Benjamin Grimm

Well, yes and no. Brock is offering to move all of our posts to the new place. It would be a new forum, with a new name, but with our history. That doesn't mean, however, that we'd have to purge what's here. This forum, The Crane Pool Forum at cranepoolcompanion.com, would remain in an inactive state. All posts up to the date of the move would remain in place. If we hate it over at the new place, we could come back here. Let's say we move on April 10. (Completely arbitrary date.) All posts here through April 9 would remain. Now say we stay over there until June 1 and we decide we hate it. We could come back here and this forum would start accumulating posts again from June 1 on. Any posts made between April 10 and May 31, however, would not come here with us. It would be a chunk of lost history.

The toxic guy is gone. Hopefully you'll now decide to linger more often in The Baseball Forum!

It could be, if we make the move and the consensus is that we were unhappy there. My suggestion would be to lock the doors on this place but to leave it otherwise intact. If we then, after a sufficient amount of time at Brock's house, decide that it's not for us we can then unlock the doors here and let everyone back in. My feeling is that while the software will be different, the community will be pretty much the same. There's not going to be a giant influx of people. I just don't see that happening. But, again, I would advocate retaining the ability to roll things back if necessary. I don't, however, see having both versions of the forum active and open for posting at the same time.

Traditionally it's been IGT. In-Game Transcript.

Google says: I'm glad they included that last note.

Everything is changing!

I think you just need the alphanumeric code, not the full URL.

Sounds like he can be a factor in the Mets bullpen this year. Maybe even a closer of the future?

That's what I think too. The fear of us being swamped by "hundreds" of users doesn't seem realistic at all. I don't know if I noticed that call for execution. Is it possible that it was roger_that? If so, you may have missed it, but he's been banned as well, after he accidentally revealed his true identity.

Edgy had to do something behind the scenes to get Brock registered because of the ongoing registration problem we were having until I finally fixed it late last week. I think he took the ID of an old spammer and renamed it for Brock to use.

The forum, as I understand it, is just part of a larger suite of offerings. He wants to be able to serve ads. This is an earlier post from this thread. You can choose to believe this or not. It certainly seems more plausible to me than "hundreds". I'd rather go this route than sit around and watch this place continue to dwindle.

I doubt it will be "hundreds". I don't even think it will be "dozens". It will probably be "a handful". Imagine opening a Blockbuster store and expecting "hundreds" of people to show up looking to rent movies on VHS.

Maybe we should look at this as if we were all advancing from Middle School to High School. It will look different, and there will be some new faces, but also a lot of familiar faces as well.

John Olerud?

Robin Ventura?

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.