The House of Blue

I'll have to say I'm a huge fan off how things are now. I'm a fan of all things UK and don't want to have to go through multiple boards to keep track of what all is going on. If there is a thread title that doesn't interest me (not many) then I don't go there. If I can't tell exactly what the thread is aiming for from the title, I go in. If I'm not interested I leave having wasted 30 seconds of my life, oh well.

Just today there was a post that was titled something like "John Smith class of 2014." I had to read through 14 posts before someone mentioned that "Coach Cal was working on it." I guessed that it was basketball related after reading that........but unfortunately I had to read 5 minutes of confusion. It's a minor annoyance/inconvenience but one that keeps me posting at other sites more than here.....even though I prefer 247 in almost every other aspect.

Yeah, but if this site gets as busy with new members as we all would like, one board won't get it done. At the moment, we can log on a day later and still find a thread topic of interest that we've been reading and/or posting in.... but when traffic picks up and threads start moving down the pages faster, how fun will it be to have to sift through 2 or 3 pages to find those threads of interest. When things move too fast, it gets kinda crazy, which is the main reason I can't stand the Rivals site. Having boards for football and basketball only will appease many members... and more importantly, attract many new members. IMHO

BUMP!

We don't wanna let this idea slip away just yet... anyone interested PLEASE let it be known.

THANKS!

Want to keep my support behind this, especially as right now it barely feels like basketball is happening because of all the football threads, I still think they need their own places!

+1 on different boards

bump for staff

I would be absolutely thrilled for it to go back to 2 seperate forums. That's one of the big drawbacks that I see on this site; that the basketball and football boards are mixed together. I would much rather be able to go to the football board if I want football info and to the basketball board if I want to talk hoops! I really dislike the combined boards.

I didn't care for the new format, and truthfully I still haven't gotten used to it or even like it. I think we should have our own football board........basketball too.......and I don't like it when I go to a thread, open it, and all I get is the closed VIP ribbons. J/S.
In some respects this site is better, but in others it isn't nearly as good as it used to be. And while I understand the need to sometimes change things up and watch where it evolves to, I am from the 'old school' of thought that if something isn't broken, you don't need to fix it. Again.........j/s.

Right now there are 36 non-VIP threads on the first page and 14 VIP threads. I would bet that this site has more free threads and posts than any other on our network. We had folks canceling on this site because they felt like there wasn't a reason to be VIP because so much was free.

I can understand having a football board separate from hoops if it was hard to navigate or sift through threads, but the last thread on the topics page is four days old. That doesn't seem to be too cumbersome. Granted, it is a very slow time right now with the holidays, etc., but I don't recall seeing the first page be less than 36 hours old. I don't see how segmenting things can make it more active, but maybe I'm just not understanding things correctly.

Frankly, the biggest argument I've heard about having a separate football board deals with free and VIP posts being mixed together - but a separate board isn't going to change that. It's just going to add another board that is both free and VIP. The users have the power to make their posts free or VIP, and I think that's a great feature.

We all want this site to grow, become more active, etc. I think it's a delicate balance of free and VIP content, but we have to make sure that our paying customers feel like they are getting their money's worth here. After getting a lot of e-mails and PMs from folks canceling because they didn't feel like they were getting much more than the non-VIPs we felt we needed to make a concerted effort to offer more VIP content and to make our scoop and opinions premium when they were on topic.

Now, there's no reason to VIP a post about your favorite show, or you new iPod list or whatever. But if it's about recruiting, the coaching search, hoops notes, other scoop, etc., it's premium because that's what people are paying for here.

Many of our sites - and sites with more members and more activity than this one - have just have one board. This site has three - this one, the off-topic Paddock and the ticket exchange. We're not against separate boards when the time is right, but right now the feeling is we need to grow this one then hopefully others will be more necessary.

I cancelled my membership for totally different reasons, and so did several others.

1) Staff members are constantly hijacking free threads with "VIP" posts. This is very frustrating and messes up the flow of conversation.

2) The "VIP" and thread police locking down threads because they deem the topic to be "VIP" even though the topic is plastered everywhere else for free all across the entire internet.

Ryan.

If the point is to grow the site first before then "possibly" splitting off some other boards. But as I mentioned before the nature of the board as it is currently may very well be stifling the progress.

During basketball and football season this board may have 20-30 active threads that are being used throughout the day. So if you have a discussion on one thread going you may have to sift through dozens of threads to keep up with the conversation. Also there are a bunch of UK fans that are mainly basketball or football but not usually both. The content of the threads are not designated and is tedious to sort through. This kind of inconvenience hinders fans from wanting to post.