Buffalo Rumblings METATHREAD: editorial policy, site organization

Now that the NFL's off-season is upon us in full force, we're going to try to get back into the habit of having a regularly scheduled METATHREAD up on Monday evenings, so that we can talk about blog-specific events and topics without those threads infiltrating other football-centric conversations on our Buffalo Bills blog.

On our recent Mario Williams coverage

Very quickly: many of you are not happy that we chose to ran two stories on Williams and the allegations made against him by his ex-fiancee, Erin Marzouki, and their pending legal battle over a massively expensive engagement ring. We appreciate two things about that feedback: that you feel comfortable enough about our community to share that opinion freely, and that you have, for the most part, done so surprisingly respectfully.

You are free to continue to post those comments, but as a new editorial policy, we will not be addressing those comments on any controversial posts, for one reason: the comments section on the first Williams post from Friday night was an unmitigated disaster, and largely so because Matt and I unwisely chose to publicly defend the decision to post about the issue. We will review all comments of this nature behind the scenes and re-assess our decisions accordingly in the future. In this case, the two posts are staying up, and we don't plan on posting any more of them on that particular topic - though that could change. We're hoping it doesn't, and that the issue can be put to bed.

Featured sections

I get a fairly significant number of emails about two things: people routinely asked to be pointed to the "opinion section" of our blog, and I'm also frequently asked to link to specific sections of the blog, like posting series or archives of various approval polls. Now, you can access our most popular hubs in our Sections drop-down on the home page:

"Columns" would be the "opinion section" of the blog (aside, of course, from essentially every comment section and the FanPost section). Approval polls for the current big hitters in the Bills' football department reside there, as well. As we add or re-add popular sections to the site (say, for example, the Buffalo Rumblings Podcast archive), we'll add them to that drop-down menu.

Featured sections and hubs are also visible in our river on select stories:

Every links post that Matt posts in the morning shows up in our Web Rumblings section, and you can click on that phrase in our river to access an archive of all of those posts. The same is true of long-running series like State of the Bills Roster.

There is one other major form of organization on the site that most of you are more familiar with, and that's the StoryStream - like this one that we'll be adding to very soon. Hubs and sections are more for featured series or topics, while StoryStreams are for specific stories or one-off series.

And while we're at it: the "Library" drop-down is of particular importance as well, as that's where our site's Community Guidelines and our constantly up-to-date depth chart reside.

GIF of the week

I love GIFs (and so do you), and want to post them all the time. Our METATHREAD seems like as good a place as any for me to toss one in on occasion. This is one is fairly epic already, and could have widespread use in our comments sections. Don't ever change, Ken Cosgrove:

GIF via

Open forum

What else is on your mind this week? We're always looking for future topics for our weekly METATHREAD feature.