Hi, my name is Brock Beauchamp, and I'd like to talk to all of you!

[Brock Beauchamp]

I'm clean, go ahead and search.*

*just don't search my name + furry

Other than that, no worries.

[Edgy MD]

Fun fact: I could never figure out how to keep new posters from automatically being assigned that toilet avatar. So I imagine half the new posters, upon joining and not bothering to upload their own avatar:

2. find themselves represented by a toilet,
4. assume they are being hazed,


6. think we are a bunch of douchebags, and


8. leave forthwith.

[whippoorwill]

The truth is that I can't even get that registration link to work.

 

You mean here?

[Brock Beauchamp]

I generally don't like to toot my own horn, but I'm going to because I think it's important to communicate the kind of organization we are, and the things we think are important.

Lots of places talk about community, but it's literally the driving force behind why we do this work. Unlike other organizations, I've thought about how to bring joy back to our communities, and thank those who participate.

So twice a year, we do community awards for all active forum sites. I happened to remember this because I literally started pulling the data for the 2025-2026 offseason a few minutes ago.

Twins Daily's Community Awards: 2025 MLB Season - Twins Daily - Twins Daily

TWINSDAILY.COM

---

As we gear up for another snowy offseason of no baseball, it's time to look at the community members who made Twins Daily great over the long grind of 162 games.

Additionally, moderators are WILDLY underappreciated, yet they basically make internet communities go. So every year in December, every active moderator receives a thanks from us, last year this was the gift. A wooden 3D wall thing of the teams' home stadiums:

https://shop.baseballhall.org/new-york-mets-5-layer-17-x-13-stadiumviews-3d-wall-art/

[Benjamin Grimm]

A few questions:

Do these forums use phpBB? Or some other platform?

And, asked above but perhaps lost in the conversation, how long do threads and posts survive? Do they remain online forever, or is there some kind of archiving that gets done?

Also, if we go ahead with this and then decide it's not working for us, is there a way to export the threads in a phpBB format?

[Edgy MD]

The truth is that I can't even get that registration link to work.

 

You mean here?

 

Yeah, pretty much since we moved the form from the ultimatemets.com domain to cranepoolcompanion.com, nobody has been able to register.

In order to get Brock registered, I had to go into the admin section, find an old spam registrant who had been banned, unban them, rename the profile and give it to Brock. And as one my might imagine, that is not a very sustainable way to go forward.

[Benjamin Grimm]

I think I just fixed it.

[Edgy MD]

HOLY ****!

We're open for bidness!

My new avatar suddenly makes sense!!

[Brock Beauchamp]

A few questions:

Do these forums use phpBB? Or some other platform?

And, asked above but perhaps lost in the conversation, how long do threads and posts survive? Do they remain online forever, or is there some kind of archiving that gets done?

Also, if we go ahead with this and then decide it's not working for us, is there a way to export the threads in a phpBB format?

 

We use Invision. It's a bit like PHPBB, but more robust.

All threads are kept on the site, though we sometimes archive really old threads. They still exist, but are no longer searchable from the site's internal search tool (though google still finds them).

As for exporting back to PHPBB, I honestly have no idea. I personally have not run a PHPBB forum since Twins Daily was launched in 2012.

[Cowtipper]

Growth is good, but we don't growth that's so fast it'll lose the culture and flavor that has been fostered over the years. If you give in to centralization you lose any level of independence a site such as this has; we don't want to become too watered down we become a Reddit or a MLBTradeRumors.com comment section. And it's like clockwork, the bigger you get the more watered down you become. If we want growth we can get that while still not selling to someone who has had zero skin in this game. It's like giving up a website to the people who bought UMDB, or a dang corporate raider. They might say they're going to do this or that, until they actually get control of it and have total say. We could do journalism and writing on our own. Let the old UMDB be the ashes, let something that WE create be the phoenix. Not some guy who jumps in out of nowhere who has no idea about the flavor or feel of the site. I know I myself have only been here a few years but even I have become accustomed to the way the community maneuvers. I've seen this happen before on another forum I used to go to and though I couldn't stand the owner, he fostered a certain atmosphere that the new owner, who swept in and bought it out of the blue, just eviscerated (and I eventually left that forum).

"I'm pretty zero-tolerance on mouth-breathers and loud *******s; this place survived this long for a reason while so many other places faltered. Keeping that is core to the idea." <-- see, that's what I'm talking about. Who's to define a mouth-breather? Brock? The self-anointed king who has no idea how this place interacts and communicates? He's admitting he's open to censorship. That right there is why THIS site is the one I gravitate to, because it is one of the FEW where you can actually say what you want to say without recourse. That is literally an admission he'll turn this into a Reddit. Where free speech is tolerated, oh but not really. This is a no no no from me.

Control of a part of this site has already been ceded once. And we saw how that went. Have we learned nothing?

Viva CPF, viva freedom, viva independence.

[Brock Beauchamp]

"I'm pretty zero-tolerance on mouth-breathers and loud *******s; this place survived this long for a reason while so many other places faltered. Keeping that is core to the idea." <-- see, that's what I'm talking about. Who's to define a mouth-breather? Brock? The self-anointed king who has no idea how this place interacts and communicates? He's admitting he's open to censorship. That right there is why THIS site is the one I gravitate to, because it is one of the FEW where you can actually say what you want to say without recourse. That is literally an admission he'll turn this into a Reddit. Where free speech is tolerated, oh but not really. This is a no no no from me.

 

Generally, the site moderators are the ones who decide what constitutes a mouth-breather. I'm pretty hands-off except in more extreme cases where it becomes a larger problem than mere moderation.

Also, hostile much? You've gone off on tangents, and they don't represent a single thing I've said or believe.

Hell, if you don't believe me, I get it. You don't have to. Create an account and go ask any of the communities I've rehabbed over the past five years. I'm not hiding anything.

[MFS62]

So, is this a done deal or are we still in courtship?

Later

[Frayed Knot]

At this point I'm not even sure we're on a first date yet.

[Edgy MD]

You've gone off on tangents, and they don't represent a single thing I've said or believe.

 

I see you've met cowtipper.

[metirish]

If this is what Brock is offering I'm out, can't be arsed with this, Cowtipper expressed his or her views , many valid IMO. I like what we have here and was thrilled that the CPF was saved , be careful what you wish for with an influx of members

[Edgy MD]

If this is what Brock is offering I'm out, can't be arsed with this, Cowtipper expressed his or her views , many valid IMO. I like what we have here and was thrilled that the CPF was saved , be careful what you wish for with an influx of members

 

Can you clarify what "this" you are objecting to?

For what it's worth, I am happy to ban anybody throwing the n-word around also.

[Brock Beauchamp]

I'll make one final message, and then you can decide amongst yourselves what you feel about the offer. If anyone has additional questions, I will happily answer them.

Some of you are concerned about growth. That's understandable. You all like it here, obviously, and don't want this place to change.

As far as I can tell, there are about 40 active members on this forum. What happens when five leave for whatever reason? What happens when ten leave? At what point does terminal velocity hit, and what you appreciated about this place no longer exists, because it literally doesn't exist.

I don't need to see the internal metrics on the site to know it was more active five years ago, and far more active ten years ago. Literally every forum I've found has been in this same situation.

How will you attract new users? Independent forums face gale-force headwinds against social media and Reddit. I went to google and made two searches: "Mets forum" and "mets message board". This forum didn't show up in the first 20 results of either search.

When spammers inevitably try to break in and junk up the place, what will be done to prevent it?

When a bot hack infects an old installation of PHPBB, who repairs the site?

What happens if the owner goes idle, and no one has server access?

None of these are threats or anything of the sort. They're simply situations that I've seen happen many times over the years. Three forums I rehabbed had MIA owners that took me literally months to track down. Two of the forums had registration turned off because spam was such a problem. In one forum, literally nobody knew who owned the domain, even the owner. All of the above reasons are primary contributors to why there used to be hundreds of thousands of small forum sites, and now there are zero in many niche fandoms. I hope for the best with this place, and all of you. I'm not the only person who can solve the problems I listed above, but I guarantee I know how to solve all the problems above.

It's been great chatting with you all, and thanks for your time.

[Lefty Specialist]

Brock, you would have loved BatMags (not).

I share some of Cowtipper's concerns. We've tried over the years to increase our numbers with little to no success. But giving control over to someone, no matter how well-intentioned, whose aim is to drastically increase the numbers necessarily means that the few dozen or so of us will be drowned out.

You mentioned TalkSox as a comparison. They have an off-season discussion that goes for 165 pages. I mean, that's great engagement but it's an awful lot. I understand it's a business, but for us that's like going from a swimming pool to the Atlantic Ocean. It's still water, and you can still swim in it, but it's orders of magnitude bigger.

Ben Grimm and Edgy are far too modest. This place would have died long ago without them. And yeah, pretty much anything is tolerated, but we're all adults here and we self-regulate pretty well. There are no teenagers or mouth-breathers here because they wouldn't be able to keep up with the bon mots and witty banter. That said, I'm not overly concerned about mods and admins, as long as they're not on Trump's payroll.

However, every year our numbers do get a little smaller. I'm fully aware that it's not sustainable forever. I'm just not sure what's better; slow death by attrition or marching into something that can't be 'ours' by any definition. I'd probably go there if it comes to that but I also expect I'd eventually drift away because it just won't be the same.

[Brock Beauchamp]

You mentioned TalkSox as a comparison. They have an off-season discussion that goes for 165 pages. I mean, that's great engagement but it's an awful lot. I understand it's a business, but for us that's like going from a swimming pool to the Atlantic Ocean. It's still water, and you can still swim in it, but it's orders of magnitude bigger.

Actually, this is a great point, but maybe not in the way you expect. I *hate* megathreads. Whenever I take on a new forum, I politely ask if people would reconsider running miles-long threads.

Most of the time, the community is like "nah, thanks bro, we like our 100 mile threads". So, as a nod to that community's specific culture, I let it ride. If the community wants megathreads, they can have their megathreads. I'm not here to flip the table if I don't get my way; I'm here to work with the community.

Those ridiculous Talk Sox threads predate any involvement I had with the site, and they're still going 18 months later.

Jays Centre is the same way, but they're EVEN WORSE about it. Dunno about those Canadians; they're weird. They create ONE thread to use as a discussion for the entire year. It makes my eye twitch uncontrollably every time I see the damned thing, but it's their forum, and they enjoy it.

General Blue Jays Discussion Thread (2025) - Toronto Blue Jays Talk - Jays Centre

JAYSCENTRE.COM

---

Will the Jays do anything in the new year? Perhaps. Santander? JD Martinez? ...discuss

[Brock Beauchamp]

I might as well be 100% transparent. When I mean growth, I don't mean explosive growth. I want slow, steady growth that maintains existing culture. Here is the monthly post reports for Talk Sox, going to back to Jan 1, 2020. As you can see, the forum was in steady decline. The vertical red line is when we took over the site. Since then, the forum is nudging up, but gently. I can count on my fingers the number of new, regular posters I see over there... but there ARE new posters, and the forum is back to where it was several years ago traffic-wise.

[metsmarathon]

do we really have 40 active members? wow, that seems... high.

I certainly come across as a little bit anti-growth, but cheez whiz, i feel like this forum is probably one or two key members away from shutting the doors for good. that scares the **** outta me.

i find it hard to believe that if we were to suddenly throw in with mr brock beuachamp - if that is your real name - that the forum would instantly grow to thousands of idiots overnight. i'd be curious what the graphs of the other sites he's.... running(?)... would look like, but if it's steady growth then that ain't all bad.

I'd be shocked if we were instantly inundated with waves and waves of mets fans. shocked. i mean, the first few visitors would certainly be leery of dipping their toes into the water. what with all us naked hill people swimming around. and no doubt we'd do our best to scare them off if they felt like they didn't belong. morons would take one look at this place and thing we weren't cool enough. but i like to think that the more thoughtful fans out there who might be actually interested in partaking in an old-school forum might be inclined to sit and stay a while, and maybe discuss the nuanced differences between fWAR and bWAR, or chat up how underappreciated lance johnson or mike cameron were, and that's ok by me. heck, maybe one day i dust off a certain skate key and a certain little WPA-lovin' tin box full of springs, cogs, and discarded vcr parts (sorry that's a lot of backstory) can find kinship with another probably made-up internet identity that may or may not actually be an axe-murderer (more backstory)...

look, let's not all act like we don't take a look around each time we log onto this precious little corner of the world wide web and think to ourselves, how the everloving **** is this place still here!? it ain't gonna be around forever, if we don't try to do something. even if that something carries some risk.

and... y'know... if somebody wanted to go ahead and scope out sergioferrarcompanion-dot-com as a super-secret doomsday backup plan that probably wouldn't be the worst idea, either. just in case...

seriously. i was basically youngest among us when this place started out - well, at least after i was invited over from the dark place in the earliest of days - and much as i hate to say it, fifty looms large in the near future. i ain't a kid anymore. and i'm pretty sure i'm still on the younger side of the median age here. we gotta do something to keep this place vital.

[whippoorwill]

Three questions:

What’s in it for you? There must be a catch, as they say.

Will there be ads?

Is this some kind of glorified spyware?

[Fman99]

Fun fact: I could never figure out how to keep new posters from automatically being assigned that toilet avatar. So I imagine half the new posters, upon joining and not bothering to upload their own avatar:

2. find themselves represented by a toilet,
4. assume they are being hazed,
   
6. think we are a bunch of douchebags, and
   
8. leave forthwith.

 

This is way funny and I prefer to believe that you did this on purpose to chase out most of the rabble. If you can get past the fact that we initially assume you're a toilet, then you're welcome here. Ask anyone

[Brock Beauchamp]

Three questions:

What’s in it for you? There must be a catch, as they say.

Will there be ads?

Is this some kind of glorified spyware?

 

There will be ads, yes. It's how we keep the lights on. You can see what that looks like from any of our other forums: https://brewerfanatic.com/forums/

What's in it for me is that I primarily work on the front-end of the site; news and videos. We take a lot of pride in our coverage, and we try to be a step above the SB Nations and FanSideds of the world. Lots of analysis, lots of advanced metrics. We're not often there on day one, but we get there in time. It's a slow process.

Year one is a money pit for us. Year two is often the same, just less so. We hope to make a little money in year three, and then maybe some real money in year four. We're in it for the long haul, not shortcuts. Talk Sox is not quite at the breakeven point for us, and we're over 18 months into that site. And that's okay; if we keep doing the work, we'll get there.

[Lefty Specialist]

It's a fair point about growth. How does that happen? How did it work with TalkSox, and especially the Padre site you stood up from scratch? Do you staple fliers to telephone poles over faded pictures of lost cats? Or is there a process for stable growth?

It's one thing to build a nice, shiny site, but it's another to populate it. The 40 or less of us will not keep the clicks coming. You seem willing to lose money on the site at least initially, so I gotta ask, who are your 'angel investors'? Online media is a money losing business, generally speaking. I know of sites much larger than DiomondCentric that are constantly begging for money or hiding things behind a subscriber wall.

Now if you're doing this all on your own, kudos. But usually there's somebody with deep pockets somewhere. Again, no disrespect intended. But you're asking us to move from our old comfortable house where the plumbing leaks on occasion and the sidewalk is cracked to a new over-55 community that promises pickleball and a nice clubhouse. We wonder about the Homeowner's Assocoation and where the hidden pitfalls are.

[Brock Beauchamp]

It's a fair point about growth. How does that happen? How did it work with TalkSox, and especially the Padre site you stood up from scratch? Do you staple fliers to telephone poles over faded pictures of lost cats? Or is there a process for stable growth?

It's one thing to build a nice, shiny site, but it's another to populate it. The 40 or less of us will not keep the clicks coming. You seem willing to lose money on the site at least initially, so I gotta ask, who are your 'angel investors'? Online media is a money losing business, generally speaking. I know of sites much larger than DiomondCentric that are constantly begging for money or hiding things behind a subscriber wall.

Now if you're doing this all on your own, kudos. But usually there's somebody with deep pockets somewhere. Again, no disrespect intended. But you're asking us to move from our old comfortable house where the plumbing leaks on occasion and the sidewalk is cracked to a new over-55 community that promises pickleball and a nice clubhouse. We wonder about the Homeowner's Assocoation and where the hidden pitfalls are.

Oh, these are super-fair questions, and thinking back I'm surprised no one has asked me before. We're self-funded. What happened is that we toiled on Twins Daily for literally years; we had no idea how to make real money, but it was fun. Then, when I was home with kids, I really focused on SEO and other site improvements. In 2019, John Bonnes, one of my partners on Twins Daily, found Raptive ads, and Twins Daily had grown to the point where we actually qualified for their site standards. We took off from there. Like so many things in capitalism, once you get "in", you're IN. Once TD was big and using Raptive, we were on a path to add other sites easily, without needing to qualify each site individually.

We've had several people try to buy in. We've refused to this point because we don't see a reason to involve others while ceding any amount of control. The other four partners are primarily interested in the Twins, and allow me to run off and do whatever I want, within reason. I'm less interested in the Twins than the other partners. When we were able to quickly turn Brewer Fanatic profitable as well - we got lucky with a few really incredible contributors over there - we had some liquid cash to run with this idea.

As far as growth, a lot of it comes from google. We do a ton of SEO work to get the site up in various search rankings: forums, mets prospects, player names, that sort of thing. We also use things like the Baseball-Reference linker to bring in small numbers of traffic during that first year when every new user is a win. Sometimes we spend some money on google or facebook ads, though that well has almost dried up and is no longer a value proposition. There is no single winning strategy; it's a series of really small moves, and sticking with it for a long time.

[Edgy MD]

We have a history of some good writers here.

How much control do we get over who provides the non-forum content?

How much editorial control do we cede? Do any of us act as editors?

Is layout and skinning something we contribute to?

If there is money down the road, do contributors get a modest taste?

Do we make deals with outside bloggers to say, "HEY! You have great stuff, but it stands alone, doesn't get the traffic it deserves, and you need to do all the hustling to promote it. How about moving it to this site and you can concentrate on writing?"?

[Brock Beauchamp]

We have a history of some good writers here.

How much control do we get over who provides the non-forum content?

How much editorial control do we cede? Do any of us act as editors?

Is layout and skinning something we contribute to?

If there is money down the road, do contributors get a modest taste?

Do we make deals with outside bloggers to say, "HEY! You have great stuff, but it stands alone, doesn't get the traffic it deserves, and you need to do all the hustling to promote it. How about moving it to this site and you can concentrate on writing?"?

Generally, I'm the site manager on these projects, and Brandon Glick will run the day-to-day editing. He would be in charge of content.

There's effectively no way to work with a group on something like editing. But if one person here would like to help, we can certainly work out an arrangement of that kind. But any time a group is involved, things grind to a halt sooner or later. It's just not an effective way to manage. But if the group at large requests something, we try to accommodate it.

Front page contributors are paid from day one. It's not a lot, but it's something. That's why we lose money on day one. As the site becomes more popular, pay increases accordingly. It never becomes a full-time role or anything, that requires multiple sites, but it goes up along with site traffic.

Layout and skinning is complicated. The general look of the site is pretty locked in place. But I've made customizations based on specific sites: for example, on North Side Baseball they hated my (truly excellent, imo) font choice, so I wrote a custom loop that allowed them to choose the default font or switch to a different font.

[Edgy MD]

Thanks. Yes, I did not mean a forum-level editing spree. Just someone who strives to ensure that this community remains representative of this community and its founders.

[Brock Beauchamp]

Thanks. Yes, I did not mean a forum-level editing spree. Just someone who strives to ensure that this community remains representative of this community and its founders.

Absolutely. We work with the community, and value its input. In the early going on these sites, it's common for several of our front-page contributors to come from the forums. Our main prospect guru on Brewer Fanatic is from the forums; actually, all our prospect people over there are from the forums, and they've been doing it for four years now. Our primary prospect guy, and one of our two podcasters, on NSBB is from the forums. Several of our Jays Centre contributors are from the forums. Well, at least two of them. I've kinda lost track on some of this stuff.