Howdy, Rumblers!

In doing a little post-day job moderating - particularly on today's Derek Hagan thread - I ran into a little issue that I'd like to ask for everyone's help with resolving.

While that thread was the feature story on Rumblings, news broke of Peyton Manning signing in Denver. Immediately, the Hagan thread turned into three separate discussions: one on Manning, one on Tim Tebow, and poor Mr. Hagan was left in the wake of his own post.

This is a problem for us that goes well beyond this one particular circumstance. Topic-specific threads become catch-all black holes of random conversation on an every day basis. This is a problem for our moderators; for example, if we're trying to monitor a discussion on the oh-so-divisive Mr. Tebow, we're left checking dozens of threads to weed out the miscreants. Plus, if we have a read up about Derek Hagan, people are going into the comments to read about Hagan... not ManningTebowGate.

My request is simple: stay on-topic in threads. If news breaks, wait ten minutes for Matt or I to get it, and if we don't, put it in a FanShot. Our goal is to keep conversations as focused as possible. If that means we need to throw up a daily FanPost for off-topic, toosh the tish discussions, we'll happily oblige. But please do your best to follow the above guidelines; the less time we have to moderate, the more time we have to write new posts!

Thanks, everyone.