Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another year of Calgary Flames hockey!

On behalf of the owners, management and staff of FlamesNation and the rest of the Nations Network, we’d like to thank all of you in advance for visiting us and contributing to what we think is one of the most vibrant and exciting hockey communities around. (Admittedly, we are a bit biased.)

That said, with the season kicking off, we want to have a quick chat about some ground rules we’d like to lay out regarding participation in our community. I’d like to sum up these ground rules with a simple maxim: don’t be an ass.

We’re excited that so many of you are passionate enough about hockey, analytics and/or the Calgary Flames to be so boisterous and active in our comments sections. However, sometimes that boisterousness steps over the lines.

Here’s what we won’t accept in the comments sections:

At the minimum, these comments will be deleted. If a member
continues to be hostile, they can and will be banned, both by username
and by IP address. We had a bit of stupidity in the comments to close off last season and rather than let this small group ruin the party for everybody all season, we felt we’d lay out the ground rules up-front and then start bouncing people. It’s either that or shut down the party, and we think our party is generally pretty fun, so we’d rather not do that.

Simply put: don’t be an ass, and we’ll have a great time together all season.

If you have any comments or concerns about this (or anything else site-related) during the season, feel free to reach out to myself (via e-mail at ryan(at)thenationnetwork.com or via Twitter), Kent (via Twitter) or Thom (via Twitter).

Here’s to another fun season following the most fascinating team in the NHL!