoughts on how to be an effective commenter, as well as an upstanding B/R member.

When most people join B/R, they quickly appreciate the camaraderie in the comment threads where everyone loves the same team…and players…and like minded fans agree…and everything is peachy.

Then a rival fan, a troll, or someone who just wants to cause trouble shows up—and the conversation shifts away from sports and onto who is the bigger d-bag.

Proper commenting is beneficial because name-calling and flaming weaken credibility and can hold our community back.

If everyone is making personal attacks in a comment thread, no one is going to want to join that community.

So we can all get on the same page, I wanted to lay out some information for our fan-experts on what is and what is not acceptable commenting etiquette.

People are allowed to not like your team

This is probably the biggest misunderstanding on Bleacher Report. Writers who are new to the community are put off when an opposing fan jumps on their article and says something to the effect of “your team sucks because blah blah blah blah.” They flag this comment as offensive because in their eyes, any insult to their team is offensive.

However, on the Open Source Sports Network you are allowed to express your dislike or even your passionate hate of a team as long as you do so without using profanity or personally attacking the writer.

You might hate the Yankees, but remember: the writer (probably) doesn’t play for the Yankees. So no need to personally attack them. Which brings me to my next point…

Personal Attacks versus Debating

Despite popular belief, there is a difference. First, let me explain what constitutes a personal attack.

A personal attack involves insulting the member you’re debating with in some derogatory way. As soon as you drop a “moron,” “idiot,” or “dumbass,” you have personally attacked someone.

Now I know we all feel very passionately about our respective teams and players, but if you drop an insult on another user, you open yourself up to having your entire comment deleted.

Name-calling and talking about someone’s mom is not only immature, but it also detracts from the credibility of your argument.

Now I’m not saying you can’t disagree—quite the opposite. Intelligent debate is encouraged on B/R. Most sports junkies are competitive by nature, so B/R is the perfect place to say what you think and defend your point of view.

My best advice when it comes to debating with your fellow users is to stick to sports. Think of it as B/R’s new acronym: “STS.”   You can’t go wrong.

If you have an opinion about a team, player, game, match, or league, it belongs on B/R. As long as you can express that opinion without making it personal or dropping any profanity, that makes not only your comment valid, but your point as well.

An example of what you can say:

“The Lakers are a horrible team with horrible coaching and Kobe Bryant will never win another MVP and Phil Jackson is the most over hyped coach ever!! THEY SUCK!”

An example of what you cannot say:

“The Lakers suck just like you! You are probably as retarded as Phil Jackson and he is REALLY retarded. How do you lose a championship to the Pistons when you have Kobe AND Shaq douche bag!”

If anyone does personally attack you, please flag the comment as offensive.  This will automatically notify me and I will take proper action. Do not respond to personal attacks—there are no winners in a comment thread profanity war.

Critical Feedback versus Writer Bashing

One of the bigger problems in comment threads around B/R is writer bashing.

Comments like the following:

“This article is horrible you should never write again”

“You should probably learn English before you try and write an article”

“It’s spelled PUJOLS not POLHOLS, you have zero baseball knowledge”

We are a community of sports writers. We want our fellow Bleacher Creatures to succeed, not fail. At the same time, we can acknowledge that there is always room for improvement.

The trick is to encourage without being condescending. If someone’s article has glaring writing mistakes or maybe just one typo, there is the right way to go about notifying the writer and then there is the wrong way.

We all understand it takes a lot to put yourself out there, especially when you’re just starting out. Having people criticize your work and provide negative feedback can cause writers to shy away from B/R or come back with even more aggression.

In an effort to keep the peace without losing the value of feedback, here are some helpful ways to provide constructive criticism without bashing the writer.

First, if you notice some mistakes, post a note on the writer’s bulletin board so it does not come off as though you are publicly calling them out.

Start off with something you enjoyed about the article. For example, what made you want to read it?

Explain the writing mistakes that were made without being condescending or mean spirited. Be supportive and make sure to let the writer know you appreciate the effort they put forth.

An example:

“Hey Dave Mo,

I read your article about Comment Thread Etiquette. I thought it was an interesting topic for you to write about.

I did happen to notice a few grammatical mistakes; some punctuation problems and a few words were misspelled as well.

Here are the corrections: ‘change X to Y,’ ‘this comma goes here,’ ‘you used the wrong form of ‘your’ here, it should be ‘you’re.’

I really think you can improve and I am looking forward to your next article. Keep up the great work! Good talk, I’ll see ya out there.”

Or if it were something very simple, an example would be:

“Hey Dave Mo,

Just a heads up, you missed a comma. Good article. Keep rocking and rolling.”

If you run into a situation where you do not know how to respond, you can always post on my bulletin board, and I will be happy to help you out.

Now on to everyone’s favorite comment thread topic…

Trolls

We all have dealt with them before.  We know they can ruin people’s experience on B/R. For those that are not familiar with what a troll is, I’ll explain.

Trolls are users who join the site just to get reactions out of people or spam them.

But here is the simple secret to getting rid of trolls: ignore them.

When you come across a troll, you should follow this super simple two-step process:

Step 1: Report to Dave Mo (davemorrison@bleacherreport.com)
Step 2: Ignore them

If you don’t feed the troll, the troll will go away. Every time you respond with a witty in-your-face comment, it just fuels the troll even more.

Nothing good will come out of engaging a troll, so why do it?

Before I go…

I just would like to say how incredibly proud I am of our community’s interactions to date. B/R is not only a great place to grow as a writer, but a fun place to hang out and participate as well.

I hope this article helps clear up a lot of the debate around commenting and that we as a community can go onwards and upwards.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions. Great working with all of you guys and gals!

Thanks for reading.

Hey guys,

As Bleacher Report’s audience and base of contributors continues to grow at an exhilirating pace, trouble making trolls and creepy stalkers are unfortunately provided with all the more incentive to wreak havoc on our Community in an effort to get the attention they so desperately seek.

Fortunately for us, our behind-the-scenes team of talented community, engineering, and product resources continues to enhance our moderation toolset in order to curb inappropriate behavior on the web’s only Open Source Sports Network.

I wanted to let you guys know that we just rolled out a brand new block user feature—in my eyes, this is the finest moderation tool at our Community’s disposal in preventing specifically against harassment, which has become a mounting concern in recent months.

Going forward, should somebody try to ruin your B/R experience by saying something hurtful or inappropriate on your bulletin board, do not reply to his or her attention seeking behavior.  Rather, just click the “block user” button on next to his or her name on your bulletin board, and that user will no longer have the ability to post on your profile.

As always, don’t hesitate to ask if you have questions of any kind about this exciting new feature.  A special thanks to all of you who have offered feedback on moderation, harassment, and trolling issues—let’s keep fighting the good fight.

Paging all Creatures: Bleacher Stud Leroy Watson has revealed the secrets to his writing in his latest submission.

The five-time POTD winner shares with you the three e’s of Bleacher Report publication: engage, educate, and entertain.  He then fleshes out how to achieve each of these important goals.

For those of you searching for success on the Open Source Sports Network, this is truly a can’t-miss.  Many thanks to Leroy for revealing his secret sauce!

Hey All,

Bleacher Report was able to provide a couple of our top MMA writers with inside access to the Shamrock vs. Diaz Strikeforce fight this weekend.

Check out this interview with Frank Shamrock by our very own Brian Oswald, and be on the look out for on-site fight coverage from D Wizzle.

Way to go Brian and Derek!

Hey Everyone,

Bleacher Report would like to invite you to join us on Thursday, April 16th at Greens Sports Bar in San Francisco to watch the Giants take on the Dodgers.  The entire Bleacher Report staff and co-founders will be in attendance so come enjoy the extended happy hour drink specials and raise a glass with your fellow Bleacher Creatures!

Here are the event details:

Where: Greens Sports Bar: 2239 Polk St., San Francisco, CA 94109 (map)
When: Thursday, April 16th, 6:30pm (Giants game starts at 7:10pm)

Any and all are welcome so feel free to bring your friends and spread the word.  You can RSVP for the event on the B/R Facebook Page.

This will be the first of what we hope to be many meet-up events across the country, so if you can’t make this one be on the look out for B/R Meet-ups coming to a city near you.

Hope to see you there!

-The Bleacher Report Team

Hey guys,

As Bleacher Report looks to continue building its brand as the web’s premiere destination for high quality fan journalism, we are tightening up our standards for content syndication.

For our purposes, syndication means that a Bleacher Report writer’s article has an excellent chance of being linked to by CBS Sports and/or Google News.

Going forward, all Bleacher Report writers will be officially evaluated for “Syndicated Writer” status based upon the quality of their submissions. This evaluation will include, amongst other factors, an internal review by Bleacher Report’s editorial staff.

The review process will be ongoing—writers who are not initially selected will have their articles syndicated on a case-by-case basis, and be given an opportunity to attain full-time syndication status through continued work on honing their craft and ensuring that their content is consistently in line with the network’s editorial standards.

By the same token, being a syndicated writer is an honor that must be upheld at all times, and may be removed if at any point a writer publishes content that jeopardizes the B/R brand.

Those writers who are deemed qualified will now find a “Syndicated Writer” badge on their profile. Anyone who has not written an article in the past six months has not been reviewed for syndication approval—if you’d like to be reviewed, please log back in to B/R and write another article.

This new policy is being enacted to ensure that Bleacher Report’s partner sites receive only the best that the network has to offer. That said, rest assured that Bleacher Report’s doors are still as open as they ever were to aspiring journalists and die-hard fans, regardless of whether or not their writing is fit for syndication.

Thanks as always to everyone for your continued support. Keep rocking and rolling guys!

The B/R store is officially back up and running—get your classic white B/R tee today!

Hey everyone,

Humor articles are some of the finest pieces Bleacher Report has to offer.  Since Dave Metrick’s famous stadium re-naming satire from the site’s earliest days, readers have been able to reliably visit the humor section of the site for high quality, laugh-out-loud original concepts that will have any legitimate sports fan in stitches.

That said, we’ve started to have some major problems recently with articles that purport to be breaking news but are actually satire.  Or in some cases…purport to be satire but are in actuality mere unsubstantiated rumors.

This all came to a boiling point yesterday when this article, which claimed that a trade agreement between the Redskins and Broncos that would send Jay Cutler to Washington was near completion, was reported on by several media outlets and then addressed by Washington Redskins management.

The article was tagged on Bleacher Report with “Humor,” but for those who stumbled upon the piece via on outside source, it appeared to be the cold-hard truth.

We of course want nothing more than for Bleacher Report to attact mainstream media attention, but we strongly believe that this kind of attention is not in the best interest of our Community.  As the web’s first Open Source Sports Network it is crucial that we are seen as a legitimate editorial publication and not as a site which starts rumors via unconfirmed sources.

We are taking the following measures to remedy this problem going forward:

1) All articles that are tagged with “humor” will be more prominently labeled as such in news feeds. This is the most effective way to alert readers to the fact that a piece of content they have opened up does not contain actual news.

2) When a writer tags their article with “breaking news,” they may be asked to confirm their sources with our editorial staff. Authors that cannot provide legitimate sources will have their articles deleted. Please note that Bleacher Report will not publicly disclose your sources.

3) Any article tagged with “humor” that contains no satire whatsoever shall be deleted.  We simply don’t feel these pieces add anything to the Community given that they are both not funny and untrue.  It has never been a part of Bleacher Report’s mission to confuse sports readers.

4) We will create a “rumors” section where writers can speculate on upcoming events.  To clarify, rumor pieces that mask themselves as breaking news will still be deleted.

We are confident that these new policies will put our Community in a much better position to continuing establishing itself as one of the premiere sources for sports knowlegde and insight, while also allowing our many talented humor writers to continue working their magic.

If you have any questions about these new policies, please email me directly (zander at bleacherreport.com).  Thanks as always for understanding guys.

With four Picks of the Day in a matter of weeks, it’s safe to say that Hotnuke (who also goes by the name Daniel Barber) has blown up on the Bleacher Creature scene.In his latest piece, he advises fellow writers on the best strategies for constructing a successful B/R article.  I’m re-posting it here for the benefit of future writers looking to follow in Daniel’s footsteps.As Bleacher Report’s Community of talented and passionate contributors continues to grow, it’s refreshing to see a new hotshot (or Hotnuke, lol) extending a helping hand to his fellow writers.  This is a testament to the hard work all of you who have been around here for years have put into fostering a highly collaborative culture amongst our membership.

Huge news everybody:

Longtime Bleacher Creature Tori Willis recently found her way onto ESPN the Magazine’s website.  Her experience as a proven sports writer on Bleacher Report and active member of Arizona University’s student section made her the perfect candidate to write an expose on the Zona Zoo.

Tori was one of the first females to make a splash in the B/R Community, and we could not be more proud.  In her typically modest fashion, she’s giving us all of the credit for her big break.

This is a dream true for Tori and another great success story for our Community.  I’m confident all of you will give this young lady the congratulations she deserves on a job well done!