Why we've come here

[TestSubjekt]

Hey guys...as I've mentioned a couple times I was just toying around with ideas for a site and wasn't actually expecting anyone to register and start using this site. But thanks for checking it out and the positive feedback.

Let me just throw some random thoughts out there to try and explain...."Why we've come here"

Let me start off by saying I've got zero knowledge of how to run a site or real admin'ing. The board is free hosted by proboards. I've seen free boards crash and numerous posts or whole threads disappear on other proboards when a big event happens.

Anyways back to my original point...I really don't like the lack of leadership at Scout, pertaining to FH. The hockey side really doesn't see it because Scout has no hockey publishers and probably has no intentions to start. Basketball is in the same boat as hockey, but I don't have first hand knowledge of that. But no pubs. But football is in the same boat as baseball with Scout having publishers running the boards in a way that is very unFanHome-like and longtime members are leaving. Every team board is basically an island to itself. You have to apply for membership to post on a board.

So I was planning on leaving and posting elsewhere, but I've also felt that other mods and CM's are starting to feel the same way, so I thought of maybe organizing to try and keep EVERYONE or as many quality posters together...which is why I started toying around with this site. I wasn't happy with the way the boards started to feel in general. I know that one of the admins on the site is planning on starting a sports related site. He might add messageboards if there were quality posters using them. Or there's the possibility that another former FanHome admin could start a new board as well. Or there's also the choice of moving to an already existing site. I thought this would be the best solution and easiest way to populate a site and checked out a few boards, except I honestly found the intelligence levels to be alot lower than I was used to on FanHome...err...Scout.

On a side note...as far as I know no one has had any contact with anyone at Scout that oversees FanHome in a very long time. *I heard from Scout today* Contents of discussion with Scout exec included in full Maybe a year, judging by the last post from a Scout Admin? I emailed Stephen Miller at Scout (who I believe was our last known contact) yesterday about the lack of contact. I don't think he'll respond. He did. 3 times.

Scout hasn't updated our software in ages. We've been there for four years or so by my count. Another CM found out we might be moving to new software at some point in the future...

On March 7, 2006, ezboard's CEO stated that all ezboards would move to Yuku when it is ready and that they anticipate this will be in late 2006. While still in development, Yuku will give ezboard users access to both platforms (Yuku and ezboard).

You can read all about YUKU here

[/b][/blockquote]

Yet we (posters, mods and CM's/admins at the former FanHome) haven't been told anything about this and I think we should have been.

If someone can read this and make sense of it, I shall exalt you.

Please discuss...

I added some stuff in to make it more relevant with the new thread title.

[coolguy3]

Chris, I admire you taking the important first step of separating from Scout.com. I'd like to voice my opinion and what I know of Scout.com and what has transpired over the past couple years and what I think will happen in the future.

First off, I'm an admin for the Miami Dolphin board, CM over the football boards, and have admin status over the rest of the Scout boards to help with HTML stuff. I've been doing this ever since the merger of FH and Scout.com. With my experiences I've gained a lot of friendships both through Fanhome and through Scout.com.

I'm sure most everyone is aware of the reasons for the merger. To be brief, Kevin & Alberto sold Fanhome to Scout.com for probably two reasons: 1) Didn't want to do it anymore. 2) Money.

The purpose of Scout.com buying Fanhome was to pump life into the forums, which would generate traffic and hopefully subscription sales. Fanhome is a FREE message board community with thousands of posters and K&A (Kevin & Alberto) just couldn't afford it anymore. It costs a lot of money to maintain the large community that Fanhome was. The only choices K&A had were to either have FH sink by being bankrupt and the boards would vanish or give Fanhome a chance to keep most of the community intact by being maintained by another site - Scout.com. The posters weren't entirely aware of what was going on and outrage was taken out against Scout.com. The few people behind the scenes that knew what was going on left. I think JohnF was one of those people and could probably give a little more insight of what all happened but this is the conclusion I've been able to make after having phone conversations with Stephen Miller, K&A, NYR, Hagrid, gerryf, and a few others.

After the merger I was promoted from mod to admin on the Dolphin board. While being admin I've become friends with a few publishers and they are extremely cool guys. (No Pun Intended) Keep in mind that they run a subscription based community because this is their way to make a living. It's not just something to do for their leisure, it's so they can put food on the table too. The amount of work these guys do is tremendous and something I personally couldn't do myself. That's the structure of Scout. To make money. Guys make this a career. Nothing wrong with that, right?

The problem lies when people who want a community where they can easily interact with others across a vast sports forum are isolated on one fan forum. Fanhome was structured for many fans to easily navigate through many team boards, which brought forth great conversation that made great friendships. Scout is structure as individual team boards geared towards marketing those team fans. If I were a Publisher for Dolphin Digest, how would I make money by having one of my posters venturing to the Vikings board? I want my posters to stay on my site. That's where the conflict is coming from. Having the community and life hood of Fanhome pushed into a Scout.com structure.

There is no one to blame for what has happened but if the spirit of Fanhome is going to live on, it'll have to be elsewhere. The only concern is to not run into the same financial trouble that K&A had.

Now this part is my opinion and an opinion others share too in that once Scout.com transfers to Yuku the main forums that were once Fanhome will exist no longer. The usefulness of the main forums is dying. Scout doesn't see the main forums as a productive way to generate traffic into the team boards.

Chris, you are taking the right steps in solving the dilimma. I support your decision in your attempt to make Fanhome the community it once was. It'll take a long time before we resemble the Fanhome of old but I think there is a good nucleus of people here to start it off in the right direction.

[BroadST]

I agree with both of you. As I posted over at Scout, I am fearlful of it just dissappearing one day without any prio knowledge and no matter how much we try, we won't be able to get our "community" back.

If we are worried about finances, why don't we try to go the donation route? There is an extremely popular board I know of that survives that way. You don't have to subscribe aka donate, but when you do, it gives you slightly more privledges?

Feezepop - aka BroadST

[coolguy3]

I think the donation route would work in the beginning but over time not receive enough donations to maintain this place.

[TestSubjekt]

I'm not sure where it was that I mentioned that I had emailed the last person we were told was our contact at Scout.com and I got a response!!!

Of course I'm going to share it with you all and also my response/rant to him.

Hi Chris,

I had a death in the family and just returned.

I will help FH mods with whatever they need but I also gave everyone the email addy of [e-mail] if any FH mods needed assistance. This goes to our technical department, and you will get faster service.

If you need a certain comp - email [e-mail] with all pertinent information. Username, email, and real name.
Site wide or global bans also go through [e-mail] Please have the correct documentation before asking for a global ban. This includes the posters username, and the post(s) that he is getting banned for.

As far as Scout's goals for FH mods and CM's, we just want to build successful communities, we hope you do as well.
When you ask FH leadership what are their long term plans?

Thanks

Hi Stephan. My condolences for your loss.

I notice this isn't the email address I emailed that you posted in the Call To Action thread on all the mod boards. Is that why the majority of our emails go unanswered? Just a thought...

You said you told us the netdev@scout address. Umm...where? Because nobody, and I do mean nobody, knew where to find someone to contact at Scout, other than the aformentioned Call To Action threads which apparently contained an old email address for you.

To answer your question from my perspective, I'd have to answer it with another question. Sorry about that.

What leadership? Kevin and Alberto haven't been seen in a year or more. Our last Community Manager with admin like powers over the whole site (Patronus) wasn't replaced. Those are people we considered to be leadership at our site. Afterall if we had leadership, wouldn't someone have had that email address that you say we already had? Wouldn't someone know something about switching from ezboards software to something called yuku?

Do you not remember what you wrote in that Call to Action thread that you placed on every mod board and then seemed to forgot about?

"I completely understand how the lack of communication between Scout and FH has caused some moderators to leave and raised the frustration levels of some moderators and admins.

All the steps required to get anything accomplished has to change.

The current process – where a moderator has to go to a sport specific moderator, who has to go to the community mangager who has to go to the owners who then have to come to me – can easily by improved so that you can get your issue resolved quickly and easily.

I intend to focus on making it easier ASAP."

Did you do something to improve the communication between Scout and our boards and we all missed it?

One more point from your email I have to address while I know you're around was your answer regarding goals for FanHome. You said you want to build successful communities. What's going on with hockey and basketball? Will we be seeing publishers killing those existing communities soon like they've done to the FanHome football and baseball team boards?

FanHome was a singlular community, not an association of separate communities. You could jump from team board to team board without having to apply for access. Are you aware that on the Blue Jays board one of the former original moderators was denied access by the publisher? Did you know that a longtime Toronto Maple Leaf mod was also denied access? Why can we not jump from team board to team board anymore? It seems like with Scout you want every community to be an island unto itself.

When Scout.com under its earlier name bought FanHome, it bought a single great community. It valued that community enough to buy it. That purchase indicates there was something of value to FanHome. Unfortunately the lack of unifying leadership and the MBA process, where you have to apply for access have damaged that value.

What the moderators, CM's and Admins are trying to do is maintain that value that Scout/TheInsiders once saw. With proper leadership in place and inclusion of the mods/CM's/Admins in the plans for FanHome Communities on Scout.com that value can be resurrected and enhanced.

Chris

[TestSubjekt]

I must have caught him sitting at his computer...

A response already!!!

Chris, I did make it easier.
I gave those who wanted more permissions more permissions.
I gave that direct email to tech support to everyone who emailed me about help.
I raised the sending emails to unlimited, so I have helped.
I really have no time to check your forums. I rely on emails to help get what you guys need.
My tech team has been great with that.

The call to action thread could be removed, it is really old.
I am sorry that your leadership has been non existent, I don't know what to say except we will help you guys with whatever you need, but we are not your leadership, we are your support. Originally all issues went through your leadership but since they are not responding to you, we have agreed to help all the mods who need it.

[coolguy3]

Our problems are not important enough for him to deal with. Trust me, I've heard it from him. I've had numerous phone conversations with the guy. I'm not sure what are you trying to accomplish here. Scout isn't going to change their structure to make us happy. This is a everlasting cycle with no resolve. Chris, many before you have gone the path you have taken to only get nowhere.

To us Fanhome is seperate from Scout but to Scout, there is no more Fanhome. They're right. There is no more fanhome. These are all Scout boards and I don't believe Scout is going to change their money making process to appease us.

Talking with Miller will get you no where. What are you trying to accomplish will get you no where. What you want and how you will accomplish that will be to continue with what you have here and grow it into a new community.

[shimmeroo roo]

Who has the power to grant access to someone to replace Patronis? Does this guy? Does their tech support?

[coolguy3]

Patronus didn't have any power that I don't already have.

Denis Savage is the one who has powers over all of the football team boards.

Patronus didn't have power over Pub forums.

[shimmeroo roo]

Nobody really has powers over the pub forums though, except the pubs. Right?

Quite honestly, I didn't realize that you'd had administrative powers for all of Fanhome (non-pub boards) and I'm not sure how aware the CMs are that you have all those powers, either. I don't know how much access the TyPenn guy has, either, but he seems to be the most active of the admin-types.

I dono, I'm all about supporting a growing community here, but part of me still wants to do everything I can to keep the broken pieces of the old community together just a little longer.

[coolguy3]

I have powers because I fixed HTML issues on the Hockey and Basketball side. I was worked on the quote feature for the BBQ section and I did some updates to the More Sports Forum. I was given powers by cooldude32 and maybe some others? Eh, I don't really care if my powers are not there. I'm just there to help out.

I have admin powers over the Dolphins, Saints, Chiefs, Seahawks, and Raiders board. I help out with admin and graphic stuff there too.

What can I say, I help where-ever I can and have made great friends along the way.

You can try to piece it together all you want but you aren't gonna get anywhere. Just ask NYR.

I'm just trying to save yourself the frustrations of everything I've seen and been through already.

[TestSubjekt]

My response back...

Sorry to tell you this Stephan, you're not support for us. Scout runs our site. We have some control over it, but it's more like we are support for Scout.

We've made decisions that get overturned by Scout.com and have seen Scout make decisions affecting our boards without any notice to us. That doesn't seem like we get to make decisions for ourselves. As evidenced by our baseball mods and admins decision to remove a board and "pasadena" stepping in and putting a stop to that. As evidenced by TheInsiders closing the FanHome NASCAR board because they had a premium content DriverInsider board that Scout controlled and not a single word came down from Scout about the closure/redirection. It was only noticed because someone saw it was redirecting to another forum.

We don't have a say in the software we're using, the publishers you give boards to (who don't seem to care about the long standing communities they're taking over), we have no clue what Scout's plans are for hockey and basketball if anything and you probably do for all three examples I just listed off the top of my head.

Still even though I broached the subject with you of software changing in my last email, there's no comment from you and it still appears no one was planning on letting us know before it happened. We found out with a mod visiting the EZboards tech support forum, as he was trying to fix our outdated software.

Some longtime posters and mods have started to wonder about our future once this software comes into place, as we don't really fit the Scout business model and it appears that no work is being done to get publishers on the hockey or basketball areas. Some are afraid that we're going to try logging in only to get a 404 error redirecting us to the yuku homepage and just like that our home is gone.

How about appointing someone as our "leader" or an actual liason between Scout and our site, so we might have an inkiling of what happens before it happens? No, I'm not interested in the position. Unless you're willing to pay, I doubt you will find any volunteers after everyone has seen first hand for four years the relationship between our boards and Scout management.

Chris

[coolguy3]

Haha, I held the liason position for awhile. What a boogus job that was.

[broadwayjoe2]

Sounds to me like either nobody cares or nobody knows what's going on....

I guess I didn't realize that problems were so widespread on the system. Things are happy go lucky on the Jets board. Mind you that board has the best Mods and Admins on the network IMHO.

[b]

broadway, it is not better on the Jets board. It can't be. One of the significant problems with the structure of Fanhome post purchase has been the seperation of the boards into little communities, rather than being one large community that drifts between boards.

[b]

coolguy, if you had that role, I never knew. Another part of the problem. We don't know the org chart.

[shimmeroo roo]

It's a communication problem. Nobody knows anything. And people who are in power make decisions without communicating them. I've been on the boards for 7 years now, and have had access to multiple moderator boards for at least 3 years and read them on a regular basis. So many things have happened that I was unaware of that it makes me feel like I haven't been doing my job well. When the truth is that somebody else isn't doing theirs.

The first thing that has to happen is someone has to replace Patronus. It has to be someone who is willing to be bold and aggressive and possibly take flak from Scout. It also needs to be someone who isn't adverse to the concept of moving the community from a non-scout affiliated site.

[broadwayjoe2]

b said:

broadway, it is not better on the Jets board. It can't be. One of the significant problems with the structure of Fanhome post purchase has been the seperation of the boards into little communities, rather than being one large community that drifts between boards.

Oh I'm not doubting that.... it just seems like there is rarely any major issues over there.

Behind the scenes stuff.... well... I'm not privy to that stuff so I don't know.

Just haven't seen the same interference in that community. Just going with what I've seen....

[TestSubjekt]

Another response...In a different format this time...

Answers below.

Sorry to tell you this Stephan, you're not support for us. Scout runs our site. We have some control over it, but it's more like we are support for Scout.

Its true you can't just make up your own rules, but no one is being forced to stay. We support those that wish to remain and build active communities.

We've made decisions that get overturned by Scout.com and have seen Scout make decisions affecting our boards without any notice to us. That doesn't seem like we get to make decisions for ourselves. As evidenced by our baseball mods and admins decision to remove a board and "pasadena" stepping in and putting a stop to that. As evidenced by TheInsiders closing the FanHome NASCAR board because they had a premium content DriverInsider board that Scout controlled and not a single word came down from Scout about the closure/redirection. It was only noticed because someone saw it was redirecting to another forum.

That isn't true, your leadership was consulted and they signed off on it. As far as pasadena goes, we were not going to stand by and let moderators shut down an active community (Expos). That was the only time we stepped in and made an executive decision after over a hundred emails from expos fans hit our customer service mailbox.

Sidenote from me: I was never informed by Kevin/Alberto. There were no posts on any of the mod boards regarding them stealing our NASCAR board.

We don't have a say in the software we're using, the publishers you give boards to (who don't seem to care about the long standing communities they're taking over), we have no clue what Scout's plans are for hockey and basketball if anything and you probably do for all three examples I just listed off the top of my head.

That is correct, you have no say in the software, but we do listen to Fanhome about feature requests. Things have been changed due to requests from your side. Our plans for hockey and basketball are just to let you guys enjoy building those communities. And if you don't enjoy it, no one has to stay. We have no control over anyone at Fanhome.

Still even though I broached the subject with you of software changing in my last email, there's no comment from you and it still appears no one was planning on letting us know before it happened. We found out with a mod visiting the EZboards tech support forum, as he was trying to fix our outdated software.

No software has changed, and your information from the ezboard tech team is light years off.

Some longtime posters and mods have started to wonder about our future once this software comes into place, as we don't really fit the Scout business model and it appears that no work is being done to get publishers on the hockey or basketball areas. Some are afraid that we're going to try logging in only to get a 404 error redirecting us to the yuku homepage and just like that our home is gone.

Not going to happen.

How about appointing someone as our "leader" or an actual liason between Scout and our site, so we might have an inkiling of what happens before it happens? No, I'm not interested in the position. Unless you're willing to pay, I doubt you will find any volunteers after everyone has seen first hand for four years the relationship between our boards and Scout management.

Do you know how many times we have done this? At least 6 times. The best liaison was Denis Savage who was an original Fanhome moderator. I will see if he wants to come back.

Thanks for your e-mail.

[coolguy3]

b, who are you?

Shimmer, just what are you trying to accomplish? Did you read my initial post here?

Jets have a great community! Willie ( tvoman ) is a longtime Fanhome member who become a part of Scout. ( Just like I did ) He now is admin on the Jets board and it's a great place that gets more traffic on one board than all the main football boards combined. James (NYjets28) is another longtime Fanhome member who is admin there too. I have a lot of respect for them.

[coolguy3]

See Chris?

I told you all this!

I've been through all this. I've been the liason. I've done the conference calls with Miller, Kevin, Alberto, etc..

I can save you a world of trouble and frustration. Denis Savage is Miller's right hand man. He is a Publisher for the Chargers side. He's a great guy too.


I wish someone would just listen to what I say...

[shimmeroo roo]

Just because you've been through it doesn't mean others don't want to try. I'm not writing off what you say. Quite the opposite in fact. I just hesitate giving up on a 7 year old community.

[coolguy3]

Suit yourself.

I've been through it since the beginning. It all begun with the football boards. When it first happened, I was the one who started bad mouthing Miller on the forums. Well, from there it proceeded to us having many phone conversations lasting up to an hour about this very thing you are struggling with now and this was 2 years ago! You can try all you want, I've been through the process everytime we try.

Tell me Shimmer, how do you make what we want fit into the Scout structure?

Scout will never push traffic through the main forums. In fact, they've taken all steps necessary to make sure we don't get any traffic.

You have to prove to Scout that the main forums are a profitbable outlet/source for the Publishers.

Can you do that? Cause two conference calls with Kevin, Alberto, gerryf, hagrid, me, and NYR weren't able to.

[TyPenn613]

I don't know how much access the TyPenn guy has, either, but he seems to be the most active of the admin-types.

Sorry I'm late to the conversation. To give you my brief history, I rose the ranks more through Scout than I did Fanhome. I never really had much of an urge to do the things, but always felt bad saying no. Now that site has become much more of a job than a hobby.

I've been posting for...well along time. I was essentially the main poster on the Fantasy Baseball forum for sometime, and after the merger, one of the old Mods, kingofmetfans, didn't make it over. Since the board was void of a Mod, I was asked to do it. It was a fairly meaningless post, and it was merely to keep things organized come February and March. Somehow over the next year, I managed to get a second Fantasy Draft board installed for the hardcore guys, and was made a Mod on the Baseball Trade & Rumors board. By 2004, I was asked by the Mets Admins to be a Mod there so that had another Fanhome guy at the top. Things were still a bit iffy at times around there due to what went down.

When the merger took place, the Fanhome Mets community was combined with another of equal size known as NYFO. Not a bad community by any means, but since Fanhome didn't have seperate team Admins, the Fanhome CMs lost power to the board. Since NYFO did have two Admins, they were given power, and the Mods were mixed together. It took about 48 hours before things went to hell and the Fanhome guys quit. Not either board's fault, but the fault of K&A tossing the two together when they were clearly run differently. The Fanhome guys were then promised a seperate Mets board by TheInsiders. They went so far as to create the link for the board, but never created the board itself. Thus a couple hundred Mets fans were lost from October to December of 2002. Many hung around, some would post complaints from time to time about it which is how I think I got my job there.

Things carried on very much the same, for me at least. When Patronus was made head CM (or whatever its called), he told me he wanted to add a Baseball CM. I turned it down, and that was either the best or worst decision I made. Patronus quit probably a little over a year ago now from his post. Finally, there was the September debacle last year with the Baseball CMs. After threats were thrown, MikeT and BleacherBum53 as I understand it said the Montreal Expos board would be shut down, and rightfully so. Now no one seems to know what really took place behind closed doors, and I've never got an answer from either of them about it, but those two were gone as well as gdavis who said he didn't have the time some months earlier.

Now I mention the Baseball CM part because if I did take it, and backed MikeT and co. as I think I would have, I might have been part of the group to leave. On the other hand, I would have killed for CM powers on the baseball board before the huge drop in participation this past year. From September through December, the baseball boards had pretty much nobody running them. The team boards that had Pubs were fine, but other than that, there was no one. This is proof to me that come "the switch" (which one Scout guy leaked to me on accident a few months ago), the general boards will be done with.

I don't know where LauvernesBeans came from, but he was at some point given Admin powers over the baseball boards around December I believe. He is a listed member since 2004, but I never saw him under the incident with the Expos board. Suddenly, he was on the Mod board with Pasadena, to the rest of us unknowns. rniki was the listed CM (she took the offer from Patronus), though she acknowledged she no longer had the time to do it, and spends her time on the Braves board. In any event, I brought the depressing situation up with LB, and he helped.

First, I disposed of almost every Moderator on the General Baseball boards because almost all were inactive, or at least so on the board. I was given a "universal" Mod status, where I could essentially Mod all those boards, and meanwhile I made enough contacts to pick up 11 new Mods for those boards. Oddly enough, many team Mods saw what I was doing with the general boards and started asking me for help with trolls and other problems on their own team boards. I more or less said I couldn't, but said I'd try to get some help. Granted, even on the general boards, I couldn't do anything without Admin powers really.

I finally talked Renee (rniki) into giving me Admin powers on any boards she could. I got them on maybe ten to twelve team boards in addition to the general baseball and general Fanhome boards (BBQ, Current Events, etc.). Nevertheless, other team Mods still asked me for help, so I went to Stephan Miller myself. After a dozen or so e-mails between him, myself, and some other guy whose name escapes me, I finally got power to every board that was lacking an Admin. So now in addition to the general boards, I have access to:

Baltimore Orioles
Tampa Bay Devil Rays
Toronto Blue Jays
Chicago White Sox
Cleveland Indians
Kansas City Royals
Detroit Tigers
Seattle Mariners
Oakland Athletics
Texas Rangers
Florida Marlins
St. Louis Cardinals
Houston Astros
Pittsburgh Pirates
Milwaukee Brewers
Cincinnati Reds
Los Angeles Dodgers
San Francisco Giants
Colorado Rockies

Essentially, I'm the closest thing to a CM on the baseball side. However, the guys at Scout seemingly will hire a hitman to take me out if I even think of using that title. So call me what you want, but thats what I do. Last month, I promoted KiltedFool (Indians Admin) to share my powers since he was offered the job once previously by gdavis and MikeT. As for my recent appearances on other Mod boards, that just has come from me trading with other CMs so we can better access other boards.

All of that said, Scout is doing what they set out to do. They are trying to operate their business as best they can, and unfortunately that doesn't include Fanhome. I don't like some of the moves they make, but I can understand where they are coming from, at least to a degree. That said, I've spent the better portion of each day for the past six or so years on my baseball boards, and I don't want to wait for them to suddenly disappear.

One other thing is the lack of Scout being there unless they want something. In the original post, the guy he is talking about that is opening a new site with forums was suppose to be me, but that plan is on hold for the time being. The partner I had/have for it, is another longtime Fanhome guy, DarkHark24. He had volunteered to write for the Royals board just to keep things active, and nothing more. I myself volunteered sometime ago to do such for the Fantasy Baseball board, and I know other guys have shown interest such as the Mariners and Sabermetrics boards. However, unless Scout sees you turning a profit from them, they won't even respond to you. Everyone I know of that has gone to them to offer their services for the good of the community has been ignored.

All that said, e-mailing Stephan or the tech guys or anyone at Scout is a lost cause. They certainly are not going to listen to a single e-mail asking them to change their ways after they already ignored the masses about it. That said, I think anyone who does have an interest in keeping the Fanhome tradition alive has to step up. The best we can do is keep the boards afloat over there until the inevitable. When I was working on gaining Admin powers, I did get one sentence from a Scout guy telling me they were looking into new software. I didn't think much of it at the time, and the e-mail and address have vanished somewhere. Nevertheless, it will happen I'm sure, and I don't see all the boards making the trip over.

That said, I think keeping them afloat for now is most important, but if we can build a new home at the same time, it would be a good precaution to take given how things are transpiring. Things like the Call to Action threads are a joke. What was once Fanhome is nearly dead, and unless a new community can be grown, it will be extinct altogether before long.

And thats my two cents.

[TyPenn613]

You have to prove to Scout that the main forums are a profitbable outlet/source for the Publishers.

If it wasn't done before, it won't now. The main boards use to be what kept the site going. As far as the general baseball boards go, they are dead. You have a couple of members who keep to a board or two, but nowhere near the interation we would see a couple years ago. By now thats a lost cause.

I'm hardly throwing in the towel. No matter what, I'll stick it out on Scout until the boards are gone. However, from everything I have seen and heard up to this point, I have to back coolguy 110%. If you talk to these guys, you quickly understand just how stubborn and apathetic they are to much of their own site.