Remember last summer, when you raised a full $1,000 for the Sacramento SPCA? I do, because it was my proudest moment as a blogger, knowing that I helped create a community that, if nothing else, could come together to provide food, bedding, shelter and toys for the transient population of Sacramento cats and dogs.

The target is different this year. SB Nation as a whole as entered the DonorsChoose.org Social Media Challenge, in which SBN competes against various other networks in a fundraising effort for schools around the nation. Bragging rights are at stake, but more importantly, it's a concerted effort to help teachers and schools get the things they need for kids in less than fortunate situations. Teachers submit funding proposals, DonorsChoose vets them, and donors make the requests happen. There is a corporate element, and some foundations (including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) are involved in matching donations on some projects.

There are a lot of Sacramento projects on DonorsChoose, and I handpicked two for the Sactown Royalty community to work on fundraising for. You can find information on those and donate at the Sactown Royalty Giving Page. The Social Media Challenge runs until October 31, but these projects are actually open until funding is met.

Don't expect to be bugged too often. The SPCA experience was really rewarding, and I expect this will be similar. We all know how rough things are right now, but literally every cent helps. You can donate anything for $1 up. If you have a cushion, your help in funding these projects will be very much appreciated.

There was a bit of an annoying argument in a FanPost over the weekend. The writer of said FanPost has a politically charged avatar, and though the writer did not mention his politics in the FanPost, someone noted that the avatar was in bad taste, and things devolved from there. Once we reached the 90-10 noise-to-signal ratio, section214 kindly closed the thread to new comments.

This is annoying. I'm not going to police your avatars. No one here should be policing avatars. It's irrelevant. I honestly wish I could ban all avatars, so we could be judged solely on the content of our content. But alas, I cannot, so I will instead use my powers as a regional tastemaker to convince those with potentially offensive avatars (on both sides of the aisle) to change to something ... fluffier.

I hope this works, because Plan B is the complete destruction of life on Planet Earth by microwave rays, and I really don't feel up to that today.

As you know, Sactown Royalty is a member blog of SB Nation, a network of 212 (!) dedicated sports blogs. If you've been around a while, you know that SBN has grown magnificently over the years. But the re-launch of SBNation.com as a sports hub is really the next level.

The tech team which built SBN 2.0 (and the awesome commenting system which came with it) worked on the design and implementation of the new landing page. As you can tell, they know what they are doing. The new SBNation.com blog, on the left sidebar of SBNation.com, is written by some fellows you'll love:

• Chris Mottram, my former editor at The Sporting Blog, a gentleman and a friend.
• Eamonn Brennan, a great guy who can write about any sports with an amazing effortlessness.
• Andrew Sharp, a gentleman of the highest order.

The team will be pulling content from SBNation blogs as well as the wider sports sphere for that main page. Also, in equally awesome news, the individual sports page -- such as SBNation.com/NBA -- have become awesome resources with a collection of vital stories. Just so much awesomeness wrapped into one site.

On first glance, the site may just look handsome. But it's seriously a next-level sports site. Mixing the specific knowledge of us individual bloggers with the national eye of the editors and the scope of the entire sports world ... it's unbelievable. Give it a shot.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post. Child Protective Services is threatening to put section214 and Exhibit G in the foster care system if I don't feed them one square meal a month. This cannot happen!

PASPN takes fantasy basketball to another dimension. Instead of allowing you to draft the best players and forcing you to think way too much about Troy Murphy, it attempts to put you in the shoes of an actual NBA GM or an actual NBA agent. You can be Isiah Thomas or you can be Geoff Petrie. You can be Kevin McHale or you can be Mitch Kupchak. IT'S YOUR CHOICE!

Here's how the GM portion works:

There will be 30 General Manager spots available: one for each NBA franchise. Since this is a new league, we will start by taking over each team's existing contracts. After that, it's up to you to re-tool your team via trades, draft picks, and free agent signings to form the best team that you can. Since PASPN leagues are governed by the rules of the NBA's collective bargaining agreement (CBA), the Mock GM game mixes fantasy basketball playing with the realities of the business of the NBA.

Once the NBA regular season begins, we will compete in an 18-week Head-to-Head season, where each team has a new opponent every week. You start 8 players (PG, SG, SF, PF, C, UTIL, UTIL, UTIL), and whoever scores more fantasy points wins the matchup. The scoring system is based on NBA.com's Efficiency rating: ((PTS + TRB + AST + STL + BLK) - ((FGA - FGM) + (FTA - FTM) + TOV )). The top 16 teams qualify for the Playoffs, which take place during the final 4 weeks of the regular season.

And here's how the agent portion works:

As an NBA Agent, your goal is to make sure your clients needs are being answered whether they are a free agent and in need of a new contract or looking to get bought out of their existing contract.  The GMs have to negotiate with them, to sign free-agents, or to get buyouts approved.
 
The agents are ranked based on the size of the contracts they're able to get for their contracts and the performance of the players during the regular season.  Only points earned when a player is part of the GM's roster count towards the Agents rankings, so there is incentive for the Agents to place their clients in situations where they'll see playing time.

The official Sactown Royalty league has 30 GM spots available in total. Sign up quickly, lest you be forced to be a ruddy agent. You'll probably be Bonzi Wells's agent. We all know how that goes. I'm in the league, and I have no doubt I'll get saddled with the ... Kings. Ugh.

This has been a sponsored post. Back to your regularly scheduled unsponsored posts.

UPDATE: I lied! I've been told there has such a demand for the Sactown Royalty league that we require a second Sactown Royalty league. If you missed out on the first, sign up for SON OF STR here.

Instead of dispatching a gestapo of silent assasins to rid StR of trolls and idiots, I want us all to police the site and reject any sort of slippage into unsavory existence. We can do this three ways:

1. Flag. If it's spam, flag it. If it's inflammatory, flag it. If it's useless, flag it. I'll check the flags when I can and make nuclear decisions.

2. Rec. The best way to kill the spirit of the idiots is to rec the good stuff! Not just comments and FanPosts, but FanShots too. Not everything belongs on the front page, so I don't a lack of an FP to imply something isn't good. So I rec FanShots. I think I'm the only one.

3. Ignore. I won't lie: sometimes the "feed the trolls" threads end up being hilarious. But they really must be nuked to keep our place as tidy as it has been for its nearly four-year existence. Honestly, it's much better to flag and move on than to feed the fire of stupidity. Cut off the oxygen. These idiots want your goat. Keep your goat indoors. Keep it safe!

For my part, I'll post up some FanShot/FanPost guidelines later today as a reminder to the valued Royalists with valued thoughts who just don't quite have the system down yet. I'd love to get to a point where we have so many wonderful FanPosts I have to raise the rec minimum for Recommended FanPosts. (We already have higher standards on that than most SBN NBA blogs.)

Thanks to everyone for the contributions. Now let's drown out the idiots for good.

A quick slice of meta this morning. SB Nation has partnered with Yahoo! Sports, and SBN content will now appear on Yahoo! team pages and game thread comments will be fed into Yahoo! live box scores. You can see the former in action already.

Jim Bankoff, the CEO of SBN, has a post up at Blog Huddle explaining the partnership. Basically, Yahoo! wants better local coverage. SBN wants more eyeballs.

What's this mean to you?

* There might be a grip of new users. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But around the draft. And free agency. And when the team is good again. There will no doubt be an adjustment period in which they learn the ropes, and we help teach them the ropes. Fair warning, I suppose.

* Let's limit cursing in game threads. It may be hard, but at least Mikki Moore and Brad Miller are gone. That's 2/3rds of the cursing-related problem! (Dang, Beno ...) I'm not sure of the protocol to this point, whether there will be a censor or whether the firehose will be shut off if things get out of control. I trust that you all will prevent something like that from happening.

While we're here ...

* When creating a FanShot or FanPost, please use the team and player tagging functions. It's super-easy, and it will make it easier for fans (here and from the other SBN blogs) to find the most relevant content. If you write an opus on Calvin Booth, but don't tag the post "Calvin Booth" in the player box, future generations of Calvin Booth worshippers will not be able to locate it. We don't want that.

* A quick word about ads: all ads currently on StR are sold and managed by SBN. The StubHub ad, the CBS13 ad, etc. If you run a local business and you'd like to advertise on the world's greatest Kings community, drop me an email (tom AT sactownroyalty DOT com) and I'll set you up with our network folks.

No matter your politics, the country's taking a giant step tomorrow. The world's not perfect overnight, but the promised land is coming into closer view.

You could say basketball doesn't matter. But anything -- even a cruddy 10-31 team -- that brings diverse people together, that's a good thing.

I hate to repeat myself, but ... there will be none of the following:

* If you come here to pick a fight, you will be banned. No one in the world has time for you, so go away.

* From this point forward, if you use a derogatory word concerning a person's sexual orientation, you will be banned. We've had two instances of non-troll StR members drop the three- or six-letter f-word in recent days. Unacceptable. Consider it the same as the n-word, which is ultrainstaban worthy.

* If you post a moronic FanPost telling us, Kings fans, that Monta Ellis is better than Kevin Martin all while bolding letters in your diatribe to spell out "Suck a dick Kings fans" ... well then OH MY GOD YOU ARE SO FREAKING CLEVER NO ONE HAS EVER DONE THAT BEFORE YOU MUST BE SOME KIND OF INTERNET GENIUS YOU BIG MAN YOU DIDN'T THAT FEEL GREAT WHEN YOU GOT ONE OVER ON SOME COMPLETE STRANGERS WHO YOU DON'T KNOW FROM ADAM FOR NO REASON WHO CARES IF THEY NEVER DID ANYTHING TO DESERVE YOUR GENIUS YOU WILL SHOW IT TO THEM ANYWAYS BECAUSE YOU ARE A GREAT CLEVER INTERNET HERO OF SORTS YOU KNOW THEY JUST MIGHT MAKE YOU A WIKIPEDIA PAGE SOMEDAY BECAUSE YOU ARE SO FREAKING CLEVER ENOUGH TO STRATEGICALLY HIGHLIGHT SPECIFIC LETTERS TO SPELL OUT AN INSULT THAT POST MIGHT REVOLUTIONIZE INTERNET DISCOURSE FOR THE REST OF HISTORY THEY COULD BUILD A STATUE OF YOU SOMEDAY YOU CLEVER CLEVER MAN IT DOESN'T EVEN MATTER THAT THE 10 MINUTES YOU SPENT ON BEING AWESOME AND CLEVER WAS ERASED BY ONE CLICK OF THE MOUSE BY THE NAZI SITE EDITOR WHO IS TOO INSECURE TO LET YOU BE YOU AND DO WHAT YOU DO NEVER MIND HE CAN TAKE YOUR STAGE BUT HE CAN NEVER TAKE YOUR FREEDOM CLEVER GENIUS STRATEGIC BOLDER MAN. Also, if you do something like that, you're banned.

*Basically, idiots, just stop being idiots. It might be hard. It might hurt a little. Going cold turkey on the idiocy, man, it can give you the shakes. But just chew on some hard candy, take a deep breath, and let go of the idiocy. Us non-idiots will appreciate it,  and the world will be a better place for it.