2016 Miami Marlins Season Preview: Community Guidelines

The Miami Marlins will have the usual consult of fans at each of their games. The suspicion is that Miami did not do enough to drastically change the expected attendances heading into 2016. But while Miami plans to appeal to its fans with just the product on the field, here at Fish Stripes, we want our readers and fans to be just as involved with the team here on the site as we are! And while content that the authors of Fish Stripes provides will take up the majority of the website, you guys have many avenues in which your voice can be heard!

Comments

The comments section of every piece is the most obvious location for where you can be heard as a Fish Stripes reader. Each of us is keeping an eye on the comments section to respond to your questions and comments about what you read. We encourage our readers to share their opinions about what we discussed in our posts. However, when I first started on this site, I wanted to emphasize that I wanted this to be a place for intelligent discussion. There is a place for emotion, and that is here too, but if you want to make a discussion point or an opinion, you have to have the right stuff to back it up.

Sabermetrics is not just about numbers, but rather about logic and rationality. As an example, here is what the community guidelines on DRaysBay say:

1. We like logic. We're not a "numbers-first" site -- we're a facts and logic site. You don't have to understand advanced stats to understand logic and to make a rational argument. We encourage debate and discussion, since there is rarely only one "correct" side to a debate, but you'd better be ready to argue with facts and not your gut.

Again, the goal here is to not make a "numbers-first" site, but rather one that is logic-first. You can discuss anything, but you need to have the evidence to back it up, and that is all that we can expect from the authors on the site and the community as a whole.

Fish Stripes is a facts and logic site, just like DRaysBay and so many other wonderful SB Nation communities. If you have an opinion to say, I am happy to hear it, but to have a discussion, you need to have evidence to back that up. It does not have to be numbers, it does not have to be data, but it has to be evidence. This is the key to open discussion, and that is what I want in our comments section here at Fish Stripes.

That being said, there are a couple of other rules to note in the comments and elsewhere on the site:

1) No politics or religion: This will be 100 percent enforced. It is simply not the place to have this discussion.
2) No personal insults: Think of your discussions here as being discussions you would have in a bar among other folks. If you say something that you think would liable to get you punched in a bar, you've probably crossed the line.
3) No advertising your stuff: If it is relevant to the discussion, you can put links to your own articles, but the editors reserve the right to delete comments that are blatant advertising of your own product/work.
4) Bring your evidence: Like I said before, if you want to discuss something, you better have some evidence to back your point!

If we follow these four rules, we can have fun discussing Marlins baseball here.

Game Threads

The Game Threads are a special place for Fish Stripes readers to join the writers in enjoying a Marlins game at the same time. Think of it like watching the game with your friends! SB Nation's live commenting allows us to get together every evening and watch the game live and comment. The rules are a little laxer in terms of cursing and other things, but the general principles above still count and will be enforced.

On our end, we will make certain that we get Game Threads up in a timely fashion for every contest to make sure that they are ready for you guys to sit back, grab a cold one (if you're of age) and watch the Fish with your friends. And we will be sure that some of our friends will be there every day as part of the journey!

In addition, we will be once again bringing back Ichthyomancy, everyone's favorite Marlins prediction game! Predictions should be made in the game threads as our head Ichthyomancy judge requests. Stay tuned for more about that soon!

FanPosts

Comments and Game Threads are awesome, but what if you think you have more to say? What if you think you have to write a lengthy response to something you read on here or elsewhere on the web about the Marlins? The FanPosts section is for you!

This is where you can go to get to the FanPosts section. If you think you have something to write that is worthy of an article, with the sort of length, analysis, and attention to detail that you expect from Fish Stripes, we encourage you to post your thoughts! This is where you can be heard and seen and where your own fellow readers can get into a discussion about your thoughts on the Marlins!

FanPosts let you drive the conversation! Instead of commenting on whatever we write, you can bring up your own topics, your own research, and your own opinions on something and let the writers and other readers respond. The FanPosts are about you and the Marlins!

FanShots

Did you find something cool about the Marlins that you just have to share with the community? Did you spot the best video of the latest Giancarlo Stanton moonshot? The best Jose Fernandez Defektor GIF yet? Or just an interesting article that you wanted to make note of? FanShots are the place to do it!

That red box is where we have our FanShots section. Right underneath, we've made it as easy as possible to create a FanShot. Just copy a link to a video, article, image, or whatever you want into the [+FanShot] button and click and you've just made your first FanShot!

Keep in mind, if you want to link to an article or a picture or something, please use our FanShots section and do not post a FanPost. This keeps both sections clean and filled with the types of things our editors are looking for in fan content!

What are we here at Fish Stripes going to do about FanPosts and FanShots? Well, we're going to highlight the very best of our community! Every few days, we will peruse the FanPosts and FanShots and point out and promote the very best to the Front Page! If you take a look at that last picture, we will also put those posts in our Fish Favorites section, complete with our choice of our most beloved FanPosts and FanShots! This is where you can have your work featured not just on the side of our site, but front and center! Many of our writers got their start in the FanPosts section, so getting noticed may just be the next step to you writing for us in the future!

Let us know what else we can do for you guys to make this community the best Marlins community on the web! Give us your thoughts!