Brock Beauchamp

Yeah, sorry, had to hide that one and a couple of other threads dating back a decade. There were so many show-stopping slurs thrown around in there that I had to nuke the thread. If I ever get the time I'll manually clean it but don't hold your breath, probably best to start a new one.

The widget is hard-coded to that space but I may be open to moving it once we establish the site a bit more and get a good grip on how many forums there will be and where.

It's actually from an entirely different section of the site. That's the user blog section, which you can access from the top navigation.

It was!

It's one of the primary reasons I do that. I'm also a visual person and use icons whenever possible to quickly identify what I'm looking for.

For sure, read this blog post.

LOL. Excellent question. For the first year, traffic is mostly the same. It’s a matter of setting things up, creating consistency, and just grinding through that first year. From there, forum traffic grows modestly while front page traffic tends to take off. We’re not after the Facebook/Twitter crowd in particular, not even a little bit. I believe our sites are a place to escape those monstrosities, not become them. I will (and do) happily sacrifice pure numbers in favor of being the smartest place to hang out, not the biggest. We want the right kind of new users, not just new users. It’s why we moderate pretty heavily when it comes to insults, whether that be toward other users or team personnel. Tone matters a lot. There are plenty of places to be a mouth-breathing dipshit on the internet; I want to provide an alternative to that experience.

I mostly agree with this. The Braves looked really impressive for a 3-4 year stretch and continue to look pretty smart for those extensions but that's a pretty flawed team at this point.

I'm always hesitant to name names but these are the orgs I would look at to poach an AGM: Dodgers (duh) Brewers (seriously, don't understand how people overlook what they've done) Cleveland (basically the same as Milwaukee, though teams poach them constantly) Twins (they poached the right Cle people, their pitching system and farm are quite nice) Rays (probably overplayed but they still produce a ton of smart baseball people)

To be clear, I'm not all I MUST STOP ALL MEGATHREADS! Mostly, I don't care that much... but people need to be okay with some double-posting happening if megathreads are a thing. Just because something exists in page 86 of a 114 page thread doesn't mean it *really* exists in the public sphere. If people want to keep their megathreads, that's okay. But there WILL be duplicate posting happening if that's the case. All I ask is for users to just ignore the threads if they don't care for them.

Oof. That's really all I got. Oof.

By the way, why I speak bluntly like this is because I made all of these mistakes in my first baseball website and basically killed it.

Mega-threads often lead to the death of a forum. They're just so uninviting to anyone new. Think as if you're a new user. You pop onto a site and want to catch up with Jays free agents. You don't know anyone and have never seen the forum before. There is one thread called "Jays rumors" or whatever. It's eight months old and 78 pages with over 2,000 posts. Where do you start? The last page? The fifth-to-last page? And why? Or do you just ignore the thread? That's the problem. As much as I don't care for lots of things about Reddit, there's a reason it does so bloody well. It's full of accurately-titled topics that gain popularity for a few days and then everyone moves onto something else. Imagine you're the same new user on the same new forum. You see a topic titled "Jays Made Offer to Anthony Santander" with 23 posts. You're interested in Santander. You know what the topic is about. You have something to say. Do you see how the bar for entry is so much lower in the second scenario? Managing a community is all about finding what works at an acceptable level for as many people as possible. If we're not bringing in new blood, we're shrinking. Because every single day, there is a person who will visit this site for the last time. It's just how things work. It might be their first and last visit, it might be a person who lurked for a few weeks and left. It might be a semi-regular poster who leaves for personal life reasons. Could be a million reasons why. But it happens.

As opposed to the previous default state of the site, you may want to set a custom feed as your Jays Centre landing page. It's that useful. Instead of having to click through the (kinda insanely large now) site, you can tailor a feed to show basically whatever you want: select authors, topics you've followed, fellow users, unread content only... the list goes on. First, to find your personal feed, near the top right of the screen you will see a newspaper icon in the blue bar below your user information. That brings you to the default view, which is Unread Content. Here you'll see a variety of options to tailor your custom stream to do almost anything you like on the site. I'll spare you going through each item in detail individually, as it's all quite self-explanatory. You can choose tagged content, type of content (news, forums, blogs, status updates, etc.), read/unread only, content you've participated in or started, followed content, and finally, how it's sorted. Depending what kind of device you're using, you can also choose Condensed or Expanded. Condensed just gives you the title and link while Expanded offers a truncated version of the content as a preview. Once you've decided on your changes, you can save this stream using the save prompt below. You're allowed to have multiple custom streams so name this new stream and it joins the others. Once you're done customizing your stream, Click Stream Options at the top right of the selection drop-down, and your choices become your default custom stream. Every time you click that newspaper or visit your stream, the selections you've made will remain in place. That's it, enjoy the new site!

Welcome, Davy!

Obviously, I want the forum to grow, no doubt about that. But even the forum staying the same size is okay with me because we're building so much around it. The forum might grow a little while the rest of the site blows up with traffic. It has happened before. The thing about forums is that if things stay the same, the forum will ultimately die. It becomes insular, threads too long, users are unwelcoming to newbies, etc. And ultimately, people drift away one by one because life changes for each of us. I don't have numbers but I almost guarantee that this forum is less-trafficked than it was five years ago. Why am I confident in that? Because 99% of forum-only sites are less-trafficked than they were five years ago. Reddit, Twitter, etc. has just killed independent forums. It's something to keep in mind. Certain things that have just "always been that way" should be challenged from time to time. And it's kinda my job to do that. But I want to work with all of you and will always hear your input before making a decision.

Alright alright alright, let's talk about this. I thought we could wait for awhile but people have strong opinions so let's hear 'em. We have two options: 1. Keep the rumors in the Jays forum. 2. Create a dedicated rumors forum, like we have on... I think two?... of the other sites. Example: https://brewerfanatic.com/forums/forum/6-transaction-rumors-proposals/ If you have suggestions or want to say something specifically, do it here.

Are you kidding me? I also run Twins and Brewers sites! They've done NOTHING! Their rumors? NOTHING! EVERYTHING IS NOTHING (seriously, baseball is coming to a reckoning with the current financial disparities between teams)

I agree on that threshold, it's basically my goal. Most of the time, I stick to reports from established beat writers and work upward from there. I try to think of it through the lens of "would MLBTR post this?" In the case of this particular rumor, they also posted it.

We're gonna have some work to do here, I knew that coming in. I was immediately told there are some serious grudges to work past. Some really s***** things have been said, I've seen some of them. I'm sure there's a lot more. If I have to cut down on name-calling and wildly inappropriate s*** like calling people "drunks" by giving people vacations, I will do that. All I ask is don't be part of the problem by name-calling back. Let them hang themselves with their own rope.

I sent you an email about it, as I gave you a temporary password. May want to check your spam folder because I sent one a few days ago and it sounds like you didn't receive it.

Honestly, the rumors sections are one of the most controversial parts of the sites, which is why I'm open to treating them differently on each site. Some people *really* like rumors; it's a form of wishcasting and dreaming on fun stuff. Some people absolutely DESPISE rumors. In the long run, rumors are really good for the site gaining traction with google and social media, which brings in new users. So it's a matter of finding ways to incorporate them in the least obnoxious way possible for all involved.

Either way, if anyone has a problem with literally any poster, my door is open. Starting fights on forums is what destroys them over time. Feuds start, rifts grow as a handful of posters declare war on one another, and everyone else leaves because it gets in the way of actual conversation. Calling a person a name never improves the situation. It changes nothing for the better.

Stop insulting one another. Now, please. If you can't have a conversation without name-calling, don't have the conversation. We're all grown-ass adults here, please act like it.

PMing you.