Brock Beauchamp

Anybody else game for signing up? It's going pretty smoothly so far but it'd be nice to have a few more names on the list.

Napping on the job last night. @PackLandVA is up for today's game thread.

"North Side Baseball, Better Than Insurance Companies"

Good lord.

Hitting the first batter is a bold strategy. Not sure it will pay off.

What were they even challenging? That it wasn't fair he missed the plate?

Oh hey, this game is still happening.

I'm doing month-end numbers and happened to stumble across this: In April of 2023 (the first full month after relaunch), users posted 5,050 posts. In April of 2024, that number was 7,550. The forums are *much* more active than they were a year ago. I thought there would be growth but not 50% growth.

See, I have no issues with the winter meeting megathread, that's a useful way to track a single event that will have related topics. We do the same thing for draft days. A three-day-long megathread makes sense. A three-month megathread, not so much.

I'd also love this but from a code level, it's so ugly that it borderlines on impossible. It's the kind of thing we COULD implement but I'd be so scared of massive code failure that I'm just not willing to do it. Why it's that way is kind of tough to explain but in simplistic terms, the time stamps on posts in the database dictate in which order posts appear. We'd have to do some pretty nefarious stuff to the time stamps to make it work and that leads to some pretty dangerous database issues.

There is quite a sentiment to move articles to their own forum. I'm okay with that but we need to make a compromise: I'll move articles to their own forums if we kill megathreads. I don't mind one or two megathreads - we also use them on other sites for minor transactions or what former players are up to across the league - but we can't have one offseason thread or one transactions thread. It's too offputting to new users. The first thing a new user does in a forum is look at how many threads are recent and any click into a thread automatically takes them to the first unread page. That's a problem if the first page is posts from 90 days ago. When we took over a year ago, about 250 people visited NSBB a day. That number is now 1,000. We're bringing in new users on a very regular basis and I want some of those users to drift to the forums and participate. For that to happen, we need the most welcoming environment possible and part of that goal means the Cubs forum needs to have recent, specific threads that make them want to click and read (and then hopefully post their own opinion).

This is a bug I've had three developers look at and it SHOULD be a two-minute fix but continues to elude us.

Okay, up next for tomorrow's game thread is @Brian707.

Ultimately, our goal is to move articles to their own forum permanently. It's what we've done on TD and also BF. But before we do that, I'd like to see more user-based topic generation in the Cubs forum. I'm all for putting articles in their own forum but when a user drops by to check in, I want them to see three new topics to read, not a handful of existing topics that are months old with 42,439 comments apiece.

This has been on my list of tasks and is currently queued in the development task list. I can't say it will get fixed tomorrow but it should be fixed some time this season.

This has been a thorn in my side for a decade. Ultimately, I keep landing at the status quo because some of the technical solutions get UGLY and dangerous. It's a problem I've been trying to find a lightning in a bottle solution for for years and I just can't.

I'm not really targeting this conversation about anything specific, I just want to get a read on what people think about the state of the forums and where they would like to see improvement. This could be technical in nature but mostly, I'm curious what people think of the tone, the conversations, and the general demeanor of the community. If you have gripes or compliments or whatever, share them here. I haven't been very active lately (on any of the sites, frankly) and like to check in periodically to gauge how things are going. As always, if you are not comfortable sharing something publicly, I'm always available via PM.

@Rex Buckingham you’re up for Monday’s game thread!

I'll need evidence.

What the hell happened here? I’m out and about this weekend and… 17-0? Yikes. @Bertz you are up for tomorrow’s game thread.

I've come to openly resent the NFL and its perpetual news cycle is part of the reason why.

@PackLandVA is on a helluva roll.

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Mine?