Welcoming New Readers To Buffalo Rumblings

Every so often, I like to welcome newer readers at Buffalo Rumblings. Our community continues to grow rapidly, and while most of the veteran readers and commenters are familiar with how we do things here, many of you may not be. After the jump, we've got as much info as we can get you about daily operations without melting your brains. For the vets, feel free to use this as a refresher course; for the newbies, let's get you started!

Community Guidelines: These are our community rules. This is something that everyone, vet or rookie, can check out, as they've been updated (or perhaps streamlined is a better word) as of late last week. If you receive a warning or a ban from one of our moderators, you've very likely broken one of these rules.

Creating an SB Nation account: You'll want to have an account even if you don't plan on ever contributing to our discussions. By having an account, there is built-in functionality that makes reading our discussions infinitely easier - such as marking comments as read and auto-scrolling to new, unread comments simply by typing the 'z' key.

You can connect to an SB Nation community like ours several different ways. A Yahoo! ID or OpenID can be associated with an SB Nation account, and Facebook Connect will get you in, as well. Or, you can do it the "old fashioned way" by clicking the "Start posting about the Bills" link on our front page.

With an account, as mentioned, you can casually meander through our discussion threads simply by pressing the 'z' key - trust us, you'll find yourself hitting that key on other sites and getting irritated when it doesn't take you down the page. That alone is worth the minimal time to make an account, though of course you're encouraged to join our discussions at any point, as well.

Technical questions: If anyone has any technical questions about the site, please feel free to ask here in this thread - I, or any of our veteran readers with the know-how, would be happy to assist you. Please know, however, that there is a 24-hour wait period on new accounts before you can comment; this was instituted back in 2008 when we had a bunch of sad-sack spam artists on the blog. Unfortunately, you pay for their idiocy. If you run into an issue during your 24-hour wait period, shoot me an email at buffalorumblings@gmail.com, and I'll do my best to get to it straight away.

FanPosts versus FanShots: Here's a helpful guide I wrote back in 2009 that, while (only slightly) out of date, still does a nice job delineating the differences between FanPosts and FanShots, as well as give you a few small guidelines on how to write them. If you're a vet, and already know what you're doing here, you'll want to click on that link anyway for the nostalgia that was us, circa two years ago, trying to figure out what color our quote boxes were.

The Rumblings team: I'm Brian, and I've run this community since April 2007. Matt has been here since, oh, maybe 2009-ish, and is my right-hand man and a hell of a great guy. Matt does our daily links post, a lot of stuff on the history of the Bills, as well as a few series-related posts and the occasional breaking news piece. I concentrate more on the news of the day, and pretty much whatever else I want to bore you all with.

We've also got two excellent authors in Ron and DJ; Ron has devised his own system to analyze offensive line play, and his posts are some of our most popular. DJ is our voice of technical wisdom when it comes to the game of football, and he covers a lot of NFL Draft stuff, as well.

Eric and Kurupt are our two senior editors; they've been with Rumblings longer than pretty much everyone here except me. They're our super-moderators, so to speak, and have done more for Rumblings more than I think even they realize. Both will occasionally appear on the front page, as well - Kurupt with his Top 50 Bills of All-Time series, and Eric with his specialty, Tuesday Morning Bills Trivia.

Lastly, we've got a great group of heady guys as our moderators. You've likely seen them all before in our discussion threads, as they pretty much dominate them. They're our eyes and ears keeping track of all you miscreants out there.

Facebook and Twitter: I realize not everyone here is social media savvy (sometimes by circumstance, but almost always by choice), but we're there and we'd like you to follow/like us there, as well. Facebook. Twitter. And while you're at it on Twitter, give @BrianGalliford and @MattRichWarren a follow, too.

Welcome, use this place well, and thank you for reading Buffalo Rumblings. That is the end of what I have to say.