I can't believe I'm doing one of these "guide" type posts, because generally it makes me feel like an incorrigible douchebag, but this has been getting under my skin for a while and I would really like to try, if at ALL possible, to lessen the extremity to which I get irritated.

I think a fair few of you understand this, but to those that don't -- the Community Blogs and the Destructoid front page are two seperate heads of the one animal. While they are linked to the same body, they think, feel and act differently. A post on the Cblogs is not a post on the main page. Likewise, a post on the main page is not a post on the Cblogs.

What I'm saying is this -- when something is posted is on the Cblogs and then it is posted on the main page, that is NOT cause for people to shout at the editor for posting "old news" or something that has been "done already." It has not been done already on Destructoid, as a rule. The Cblogs and the main page are different things.

Remember, the front page of Dtoid gets thousands of readers a day, which is going to be more than the Cblogs. We can't just not post news because it might have been "broken" by a reader first. We reach more people, that's the bottom line. I've had to reign in saying that in a nastier way to people who have been particularly galling in the way they attack "old" news.

I know I don't just speak for myself -- it's very insulting for an editor, who usually spends a long time adding editorial commentary, spell checking ruthlessly, and generally making a story worthy of Destructoid's main page, to be waved off and have his/her work demeaned by somebody arrogantly throwing a link to the Cblogs and acting like they "broke" the story first. It also makes us look bad to other people. Hell, it's not even that insulting to link to your work if you're proud of it ... but throwing the link up and nothing else, or throwing it up with a backhanded comment to the Dtoid editor is pretty shitty.

If we get the news from the Cblog, you bet we'll link to that appropriate story. However, if there is no link to a Cblog in one of our stories, it's simple -- we got the news from somewhere else, probably the same source you did.

I doubt of course that anybody means any harm when they do it, but it can be very weary for the editor. I love the Cblogs here, and the editors on Dtoid are more interwoven with the community than any you'll ever see, which is awesome -- but there is that barely visible line between main page and Cblog.

Hope that sounds fair to everyone.