Welcome to Camden Chat!

Hello and welcome to Camden Chat! In finding your way here, you have already taken the first step in what could be a beautiful friendship. If you're an Orioles fan, you won't find a better place to come and hang out and talk about the O's or anything else than right here.

It's always a bit intimidating to drop in somewhere new where everyone already knows everyone and you are the new person, but don't be shy. We are a friendly bunch, and since we all love the Orioles, we have that big thing in common.

Here are a few things to help you get the lay of the land before you jump in:

How to join:

If you have never been a member on any SB Nation site before, the first thing you will have to do is create an account. All you have to do is go to the top right of the screen you are on now and click sign up. Pick yourself a username, make up a password, and put in an e-mail, and you'll be good to go in no time.

Once you've made an SB Nation account, the next step is to actually join Camden Chat. Go into any article and all the way at the bottom of the comments, you will see a message that you must be a member of Camden Chat to participate. Check the box to agree to the Community Guidelines and then click the "Join Camden Chat" button and you will be activated immediately.

The Rules

You can find the Community Guidelines here. They pretty much boil down to don't be a jerk.

There are a lot of places on the Internet where people say, "Don't read the comments." My goal is for Camden Chat to never be one of those places. You should read the comments here, because the comments are what make this the greatest community of Orioles fans you could find. This is not the Wild West of some newspaper comments section. There are standards.

If you're here and you're not an Orioles fan, you're still welcome to hang around. We like to talk baseball or anything else with anyone. Please keep in mind, though, that this is a haven for O's fans. If you show up to interact in the immediate aftermath of a tough loss or after a brawl or some other event where emotions will be charged, your presence will be viewed much less kindly, especially if you just want to rub it in.

Dropping in on a random Tuesday and the Orioles aren't even playing your team? Welcome to the party!

Follow us on social media

Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook and you can stay on top of anything new that gets posted to the site. Bookmark us in your browser too!

FanPosts and FanShots

You can contribute in more ways than just commenting on articles. There are also FanPosts and FanShots, which you can find along the right side of the page.

If you have a story to tell, a FanPost is a great place to do it. Maybe you went to a major league or minor league game and a player gave your kid a great experience, or maybe you'd like to tell us about going to a game on the road, or anything else that might be on your mind about the team. If your FanPost is really good, the next time you come to CC, you may find it on the front page.

FanShots are where you can share awesome or funny pictures, GIFs, Vines, videos and the like, whether they are yours or someone else's. For the most part, you just find them somewhere else, put the link into the FanShot, and then it will take care of the rest. As with FanPosts, the best of these could end up on the front page, because if you liked it, we might like it too.

Getting started

If you're capable of lucidly stringing together sentences in the English language, which if you've read this far I'm guessing you are, there's no better way to get started than to just jump right in. I suggest you pick the day's Bird Droppings post, our open thread posted each day with some O's links that is a platform for you to talk about whatever, within the rules. If it's a game night, join in the game thread and get swept along with the current.

Oh, and if you're responding to someone else, make sure you hit that Reply button on their comment, instead of accidentally replying to the bottom of the page. Do that correctly and no one will even notice that you're new.