WrigleyField 22

Or when 51 of us agreed on anything. Not even the usual suspects are taking the contrarian take, apparently. Impressive.

Compromise: we'll create a site no one likes. This guy gets it

It's okay I never needed insider status to feel validated!

Seems low (hockey casual here)

Yea I don't know how practical it is on the backend, but I go to a Bears board that has experimented with merging 2 or 3 boards (Bears, other NFL, Draft) in an out of the main board due to volume at different point of season / offseason. It works well but I imagine it may be a little bit of a pain.

I mean surely Brock is just smart enough to insult the Cardinals to endear himself to us, but I'll accept that blatant ass kissing as genuine. I approve of our new corporate overlords.

What you've generally laid out sounds good to me. I don't have answers as to why some of these things like rants got split out. I'm sure long ago with much different activity levels it ended up making sense, and just hasn't been updated in ages.

fair. the off topic stuff was what i was mainly thinking of as the place for some megathreads. i guess it depends on how granular you would want to get with that stuff and how much the traffic does or doesn't warrant it. I'm kinda with you; I don't mind the megathreads, but would prefer more subforums. Like, one for politics, movies, music, food, etc.. Having a broader off topic forum still makes sense, and rants is fine. I think a "serious topics" forum is a decent idea, too. I know I'm biased, but I think the non-sports posters/topics have been doing a LOT of the legwork in keeping this place from being a ghost town. I know some of it comes down to moderation effort from volunteer mods, but I think social has always had a great beat to it. To borrow the movie or TV example, when Game if Thrones was on its live run, we busted out a separate thread for it. Or MCU and Star Wars have kept separate threads from Movie thread. Don't need a whole subforum. Sports/socual sub forums have stayed active and the frequency of talk between different topics has stayed fresh, without pushing activity off page 1 too quickly. There is no need to get so granual with OT type sub forums IMO. Perhaps by total accident, but those sub forums are keeping activity up because the rhythm to topic frequency actually makes sense and are accessible.

The new software has a robust activity tool that many of you will surely want to explore. It has all sorts of settings and can be quite granular based on your own interests. And you can save these settings to be quickly-toggled options for future use. https://brewerfanatic.com/discover/unread/ Very excited to see it in action. As long as those tools exist, it should hopefully help with killing mega threads.

To be blunt about it, I don't care about off-topic/social stuff unless it goes against advertising policy (ie. gets us blocked from our advertiser, which requires some pretty awful stuff or nudity, which definitely isn't awful by my standards but they feel differently) or goes against what I talked about above (ie. basic human decency). And when I say "basic human decency", I *do not* mean dark humor, I mean racism and general awfulness that is all too prevalent in our society. My opinion is that the first page of a forum should roll over every couple of weeks (again, specifically talking Cubs content here). Having more, focused threads increases engagement while encouraging new users to jump into the pool. Hell, just the news of the site purchase and this active thread has bumped traffic considerably in the past 24-ish hours. I encourage people to start considering what they're about to type and go ahead and create a new thread about it if it's a timely, specific point that will spin off its own conversation. To a significant portion of users, long-running mega-threads become wallpaper. More topics with specific titles encourage people to not only read more but post more, too. And a more visually active forum with lots of recent posts takes down one of the barriers people have to registering and making their first comment. I tend to agree. A lot of us I think use the active topic shortcut to view activity. That looks like it's rolling over from Sunday on page 1 right now. Not sure if 48ish hours is typical there. So you might get some pushback there from users accustomed to logging and and seeing a couple days worth of active topics. But probably a majority of those are not even cubs/baseball related since the non baseball forums actually start new threads with regularity whereas all Cubs/baseball discussion gets swallowed into mega threads almost by default.

Let's adopt this forum and let Mojo go nuts imo https://brewerfanatic.com/forums/forum/42-head-2-head-debate-forum/

I think social/sports forum has a pretty good mix of mega v non mega threads honestly. Like every subset of idiots we talk about there has there own thread and we are consistently adding threads for new kind of idiots and occassionally spinning them off into tangential threads. General Cubs Chit Chat on the Cubs Discussion sub forum is definitely a mockery of forums lol Page 1 of Cubs Discussion still has a last post date of July 2022! Just start a new damn thread! Compare to Feb 2023 for social and Dec 2022 for other sports for latest post date on page 1

You don't have to worry about this. We're in this for the long haul and fully expect to lose money the first couple of years, maybe turning a profit by year three or four. And if things go disastrously wrong from there, it costs us virtually nothing to shut down the parts of the site with high overhead (front page news, videos, etc) and return to being a forum. There will be no need to ever shut down the site provided there are people here interested in discussing the Cubs. What if 80% of my posts are in social/other sports sub forums

The relative lack of high level strategy makes us focus on the minutiae.

The sports editor, the main editor, or are you thinking of Katie Pizza? I don't even remember the actual editors' names. I just remember they both hated me. Most of my bosses forever have hated me because of what I now know is the autistic hyperfixation/burnout cycle. It's a little like manic-depressive. I get hyperfixated on my career, I do amazing work, give great interviews, talk myself into new and better jobs. A few months later I'm burnt out, the hyperfixation disappears, and I can literally barely drag myself in every day to click around on the computer screen and retype some press releases to avoid getting fired immediately. I always thought there was a vibe between me and Katie Pizza, but I was married at the time and would never press the issue. A few years later my then-wife cheated with a work buddy and I feel like I should get a re-do on that one. katie pizza baby! best name in the business So... Was she into Kyle and he should have shot his shot?

If they remove the horsefeathers horsefeathers filter we horsefeathers riot.

Yea, that's my read on it. I was playing around with the Over the Cap valuation metrics and all your playoff teams were getting like 240m+ in value (interestingly his valuation metric was quite a bit more than the cap on average which is interesting... Possibly it's keyed to $ and not cap hits?). But in any case, assume playoff teams are getting 110-115% excess market value, and for most of the teams, like 80% of your value is from your top 25 or so contributors (no duh).... If you had a magical roster with 25 expected value pick 65 players. You'd have only a 16% cap utilization, and you'd also have only about 68% market value roster which is basically 2022 Bears level bad (according to OTCs metric at least). So like those late second and early third picks for example are really useful and basically necessary. But further up the value chain your options for adding a "6% WAR" player is really limited so 65+66 isn't as valuable as your most valuable pick (12). If he just took the total value and not surplus value, it would maybe have been an okay start perhaps. Though I still really like OTCs methodology on their chart as theirs is also a reflection of actual market forces (based on second contract values). Even if market forces are flawed there's still value in that. See that he made some updates and incorporated some feedback. While I still don't see too much value in dropping QBs, looks like it's addressed some of the issues, and he added in total value as an option instead of just surplus value. I'd still take OTCs chart, and they have a position based adjustment tool as well so you can factor in the position being drafted (at least for the team trading up) to adjust point value. Which then helps adjust for all positions and not just QBs.

As a counterpoint, I'll bring up that this site's traffic has been consistently declining for a few years. Long-term posters inevitably leave and if they're not being replaced (which they haven't been for a few years now), a forum can become a ghost town. People WANT high quality commentary. It has been our calling card for years on Twins Daily and was the case for 20 years on Brewer Fan. The same has carried over to Brewer Fanatic, we're just giving good smart posters an option they may not have known about before. If you're irritated by the likes of Twitter and Facebook commentary, other people are, too... we try to be a place that attracts those people and bring them into the fold. We also don't hesitate to give Twitter bros the boot because we don't want to hear their thoughts any more than you do. I agree that the site has been declining in traffic, its basically become a group of people who know each other as well as anonymous internet people can know each other. I know IMB's an ass and I love him for it. I know David occasionally goes silent as he needs downtime to upgrade his RAM every so often. I know Mojo's an ass and I love him for it. I know why the game thread forum is named after Fred Hornkol. I know that goony's an ass and I love him for it. I know derwood is good for a dumb comment every so often because he doesn't read before he posts, but know I can give him horsefeathers and he'll take it in good spirits because he's a good dude at heart. I know that I don't have to look at minor league box scores because every morning Raisin will neatly summarize everything that happened the night before. I'm not against what you are doing at all, but some of that close knit core poster/inside joke stuff that makes this essentially my internet home page is what I worry we may lose if the board grows too much. I don't even know how much I care about discussing the Cubs anymore, I just like chatting with the same people I've chatted with for 20 years. But I am looking forward to seeing some improvements to the site, and hopefully not having to panic every time the site briefly goes down wondering if this is it for the forum. I'm open to seeing where this takes us. Good luck! Replace love with tolerate. Maybe even accept.

We should credit Bum with all the great stuff. Da Bum hand-timed a bunch of his friends running 90 feet and proved that diving into first is slightly faster. Wait, I'm pretty positive the sliding into first guy was someone else, too. Thatsthejoke.gif

Counterpoint: the reasons it was awesome had nothing to do with the Cubs or baseball and everything to do with the Social forum I don't know. Game threads used to actually worth browsing at one point.

Welcome and good luck. Hope this place is standing in another 20 years still. Browsing at Brewer Fanatic and Twins Daily. Do you envision upgrading the board architecture to that layout? And can we get a dark mode if so? If you give me a dark mode, I'm ready to call it instant success.

Wait really? I'm shook. Must be confused cuz of the cheese sauce and posts about drinking a gallon of apple juice to cut down his sugar intake.

Yea, that's my read on it. I was playing around with the Over the Cap valuation metrics and all your playoff teams were getting like 240m+ in value (interestingly his valuation metric was quite a bit more than the cap on average which is interesting... Possibly it's keyed to $ and not cap hits?). But in any case, assume playoff teams are getting 110-115% excess market value, and for most of the teams, like 80% of your value is from your top 25 or so contributors (no duh).... If you had a magical roster with 25 expected value pick 65 players. You'd have only a 16% cap utilization, and you'd also have only about 68% market value roster which is basically 2022 Bears level bad (according to OTCs metric at least). So like those late second and early third picks for example are really useful and basically necessary. But further up the value chain your options for adding a "6% WAR" player is really limited so 65+66 isn't as valuable as your most valuable pick (12). If he just took the total value and not surplus value, it would maybe have been an okay start perhaps. Though I still really like OTCs methodology on their chart as theirs is also a reflection of actual market forces (based on second contract values). Even if market forces are flawed there's still value in that.

My totally unbiased opinion (because I'm not a Ben Baldwin hater- he does some good stuff) This chart is total trash. He makes directionally "accurate" claims, but they are just claims that other analytical trade charts have done much better. It's not enough to just be directionally accurate when you're so far over in your end conclusions and values. My Fuller responses to it: