Welcome Deadspin Refugees!

Greetings!  Much like finding your way to the mythical Ultima in the Choose Your Own Adventure book “Inside UFO 54-40”, you don’t necessarily remember how you ended up here at doorfliesopen [DFO], but somehow you did.  We’re glad you’re here!  Like many of the new folks, many of us were also fans of deadspin and are sad to see its demise, particularly with regards to the many talented writers who are bravely telling the assholes from G/O Media to go fuck themselves.

A bit of site history: DFO got started as a little wordpress project by some kommenters from the beloved blog KissingSuzyKolber.  We really enjoyed what the KSK crew was doing and wanted to develop as writers and start producing our own material.  When KSK got shuttered by Uproxx, we carried on their tradition of dick jokes by going fully independent and building our own site.  The NFL was originally our main focus, but we’ve branched out considerably since those days and cover all kinds of things, including Australian rules football, Canadian rules football, Everywhere-but-America rules football (aka soccer), robot fighting, and even competitive cheating.  If you’d like to peruse through some of the best work we’ve done over the years, here’s a pair of links to some of our favorite posts (part 1 and part 2).  You’ve come here at a very special time, because today is our annual Halloween celebration, featuring spooooooky NFL stories.

I’m going to pretty blatantly plagiarize last year’s welcome post by Balls of Steel for some of the basics about playing around in our sandbox here, but we’re glad you dropped by, and we hope you stick around to crack jokes with us.

Oh – one last thing.  We don’t run ads here, and never will.

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Some Guidelines For Commenting

Our little community here are all good people, and have very good senses of humor. We are also by no means PC around here and sarcasm is not only accepted, but encouraged.  We all root for different teams (and different sports), and we regularly give each other loads of shit about it. We like laughing at other people’s expense, even our own. So have at it.  We never want to stifle anyone’s voice by deleting or editing comments. We want you to say what you want to say, when you want to say it, and how you want to say it. As long as it doesn’t become a situation where specific other commenters are being targeted/harassed personally, or it becomes problematic regarding language. And don’t get me wrong, profanity is allowed (often encouraged).

But slurs thrown in malice/anger, especially directed at other users are not. That’s a big no no.  The same goes for racial slurs, like the Washington [Redacteds].

Sometimes sarcasm doesn’t come thru in typed text. So please keep that in mind. A vast majority of the time, that will be the case.  We don’t have a lot of rules around here, and we’d like to keep it that way. Mutual respect among members of the community goes a long way toward that end. Have a sense of humor about yourself and don’t take anything too seriously and you’ll be fine.

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Posting Videos and Images

To post youtube or vimeo videos, just copy the whole address and post it into your comment: “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go0d3LL_sux”.  Links with the youtu.be prefix won’t work – yet.  Images are a little more complicated.  The address to the image file must begin with https…the “s” is very important.  Without the “s” (if it’s http with no “s”), the image won’t embed into your comment.  However, the address will be visible as a hyperlink and can still be clicked and followed.  The images addresses also must end with .jpg, .png, or .gif.  If you cannot find the image you are looking for with the proper string, you would be encouraged to copy the link or save the image and upload it to PostImages.org for quick and easy use.  This works particularly well if you want to post a photo you took but it’s not on the Internet.

With regards to nudity: no exposed genitalia, and female nipples must be mostly obscured by clothing.

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So What Else?

Be cool. Be funny. Don’t be afraid to contribute. The site was built by people who commented on other sites, so we all were in your position at some point. We were all wondering if we were funny enough to be at the same place as the people whose comments we read and who we thought were hilarious.  We won’t bite your heads off if your first comment doesn’t hit the mark.  Now, if you feel extra adventurous and want to WRITE for this site, we encourage that too! As I mentioned before, we all started out by commenting on sites and then decided to take our shot at writing. If you want to do that too, PLEASE let us know and we’ll be happy to have you join us in creating precious precious content for us to read on the toilet at work.  Anything you want to write about is welcome as long as it’s related to having a good time and enjoying the many things available in this world that can make us happy.  Which, ultimately, is what this blog is about. We want to have fun, make ourselves laugh, and remind ourselves that, no matter what things happen to you in life, there are also good things in this world and they should be celebrated.

All hail the most glorious Commentist Party, and welcome to the revolution!