Re: Boneyard History
1996 - The Husky Howl. This was the Hartford Courant's message board and it really was the very beginning. Believe it or not, some of the regulars here were around back then. RabidHusky and BadDog were the two biggest personalities on the board at that point. I'd point to them as the first real "Boneyarders". Deepster, x, suzyq, prankster, Deadrody (I think), Funster, uconnhenry - I'm sure I'm forgetting some people. It wasn't nearly as active as it is now, but it was a pretty clever board.
At some point, the guy in charge of the board made a change from a threaded board to a folders-view board. A short discussion amongst the regulars followed and it was determined that the new board sucked out loud. It happened when I was on vacation and when I got back, I had around 20 emails saying that the board was on the move. (The Nomadic Horde). We wound up at a College Sports Insider board. We basically just took over one of their boards and used it for whatever we wanted. It crashed. We went to another and another and another until College Sports Insider basically took their ball and went home. We'd show up on one of their boards and just shove the folks there aside and make it a UConn board. I think the last straw was when we invaded their Big East board and crushed it.
Through our travels, one user got fed up of the constant motion and he set up a board on a company site. His name was Frank and I believe he still lurks today. The name "Boneyard" was his idea. That was fine through the summer of 1997. One problem - that board was basically a free for all and it became unusable at some point. The traffic almost dried up.
Sometime in the fall of 1997, I got an email from Tom saying that he had worked up the same script as the Boneyard used on his free ISP account. For a couple of weeks, basically all that site was was the two of us posting and observing various disasters that seemed to happen hourly. Eventually, we invited the rest of the people to the board and it actually worked well....for a while.
At some point, the people at Crocker Communications discovered that 90% of their resources were being used by one of their ISP accounts. They pondered the situation for three seconds and pulled the plug. We lost everything and anything. Fortunately, we had planned to move anyway and we were able to jump to the new site one with the UConnfan.com URL. That was in April, 1998.
That began the server jumping era. The site was (and still is) growing at a rate that boggled the mind. We'd pick a server contract and find that we were either crashing or just running over our traffic limits. At some point in there we discovered that Mindspring, above all others, really sucked. They were terrible ..
Anywho, after a couple of years of that, it just got too expensive and too much of a general pain in the ass to continue that way. Somewhere along the way, the brilliant idea to start Syracusefan.com was hatched and that went vertical faster than could have been predicted. Twice the success, twice the headaches. Rivals had been pestering us for about a year at that point, so we decided to give it a try. (During the time Rivals' was pitching to us, we probably could have seen the handwriting on the wall in terms of how casually they handled their money - they offered to fly us to Seattle to look, yes look, at their servers.) That lasted a year and despite peppy emails touting the financial well-being of Rivals, they went belly up. Some of the smarter cookies from Alliance Sports bought up the remains and has produced what we're sure is a much sturdier ship. (Funny story about Rivals - they had a board for publishers to communicate and to share ideas with the muckity-mucks at Rivals. Tom and I were both banned repeatedly. To sum up, we were right and they are out of business :-p)
So, in May of last year, we went back to the old way of doing things. Tom lost 1/2 his body weight, but things were going well. Unfortunately, when you're giving something away for free, the better you do, the worse you do. So, we're back here again. I'm willing to bet this will be home for quite a while - we have some plans for the place. |
You guys are the best!!!
