Benjamin Grimm

The forum lived at ultimatemets.com for seven years, from late 2018 until early 2026. It had been at other domains before that and is now at another one after that. The UMDB didn't "own" the forum, it was just acting as a landlord, if you want to call it that.

I think the salient point here is that Edgy may decide he doesn't want to do this anymore. The Schaefer thing didn't require much effort on my part, but with so few participants, I decided even that little effort was more than I cared to expend. If Edgy feels he's doing to much work for the entertainment of too few, then it's entirely his right to decide to shed the responsibility. This is not something that should be subject to a vote. Nobody should be obligated to continue a hobby that is no longer fulfilling. And Marshmallow is right; the open antagonism toward Brock by some is juvenile, although he didn't use that word. Yes, this feels a bit like The Music Man (for those who get that reference) but unlike Harold Hill, Brock isn't asking for any money from us. He's proposing something that may be mutually beneficial. Or may not. That can certainly be debated. But if I was the primary admin and moderator here, and I didn't want to do it anymore, I'd gladly turn it over to Brock. The worst thing that can happen is what happened to the UMDB. I don't like it, but it's not a calamity. Life goes on. Nothing lasts forever. It's okay to let go of things. It's life. To everything a season.

Al Leiter?

And I don't want to speak for Edgy, but it may not be just about the money. After a while you get tired of putting in the effort and realizing that it's for fewer and fewer people. That's why I pulled the plug on Schaefer and the TCD. If someone had stepped forward and offered me $20 per month to keep doing it, it wouldn't have mattered.

I can confirm that he wasn't invited. He reached out to me through the UMDB before I gave it up. I don't see the risk here. We can lock the forums here and try the other place. If wr hate it there's nothing stopping us from returning here.

I'm out!

The UMDB archive will remain indefinitely. I don't know what last rodeo you're referring to.

Many excellent points there. I think Edgy's opinion matters more than anyone else's here, and I support whatever decision he makes. And if I were him, I think I'd go for it. If it proves to be a disaster we can always regroup elsewhere, although that seems very unlikely to happen. (Both the disaster and, should that actually come to pass, the regrouping.)

You probably tripped over me while I was doing stuff to solve the registration issue.

I think I just fixed it.

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?

If you do, they'll ask you to contribute around the house. Do the dishes and vacuum, stuff like that.

I'm not sure if those are typos or Irish vernacular. (Just taking the piss!)

He'd be a darker horse if his name was Nate Plum.

No apologies necessary. You gave us all a heads up so we knew! And remember, there's still this. https://leaptoad.com/mets/

I'm sorry. I've had to apologize to several people who have contacted me. I'm hoping that the site will once again be as comprehensive as it had been. I really didn't know that the new guys would gut it like that. I did tell them that they could do whatever they wanted with the site, so I have no grounds for complaint.

If you want to roll the dice on this, I'm all for it. After all, the worst thing that could happen is this.

It's always been The Crane Pool Forum. It's just bounced from host to host from time to time over the years. I don't remember what domain it resided at before December 2018. I first encountered the forum in 2002 when it was on ezBoard.

Put me down for Tauchman. He's so much in the dark that I'm not sure of his first name. Mike, maybe?

We had everyone recreate their accounts when the site moved to ultimatemets.com in December 2018. Any email addresses from earlier than that are no longer available.

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?

There are thousands of archived threads, but they're all saved as individual HTML pages. They're not in the phpBB database format.

So... Who are they?

I think it's someone who knows where the crunch berries are.

https://sny.tv/articles/mets-steve-cohen-no-nonsense-approach-2026-season