Introducing the New Canes Country Community Guidelines

Like the Carolina Hurricanes, Canes Country is in the midst of a bit of a rebuild, between new site management, a new writing staff, and new approaches to bringing quality content to our readers. Through all of the changes, our objective has remained steadfast: to support and grow a community of Canes fans by providing the highest quality news, analysis, and discussion from the fan's perspective. To that end, today we are launching a new set of community guidelines, effective immediately.

The timing is fortuitous because SB Nation recently announced a global set of community guidelines for all sites in its network, in support of the following objectives:

• Provide readers with a set of basic expectations for their experience across the network
• Provide site managers and site moderators with a consistent code of conduct across the network
• Make the SB Nation network of sites more inclusive for all readers.

These guidelines went into effect on July 26. Please take the time to familiarize yourself with them if you have not already done so. In a nutshell:

• Obvious egregious behaviors – those considered intolerant, prejudicial, personal attacks, trolling, spam, offensive imagery, excessive profanity, and posting of illegal activity – are prohibited.
• Other specific problematic behaviors have been called out such as gendered insults and making light of serious crimes and physical or mental disabilities.
• There's a new 'first post' rule allowing a site to take immediate action if it is determined an account was created for the specific purpose of disrupting the community.
• There's a crackdown on the creation of multiple accounts to circumvent the guidelines.
• Guidelines apply to all aspects of user's presence including posted content (comments, FanPosts), usernames, signature lines, and profiles.

Additionally, Vox Media (parent company of SB Nation) rolled out a new privacy policy on Aug. 26, which all community members were required to accept. Please take the time to review and adhere to these policies as well. Now is the time to review your account and at a minimum, ensure your name and email address are accurate (other information in your profile is optional but please be sure it is accurate if you have chosen to share it).

The new Canes Country Community Guidelines reside under the Library tab at the top of the home page. They are designed to build on the network-wide guidelines with emphasis on the following areas:

• The personal attacks provision has been expanded to identify additional specific prohibited behaviors.
• There are more specific guidelines around profanity and 'NSFW' content. Excessive, disproportionate profanity is not permitted (consider 'PG-13' a valid comparison).
• Political and religious discussions are restricted to situations where germane to an article.
• Public discussion regarding moderation and/or disciplinary actions is prohibited.
• Privacy and confidentiality provisions have been added.
• Provisions for use of copyrighted content and images have been added.
• Rules for disciplinary actions have been added.

TL:DR version: Practice Wheaton's Law. Further participation in the comments on any Canes Country post signifies your agreement and understanding with both the SB Nation and the Canes Country community guidelines, and you agree to be subject to their provisions.

All Canes Country writers have the authority to ensure that the site is moderated according to the guidelines. In addition to monitoring for unacceptable conduct, the writing staff have the ability to moderate inline within the discussion to maintain an even keel, for example to guide off-topic conversations back on topic, control arguments, etc. At this time, only managers and editors have the ability to administer disciplinary actions including deleting comments and administering warnings and bans, although in the future independent moderators may also be assigned to this role. All writers and commenters have the ability to flag inappropriate comments, and questions and concerns can be sent directly to the site email account (sbncanescountry@gmail.com).

Please also be aware that due to site limitations, comments cannot be edited, they can only be deleted, and deleting a parent comment automatically deletes trailing replies. The end result is that some comments will be deleted even if they include relevant conversation, if a portion of the comment violates the guidelines. Likewise, at times comments that violate the guidelines may need to be left intact in order to support the flow of a previous conversation. In that instance, the moderator will publicly acknowledge that the comment violates the guidelines but has been left to stand. The commenter may also receive a private warning even if the comment is not deleted.

We'll gladly answer questions or provide examples here in the comments, and the email account is always open for further offline conversation.

Rules are never pleasant to administer or to adhere to, but please keep in mind that the ultimate goal is to enable discussion while keeping conversation respectful to all who are participating or reading.

Be excellent to each other.