Brock Beauchamp

Actually, upon further consideration, I won't even make an argument for a MiLB forum. This forum is small; it's better to keep everything condensed and as-is. Should traffic increase, that's a discussion for another day.

I don't have strong opinions on most of this. If you look at the other sites, there is some variance between them, and almost all of those differences stem from the original forums. I think they all have draft forums now, but that wasn't always the case. Some have rumors forums, most do not. They all have minor league forums, but they all came that way. I'd prefer a MiLB forum, but it's a conversation I'm open to having. There are logistical reasons for a MiLB forum, and I'd like to make my case for it, but if everybody replies "nope!", then okay. We need a front page news forum (well, don't NEED, but I think most of you will want one) because that's where threads for the front page news are stored. Otherwise they overwhelm the main team forum. The one thing I'd like to make a case for is to change the name of the primary forum to match the rest of our sites, but that's because it will help bump our SEO rankings by quite a bit. The Adopt-A-Prospect forum and all that stuff? Sure, they're great. We had the identical forum on Twins Daily for years before it fell out of favor. The thing I'll probably make the strongest case for (other than the SEO forum) is the merging of inactive forums. If nobody has posted in a forum for months, it's just kinda dragging things down and should probably be part of a more active forum.

I'm going to be frank: I don't care all that much what happens in the forums. There can't be rampant racism, beyond that almost everything is a choice. But I'm absolutely cutthroat about racism, as we all should be. My kids are Black, I have no time for that ****. If it was all about the dollars, we wouldn't do stuff like this, which pissed off a HUGE portion of our audience. Our Twins Daily front page on ICE Out day. People act as if trying to be profitable means you need to discard everything you believe in; that simply isn't true. Some people do that, sure, and those people suck.

I've spent years looking into forums for every MLB team. I didn't find this place until early summer of 2025; it was really hard to find, to be honest. I had tried so many variety of searches for each team, and this was buried deep in the results somewhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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/

I'm clean, go ahead and search.* *just don't search my name + furry Other than that, no worries.

Fantastic questions. Here you go. We pay for all our content, yes. I go and find writers and videographers, it's actually the primary role I fill right now. Raptive ads pay our way. We've considered a metered model for articles, but have yet to make a decision on that. I don't think we will. But the forums will always be 100% free to use. I'm not a fan of paywalls, though in some instances they are necessary. We pay people to go down to spring training, and stuff like that, which is primarily the stuff we paywall (subscriptions also come with ad-free browsing, so that's a thing). We won't shut down Jays Centre. If revenue continues being a huge problem, we may re-tool it, but there's absolutely no reason to EVER shut down a forum from our perspective. They require nickels to keep alive given our overall server expenses, so why shut it down? We run a big tent of content. People write all sorts of crazy ****. But that anime piece you mentioned? That was literally written by a SABR award finalist. She's fantastic! But yeah, that piece is out there. But she's a great writer, and she wanted to do it. I'm not going to say no given her writing ability. But if you want to mock it a little bit, more power to you. I'm not going to shut down that kind of thing unless it turns personal.

Ouch. Brutal. So I take it you're not a fan of what's happening over there... One thing I haven't mentioned is that we've tried a similar thing to what UMDB did, but we called it the players project. It has *really* struggled to get off the ground, and is perhaps my biggest frustration of the past five years. I LOVE the idea of a fan-centric database of players, but I can't get any buy-in. The Minnesota Twins Players Project - Twins Daily TWINSDAILY.COM

Sure, here are some links to the forums to our existing sites. Feel free to poke around and see what's within, should the interest strike. On a few of these sites, most notably North Side Baseball, there is a hidden politics forum that is VERY active. No MAGA garbage in there at all, the community is very left-leaning, and I didn't want to disrupt that. There are conservative communities out there (but not many, take what you will from that information), but I intentionally steer WAY CLEAR of them. That's a deal-breaker for me personally. If my kid reads the site and is embarrassed I'm their parent, I'm doing things very very badly. 1. Twins Daily: the first, and the biggest: Forums - Twins Daily TWINSDAILY.COM 2. Brewer Fanatic: first site we pursued (I was a Brewers fan back in the 80s), acquired this in 2022: https://brewerfanatic.com/forums/ 3. North Side Baseball: our managing editor is a Cubs fan, acquired this in 2023: Forums - North Side Baseball NORTHSIDEBASEBALL.COM 4. Talk Sox: this forum was dying on the vine, so I snatched it up, acquired this in 2024: Forums - Talk Sox TALKSOX.COM 5. Jays Centre: a prominent Jays site, unfortunately revenue on it is killing me, still we're sticking with it, acquired in 2025: Forums - Jays Centre JAYSCENTRE.COM Those are all the existing forums we've adapted into the super-site model. We've also started two sites from scratch, which are pretty new: https://royalskeep.com https://padresmission.com

Oh, interesting. I didn't realize that. What was the name of the forum before 2018?

1. I like preserving the old internet of the early 2000s. It's sad to see how many sites have died since Facebook and Twitter started dominating our lives around 2010. 2. No merging, this is about this community, not multiple communities. Yes, we want to bring in fresh blood, but we also want to keep alive what's already here. 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. 3. And frankly, it's EASIER to start a site with an existing population. We've also started sites fresh (PadresMission.com), and those do fine, but it's both easier and more fun to work within an existing group. 4. I think TalkSox.com is an apt comparison to this place. It was much smaller than BF, and we've brought in new users, but not all that many. Just enough to keep things lively in the forum. And we've certainly shown a few the door for being... well, idiots. We took over Talk Sox in August of 2024. Forum posting is now up maybe 10-15% year-over-year. It's a nice boost, but hardly community-shattering.

I've come to LOATHE social media. It has lowered discourse across the entire planet. What could have been an amazing tool has turned out to be vastly inferior to what it replaced. These cool little communities are rich with their own history, and culture, and instead we've all been railroaded into yet another sprawling behemoth that only wants our money.

The old threads, going back to 2005, have been purged from the database tables. They only exist as HTML files. I have access to them, as well as to the custom table that indexes the HTML files. I think we can probably continue to host them here on cranepoolcompanion.com. If we were to move to your site, would threads survive forever? Will posts from 2026 still be online in 2036? Out of curiosity, do you happen to know if you have legacy email addresses from users dating back a few years? I see 179 members of the site. I assume that is just the number of active users since the migration, not from 2005.

The old threads, going back to 2005, have been purged from the database tables. They only exist as HTML files. I have access to them, as well as to the custom table that indexes the HTML files. I think we can probably continue to host them here on cranepoolcompanion.com. If we were to move to your site, would threads survive forever? Will posts from 2026 still be online in 2036? Ooh, so you have the old files. I bet that will work. Give me a day or so to get in touch with my dev (I no longer have time to do the dev work, and he's a specialist). If we have the HTML flats, I THINK we can make that work.

Lots of our sites have political forums and whatnot, but what I usually do is hide the political forum behind registration, and then often add a timeline after registration. For example, the political forum won't appear for anyone who isn't registered and logged in, and then they either have to wait six months, or they have to post 100 times, or whatever. I've found this helps weed out the kind of nonsense you get on Twitter or Facebook, where any political thread brings the stupidest person in the room out of the woodwork, just to argue and be insulting to everyone else.

There are thousands of archived threads, but they're all saved as individual HTML pages. They're not in the phpBB database format. No one has access to the server that contains the database? I will talk to the developer, and see what we can do with flat HTML files. Wait, what is the address of the archives? I see Ultimate Mets updated, and now the archives for this forum are missing, maybe?