A Postmortem

[BRule]

But I thought you were black? So wouldn't that mean 14 or 15?

DAT'S RAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYCEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES

[The Chosen One]

DAT'S RAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYCEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES

Not to hijack Hawk's thread or anything, but when you say Shanks was a cocksucker back then when you were a kid, and still is now 15 years later...

I mean I don't know. Where's Zito to explain this to me?

[BRule]

Bill liked penis, Bill still likes penis.

[The Chosen One]

Bill liked penis, Bill still likes penis.

So is this Anti-Heyward thing a projection of him being bitter against young black dudes pertain his falling out with you?

Was the fact he banned you so many times and kept letting you "come back" a form of modern day flirting?

[Hawk]

Was the fact he banned you so many times and kept letting you "come back" a form of modern day flirting?

Affirmative action quota.

[jpx7]

Bill would troll other forums and PM me on BravesCenter about what I said there. Dude wasn't cut out for the internet.

He did the same to me, by the way.

[weso1]

Is there a reason we aren't getting any details itt?

[The Chosen One]

OT: The reason the site's been having lagging slow loading times is because with more users logging in, it's bumped us up on google index and google is sending more crawl spider bots to scan our pages (for search engine results). As a result, they're hogging a ton of bandwidth, that's why you may see 51 guests. I looked at the genuine IP's, and about 2/5 of the 51 guests are actual people on real ISP's (which is really good for us), the rest are spider bots or forum spam bots.

I wanted to leave it as guests can lurk so they could read and stil come here, but it's just allowed the bots to open a new page every .18 seconds. I may have to do it again to registration view forum only. The other downside is, a ton of forum bots are getting past the security verification registration now. I'm having to delete a bunch of fake spam bot accounts about 10 times a day.

It's a good sign though as it shows our forum is picking up on genuine user traffic (bots don't attack dead forums).

[Hawk]

Bill was definitely insecure about what people said (and thought) about him. I get the impression that he never thought he was being taken seriously or getting the respect he deserved. He was lumped into the same category as a blogger and afforded the same level of gravitas as a Mac Thomason (RIP) or gondee, although he actually had press credentials and knew many of the players (and their families) very well from the access he had during his show and book research.

Bill wanted to be _the guy_ and took very personally being challenged or undermined.

There was one guy (I think his name was Jason) who consistently posted 'insider' news about the Richmond Braves to the point where we investigated whether or not he was an employee of the R-Braves. One day he posted saying that he spoken with a player about a call-up (or something) and Bill actually called the player and asked him whether or not he had spoken to a guy named Jason about the issue. The player said no, and we banned the poster in question. In fact, we banned his entire ISP for a while because he kept creating new usernames.

Some of the original old board purists; Gatom, Wilbo, Horsie, pfigster, et al. really got under Bill's skin because they weren't afraid to speak out against him openly, even after Bill would take to private messages in an attempt to straighten them out to his liking. I guess he thought he was effacing himself by messaging them to begin with, and when they turned around and essentially slapped him in the face the ban hammer swung mightily. I would often go in and lift bans after a few days because, to me, maintaining an active message board was paramount and I saw little value in banning people with large post counts, no matter what they were posting about (and in my time, there were very few spammers or rabble-rousers in general.)

[Hawk]

I wanted to leave it as guests can lurk so they could read and stil come here, but it's just allowed the bots to open a new page every .18 seconds. I may have to do it again to registration view forum only. The other downside is, a ton of forum bots are getting past the security verification registration now. I'm having to delete a bunch of fake spam bot accounts about 10 times a day.

It's a good sign though as it shows our forum is picking up on genuine user traffic (bots don't attack dead forums).

I think that you should keep viewing open. I can see this place growing very quickly. What kind of vBulletin plug-ins are you running for the verification process? I know there are a ton out there.

Also, are you footing the costs for the vBulletin license and hosting on your own? I'd be glad to help out however I can, whether it be with hosting anything or a few skrills for a good cause.

[BRule]

PM's from Bill were the BEST...I wish I still had them all. You could tell very much that he just wanted to be the "cool kid" or "the guy" as Hawk put it. He always switched his tones from trying to be your dad to being a 16 year old troll. I can't even remember how many hilarious PM's I ended up forwarding to c2c, Zito, thewupk, Khawkins....those were the days.

[CJC]

Sounds like Shanks has some kind of personality disorder

[The Chosen One]

I think that you should keep viewing open. I can see this place growing very quickly. What kind of vBulletin plug-ins are you running for the verification process? I know there are a ton out there.

Also, are you footing the costs for the vBulletin license and hosting on your own? I'd be glad to help out however I can, whether it be with hosting anything or a few skrills for a good cause.

Bought the vbulletin license and then domain and hosting from godaddy. Added up to about $500 so far

[jpx7]

Added up to about $500 so far

Or about 25 Criterion blu-rays at half-off MSRP.

[The Chosen One]

Or about 25 Criterion blu-rays at half-off MSRP.

[CK86]

who are you?

Your favorite Duke fan - cameronkrazie86

[gilesfan]

Yeah. Bill def wanted to be the guy. It's terrible he banned a guy with insider information.

[The Chosen One]

Your favorite Duke fan - cameronkrazie86

[50PoundHead]

BRule, my man, the original misfit. Where is Redneck Paramedic?

I think Redneck Paramedic told as all to "F**k off" after we pulled a hoax on him in the chat room during the Winter Meetings a few years back. giflesfan remembers the particulars better than I do, but it basically was "when the next guy comes in, we all talk as though we've just traded for Jason Giambi." He bought it and when we told him it was a joke, he just ripped every one of us. I don't know if he was serious or not, but that's the last time I ever saw him. It was a truly classic prank. It was totally unrehearsed but great improvisation. No one went overboard and we kept the trade reasonable enough that it was plausible. He kept going out and checking ESPN, SI, MLB and the other outlets and would come back and say no one was reporting it. Somehow, we kept it going for about 15 - 20 minutes before we broke. Truly one of the all-time chat room highlights.

[Metaphysicist]

Is there a reason we aren't getting any details itt?

There were a few instances, but the one that he brought up to me for years (literally) was some off-hand remark on one of the old "Trash Talk" forums that sprung up. Come to think of it, it was probably KHawkins' spinoff board. Anyway, I said something about Bill looking like he was pregnant (dude had mad beer gut) the time I'd seen him at Spring Training.

He... did not take take kindly to that. That's understandable; it was a potshot, even if it was said in a trash talking forum. I actually apologized to him when I realized he was scouring the whole internet and cataloguing every mention of his name. But for years after, he'd bring that chestnut up as an example of how I was trying to ruin his website and his livelihood or whatever and that I was actively running him down in other places. We are talking actual years later; his obsession with minor slights was much less flattering than his man-ponch.