Hello, world!
It is the start of a brand new baseball season! Nobody seems to have told the weather but I promise you that it is so. If you’re reading this you may be a new Royals fan. That’s terrific! Our fellowship always has room for more and you won’t even have to deliver any magical rings to deadly volcanoes to participate! If you’re not a new Royals fan you might still be a new Royals Review fan. This is also terrific! As a new Royals Review fan, you may be asking yourself such questions as, “What is a Royals Review? Did I pass? Do I get a quarterly earnings bonus?” and there are reasonable answers to some of those.
What is a Royals Review?
To put it succinctly this is a blog/internet community primarily focused on the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Royals Review, or RR for short, belongs to the SB Nation group of sports blogs. Any other blog in their family will allow you to use the same username and will have similar layouts and commenting setups. You’ll have to specifically request commenting access for each blog as you go, but otherwise, everything is set up identically.
Here at Royals Review we have a wide variety of content to keep you informed and entertained. We have threads every game day in which you can chat with other members of the community about the game as it’s played, recaps, daily link roundups, series previews, analytical pieces for the statheads, and satire for people who just want to laugh. You may have heard that up until very recently the Royals weren’t very good so you might be surprised at the humor that a bunch of nerds have been able to come up with.
Is this the only place for Royals Review content?
Absolutely not! You can find Royals Review content in a variety of places on social media:
- The main website is where you’re probably at, right now, https://www.RoyalsReview.com
- There’s also the official twitter account of Royals Review at https://twitter.com/royalsreview
- The official Facebook page can be found at https://www.facebook.com/RoyalsReview
- There’s a semi-regular podcast which usually be found here but also on https://soundcloud.com/royalsreview
- And if you navigate to the Masthead you’ll find twitter links and/or email addresses for almost all of the Royals Review writers, editors, and our manager, Max Rieper.
What can I do here?
Royals Review is not just a website for news and analysis about the Royals. It’s a community. That means we absolutely encourage you to participate! You might want to start out by pretending you’re an anthropologist studying some strange new culture and get the lay of the land before you jump in. Many of the regular commenters and writers here started out as lurkers. You may also want to just go ahead and take the plunge; that’s fine, too! If you haven’t started the process of acquiring permission to post here, though, there is a one-day waiting period.
While you’re lurking or waiting for your permission to post, you might want to go ahead and check out this community guide to get an idea of the kinds of expectations we have for behavior around here. Even if you don’t want to do that, please make sure you understand the quoted section below:
What will get you bounced from our community is persistent abusive harassment towards a user or users. Specifically, this means any more harassment of writers at MLB Daily Dish will get you banned immediately. The definition of “harassment” can be difficult to spell out, but I think we all know trolling when we see it, and I will generally give one warning to steer you in the right direction, but after that I cannot accept that kind of behavior and I personally will ban you.
What will get you banned without any warning:
Racial/ethnic/homophobic/misogynistic slurs (this includes the word that rhymes with bunt)
Posting of pornographic images
Revealing personal details about another user
Obvious trolling with no positive contribution of any kind
There’s also a user’s guide which might answer some of your other questions. Because Royals Review is an internet community you know we’ve got our own inside jokes and memes, too. We don’t want to exclude you, though, so here’s another guide that describes many of them. Also, that guide is a bit out of date - it lacks the references to Swedish Sex Dungeon, for example, a meme that’s a bit of a spin on the “that would make a great band name!” meme - so if people are saying things that don’t seem to make a whole heck of a lot of sense it’s probably just another inside joke and if you ask someone will be happy to fill you in.
The most important meme is probably the otters meme. Here at Royals Review, we share pictures of otters in gamethreads and recaps every time the Royals win. That means we don’t share pictures of otters until they win. Avoiding premature otters is a matter of respect toward your fellow RR community members.
Once you’ve completed your waiting period you’re ready to go! You can comment on any article posted here, and you can even write your own through the FanPost section. You won’t just be screaming into the void if you do, either. Our manager, Max, makes an effort to find some of the better and/or more interesting fan posts and get them posted up on the front page. That’s actually how I started on the path to this glamorous career as a word-slave staff writer, here! Even if you don’t make it to the front page you’ll probably still get some comments from your fellow readers and writers so check it out!
The community here is a bit more on the stat-oriented side, but that doesn’t mean everyone and everything here is incomprehensible or immune to other kinds of discussion. If you don’t like stats, that’s fine! If you don’t understand a stat just ask in the comments; the community is pretty friendly and someone will be sure to help you out. If you don’t want to talk about baseball at all, for some reason, you should find your way to one of the Off-Topic threads that get posted sometimes on off-days or to the Royals Rumblings where a roundup of Royals news and other things of general interest get posted every day but Sunday. There are all kinds of conversations that happen there so you’ll probably find something you like. We even have a handful of commenters that treat the entire experience as a sort of performance art with varying results but a couple of them are well-adored members of the community.
The point is to have fun while sharing the camaraderie of rooting for the Kansas City Royals. There is no structure you must follow or stat you must worship in order to do so. As long as you’re having fun and being respectful of everyone else we will all get along just fine.