A number of people have asked and expressed some concern about the last three Fridays and just where William Spaniel has gone. In fact, a thread from his article three weeks ago continues to get hits, discussion, and speculation on just what happened. I wanted to make sure that our readers knew what had happened, and to make sure that everyone knows that it is not by our choice that the last three weeks have been Spaniel-less.

I think it's fairly obvious that William's articles are not without controversy. Safe to say, each week when William's articles come in we need to take a closer look at them than the usual "deck, sideboard, play" articles. Normally when editing we like to allow as much as possible to stay in an article and also we try to alert each author when we feel something must be changed. Last Friday something in particular needed to be addressed, but time was so short due to the send-in time of the article that we could not have it posted in time, and our "suggestion" that the material be rewritten was not received well. A small snippet here will suffice:

What do the Nazi Holocaust and concessions have in common? ... we're going to start out by talking about genocide ... Ordinary people like you and me committed the Holocaust.

The gist of William's article was that concessions are bad, mkay, but it's the players fault more than anything for letting that happen. While that is a fine opinion, his opening comparisions (above) were grossly overexagerated, inflamatory, and non-publishable. I personally emailed William back with my suggested adjustments (changes that in fact left much of the article intact) and as of yet have not had further discussion with him about what went down.

William has been working with us for over a year, and we've loved all the things he's done for the site. I'm actually a bit surprised that it's taken this long for us to butt heads over an issue, but we're certainly not happy with the fact that it's left us without William's articles for the past three weeks. I've been trying to "give him some space", but I hope we can reach some sort of headway soon because William and his articles have become such a fixture on our site, and both sides have worked hard to make that happen.

This is not a public forum on opinions of whether or not William's article and its material should have been published or are publishable; that's not up for debate. The fact of the matter is that the owners and editors of the site made a decision. But with all of the speculation in the forums, I wanted to be sure that our readers knew what had led up to recent events.

If there are any futher questions, please send them off to me at ray@tcgplayer.com. I'll try to answer as completely as I can.