A New Era of JBB

<div class="quote_poster">shapecity Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">Actually the signature and avatars on S2 will allow for bigger ones than the current JBB settings. I think there's multiple signatures allowed for now as well.</div>

Just remember to NOT go over there and register. All your signatures, avatars, postcounts, etc should be migrated for you within the next couple weeks.

 

^Can you say it again? I don't get it.























lol jk

 

<div class="quote_poster">Kidd Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">Legacy, this is good news for Nets fans. I checked out the Nets forum, and it's very active, already.</div>

That's pretty sick man. Looks like we have some competition.

I can't wait for the change. The new era of a Legacy begins soon.

 

<div class="quote_poster">Mamba Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">Can we somehow lose Umair in the transfer?</div>

lmfao.

I'm all for the switch as long as the community stays how it is now.

 

What if we have already registered? I registered with BBW around a year ago, so what will happen then?

 

^ I thought it was Sportstwo not BBW

 

So JBB isn't going to look like this anymore?

 

Are we going to have the same layout as them? Cause it looks pretty messy, IMO.

 

Na, it'll be on SportsTwo(@ B-22)

EDIT: Damnit Legacy.

 

<div class="quote_poster">Legacy Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">Are we going to have the same layout as them? Cause it looks pretty messy, IMO.</div>


No, I don't think so. Our graphic designers will make the site more pleasing to the eye.

 

Wait, are we still going to use this JBB site, or will we only use the Sportstwo site?

 

I'm startin to get confused now..

 

<div class="quote_poster">Brian Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">^ I thought it was Sportstwo not BBW</div>

BBW merged over there before, taking their member database with them. I was never active over there, but did register. So I'm already there, but with like 5 posts.

<div class="quote_poster">Brian Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">Wait, are we still going to use this JBB site, or will we only use the Sportstwo site?</div>

If I understand correctly, it will be on the sportstwo website, but branded as JBB.

 

I am Denny Crane on SportsTwo, the guy who started SportsTwo and wrote all the software. I thought I'd post here to welcome you all to SportsTwo ahead of time and to answer some of the questions I've seen in this thread so far.

First, about SportsTwo.

I was moderator, community moderator, and then administrator of one of the largest basketball message boards on the internet. You may recognize me by my user name here. I want to echo what Mel wrote in the first post - I was the technical guy who installed, maintained, and made sure the vbulletin software was running.

When we switched from version 2 to version 3, we lost all the hacks we had applied to the site and I basically had to start from scratch. This is one of the primary reasons why I decided it was time to implement a custom community site - since I wrote the software, I can hack it to do whatever WE (we being the community) see fit and never have issues with upgrades.

Then there were the issues of how generic message board software works and especially with a sports theme:

Customizing the forums for team banners, menus, and colors was a downright horrible experience; vbulletin or any other message board package I looked at had this same issue.

People tend to hang in their favorite team (or other) forums and you don't get a good intermingling of all the members together.

Adding features that tightly integrate with the whole experience is impossible at the least and ridiculously hard at best. There are hacks for vbulletin that allow a loose integration of other software packages like wordpress, drupal, and mediawiki, but the integration is the bare minimum of what it should be.

I've looked at a number of sports message boards in the past few months and they either have the forum home page as their home page or some other content wrapped around the forums that few people really bother with (justbball.com may be an exception due to the high quality of the blogs on the home page ). This is a good example of how difficult it is to really integrate features with existing message board software and pull it off well.

I literally spent as much time off-site looking at NBA stats or stories or whatever as I did on-site. Pasting content from those off-site sites into the WYSIWYG editor doesn't work so well because the styling (CSS) isn't pasted as well. Having the content be part of the site solves this since the styling is already there!

People try to use the message boards to organize things like games or draft leagues or mock drafts that aren't ideally suited for the message board context. SportsTwo is designed around the principle that things that people do that don't fit the pure message board paradigm can be implemented as web "applications" that augment the experience. Someone's already mentioned the historical stats database and salary data (which are integrated in their own right now!) - these would be horrible to implement as threads and posts!

We don't take our motto "for sports fans by sports fans" lightly. It means that we administrators are part of the community, the community is run by the community (through the moderator program), and the software/programming is driven by the community (by request or by obvious need).

The "Two" in our name means many things. It partly means 2.0 as in Web 2.0 - you will see a real difference in how the SportsTwo software operates vs. the Web 1.0 style vbulletin (tho vbulletin is adding 2.0 like features over time). It partly means version 2 - after the merging of justball.com to the S2 platform, it will be justbball version 2. It also partly means 2.0 as in the Web 2.0 philosophy - many functions that were admin-only are pushed to moderator level, features are democratically created, and user generated content is both appreciated for how great it is and promoted as such.

About bballworld.us

bballworld had changed ownership a number of times before we bought it. It wasn't our intent to break up their community, but to make it a part of S2 as we're doing with justbball. The founder wanted full control over the site (turning our 'democracy' into a dictatorship!) and went off to start his own new thing. Some of the members were loyal to him and joined him at the new site. Let's just say the new site has already changed management a few times and many of the BBW members are now regulars at S2 anyway. We have no grudges to bear against BBW, it's founder, any of its members, etc. In fact, it's reciprocal - I've not seen that anyone from BBW particularly has any issues with us, either.

It's true that the BBW threads and posts were imported to S2, but it's also true that those threads and posts are reasonably active still, and they do not represent the majority of our threads and posts by any means. We're currently doing ~700 posts/day and we're delivering hundreds of thousands of pages per month - and we're only 90 days old!

BBW isn't the only site we've had join S2, as well. And these other site members are thrilled to be part of the S2 community. Some of them are now mods and global mods at S2 even.

BBW members weren't notified about the move ahead of time for one simple reason - if people register at S2 to check out the site beforehand, it only causes them confusion after the merge (as there'll be two user accounts, two signatures, two avatars, and so on). This is why you've been asked (in big red letters, no less!) not to sign up for S2 and to be patient and wait for the merge to happen.

About the merge of justbball to the S2 platform

We've developed some really good tools for importing the important information from vbulletin (and other) message boards to the S2 platform. S2 is a robust content management system that has the feel of forums; this allows the posts, threads, private messages, sigatures, avatars, polls, and so on, to be moved to the S2 site.

We're expecting the merge to happen this coming weekend (9/7, 9/8, or 9/9). During the merge, both sites will be disabled for an hour or two. All your posts, your avatars, your signatures, your polls, your private messages, etc., will be at S2 when the sites come back online. Your username and password will work. The only thing that I can think of that will break will be any bookmarks you've set in your browser to pages on the current justbball site.

If you've made an account on S2 or on BBW or any of the other sites we've merged into S2, your justball username/account will have jbb in front of it. In my case, it'd be jbbDaBullz. So when you try to login the first time, if your user name doesn't work, try with the jbb in front. We can merge your accounts together after the merge, if that's what you want. We can rename your old account and new account so you get your proper user name. In a few rare cases, someone else may have already registered your username at S2, so you will have to come up with a new name and we'll facilitate the change.

Everyone will be given 1000 points to start out with, to use on the S2 site - we won't be counting your posts or other activity on justbball.com in any other way. You earn more points at S2 by posting, reading threads, blogs, articles, and other content we have - or by winning them in our games and contests.

About justbball

We have a huge amount of respect for Mel, shapecity, the other admins & staff, and the posters/members of justbball. I personally have known about justbball.com for years and have considered it a top-notch and well run community.

While we already have a robust NBA community, the addition of justbball.com to the S2 community will give us more people to talk to, more people to read our posts, more people to organize games and contests around, and so on.

I've known Mel and shapecity and some of the others for a while now and we're all quite excited about OUR future going forward. The key word being "OUR" here. After the merge, it won't be me vs. them, or us vs. them, it's going to be a bigger US together. You all will be welcomed as long-time members of the united community; the justbball.com admins, mods, and cms will assume similar roles at S2, and generally justbball.com will be the face of the S2 basketball community.

More about S2

Our objectives are to build community and build the best sports site (overall) on the internet. All of us are going to be a big part of this effort - we take pride that there's a form of "ownership" of the site by the community members.

We're not out to sell the site off and get rich in the process. Though we are running S2 like a business at the highest levels. We are spending a good amount of money to provide the basis for S2 out of our pockets, and at some point in the very near future, the site will be paying for itself. We won't hide that we want to the site to make more and more money as time goes on, but we'll also commit that the money the site makes will be used to further the site and benefit the community as a whole. For example, we're paying for a news feed from a professional sports news organization; they offer many other premium feeds that we currently can't afford; as we can afford to add more of this content, we will.

Nick Nolte had a line at the end of the movie teachers that went something like this: "they're not here for us, we're here for them" and this applies to S2: we're here for you, not the other way around.




We appreciate your patience for the next week and look forward to being ONE community together after the weekend.

 

test

-Petey

 

Thanks for going into detail with it. Looking forward to working with you, and the rest of the staff.

 

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