Yesterday, as many of you have likely already seen, r/NFL chose to remove the CSS from their subreddit, in protest against the way that the Reddit Redesign project has been progressing. And make no mistake - this was not an easy decision for them to make, nor a simple one. If you haven't seen their post on the subject, you can find it here. If you haven't strayed outside of r/baseball much in the past, it gives a good overview of what they - and we, as well as most every subreddit's mod teams - have been dealing with in the last months.

Good CSS is, while not invisible, certainly taken for granted. Subreddits grow their CSS, refine and improve upon it, even overhaul it every so often to make sure the look is unique and friendly to users. Color schemes, layouts, flair integration, header menus, sidebar images - these provide a groundwork for subreddits and communities to build off, a basis for how to interact with the sub and its members. Many subs, especially sports subreddits like r/NFL, r/NBA, r/CFB, r/hockey, and /r/CollegeBasketball, as well as here in r/baseball and all of the team subs, rely on this styling to create a cohesive experience for the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who browse the sub every day.

Unfortunately, while we support r/NFL in their mission, we cannot take the same steps to disable CSS on r/baseball while we are in the middle of the season. That alone should speak to its importance to the way the subreddit works. So many of the features on the sub - from team logo flairs, to the daily game calendar and standings board, to the styling of game threads - rely on CSS that has been built, rebuilt, and polished over the course of years. To have these features ripped away in the middle of the season would be devastating, and would require as much work - if not more - to create even a similar user experience.

We do not know how far along the site redesign is into its "testing" phase, and when it will be rolled out to all users. We have promises from the admins that improvements to the redesign are coming. That customization options are coming. That CSS is coming. But we've had promises before. All we can do in the meantime is hope for the best, and prepare for the worst. We hope that r/baseball, and all subreddits, will have the features that the community has come to expect and enjoy, and the character that makes it feel like a unique part of a whole - instead of a minor variant on the standard.