Greetings dear reader(s), we hope you are enjoying your summer thus far! We have some administrative changes to discuss.

Our founder and blawgczar, Brendan, is stepping away from Pens.Hockey to pursue other interests.  His departure is disappointing, but sometimes better or more important things come along.  We wish him all the best in the future.

Despite this please know that in terms of content this should not affect your experience in any way; Rad, Gene/SouthSideGeno, Lauri/Finn Bonzalez, and myself (Chris/The66thDopefish) are still here and have no plans to go anywhere.  “We” have taken ownership of the site and are happy to carry it on. We all send our deepest thanks to Brendan for giving us an outlet and a chance.

With the change in administration there will likely be some changes or hiccups as we become familiar with what all goes in to running a website as well as some other decisions.The most important change we would like to address is the comments section.  We have a responsibility to our readers to make our community as welcoming as possible.  If we’re talking about hockey, this should not be a problem whatsoever, but because we live in the real world and not everything is hockey-related, the conversations in our comments section can stray off-topic.  Many of us have spent a long time on the Internet and we know what to expect from those conversations, but sometimes we can forget that some people are more sensitive to some subjects than others.

To this point, we would like to advise everyone to look over the Basic Rules for Disqus for guidelines on how this (and pretty much any online community) are regulated.  Are we going to more strictly moderate our Disqus comments hereafter? Not necessarily; there are only a few of us and each of us has our own threshold for what is offensive.  Our best suggestion is this: if you are offended by anything you see in our comments section, please make use of the “Flag inappropriate content” option in the dropdown box of the comment in question.  You are the only person who knows what offends you, and if you do not communicate, nothing can be resolved. We have always believed in a self governing comments section and feel that the “flag inappropriate comment” button is a way to help out with the edgier topics that came up over the last few months. PS: every time a comment is flagged we get emailed so don’t be a dick you dicks.

Other possible changes:

1. We are considering potentially doing weekly recaps on some weeks of the winter instead of after every game to help accommodate for Rad’s upcoming schedule of interviewing.
2. We would like to put a bigger emphasis on the shop and designs for the shop, if you have any concepts or images to contribute you know how to contact us.
3. We are still big believers in no ads but wouldn’t mind if the site became self-funded, any ideas on how to make that happen other than the shop would be appreciated
4. As always if you want to write for us just email us!

The four of us are thrilled to be taking over the site and making sure it stays afloat for this year (we are on a 1 year contract at the moment). We hope it is going to be our best year yet! If there are features you think would be cool or anything you would like to be included more in the posts (boobs is not an option) shoot some suggestions in the comments. Now is the time to try new things out before the start of the next season.

If you’re interested you can follow us on the Twits: Rad @admaryland, Chris @CDMcCauley67, Mr. Bonzalez @lauriruu and Gene @gpal722. Our feelings won’t get hurt if you don’t, Twitter follower totals may be an insult for some people but we have a life.