You totally get half of what I'm saying. The other half is that there's a psychological attachment users can easily make with The Blazers. There really isn't one with The NBA. Some people really do think, "I love the NBA" (just like the old slogan). But I'd bet there are far, far more people who think, "I love the Blazers." The NBA is too diverse, too spread out over too many cities with too many competing teams for an emotional attachment to form. The Blazers, however, are nicely confined to one city, 15 players and one coach, and of course the history of the franchise. SportsTwo will always have the same problem (just like Basketballforum did). By its nature, it has to please too many people to be effective at fostering strong brand attachment. It could fight this, or it could shrug and make something fans could become attached to.
someone just register a domain name, have it auto forward to this forum. 10 bucks a year at godaddy...cheaper elsewhere. big whoop.
Yeah that's understandable, but to a certain extent it could be confined to one thread. Over just the past couple days I have seen "BBF.com is a joke", "Learning from BBF.com", and "I've been banned from BFF!" If I didn't know better I'd say this is all a covert operation to promote them.
http://sportstwo.com/MLB What Pegs and I put together in a matter of hours (many of which were dedicated to learning about drupal/pestering Denny). The idea of mlbtwo.com and netstwo.com and blazers.com sounds very cool.
I kinda ramble here: The technical issue with single signon is the cookies, cross domain security issues implemented by the browsers, and quite a few other similar things. People don't expect multiple different hosts/domains to belong to the same domain as far as the technology goes. I personally don't like the idea of having to sign in to the Blazers board to post, then go sign in to the Nets board to post, then go sign in to the Bulls board to post, and so on. That's a cookie problem. Javascript also has similar issues, which ties our hands with what we can do going forward. And like I said, I don't see the value in running a network of independant sites like you've seen elsewhere. It seems to me there's another site people are talking about on this site as if it has a brand (which it does). We do think there's value to the S2 brand currently, and in the long run. In your analogy, S2 is the supermarket proper - you do tell people to go to Albertsons or Safeway to get their band aids. What is possible is something like blazers.sportstwo.com, and that's an issue that I would want to address for the entire site, not just this one forum. It's just an economy of my time and labor issue. Customer care is what it is. It's almost our whole business model. If we lose sight of it, we're nothing.
Denny, do you think you could integrate S2 with my wordpress site? Basically, I would castrate all non-wordpress elements of my site off, and keep the blog at the current domain, while making the forums the S2 Bulls forum, while integrating the userbases? Two separate entities still basically, that are in a symbiotic and combined (shared userbase) relationship.
Alright. I will be on in a short while. I need to figure out if one of these programs on my mac works with AIM, or if I need to download it. But I'll be on really soon.
Why not also have www.blazers.com (or whatever guys want) forward to blazers.sportstwo.com. http://chicagobearsdaily.com/ as a very prototypical example
