"Norm!" (The Welcome Thread)

BGO - The road less traveled
Welcome guys. We left the light on...
 
Who am I?
Life long Skins fan from an area of upstate NY loaded with obnoxious Giant fans. Even as a little kid they made me ill so I turned to their foe as my team around 1971. I knew no one else that was a Washington fan so there were no outside influences other then Giant fans and really like a number of Redskin players like Larry Brown, Chris Hanburger, Mike Bass and Pat Fischer.

I was DWinzit on ES since 2006. I love the draft but have not had the time to deep dive into it recently. Looking forward to that changing as retirement is planned next year! More time with grand kids and Florida
 
Welcome to BGO
 
Long time lurker on ES for many years and semi regular poster since 2019....So happy this place exists and seeing some familiar names. Looking forward to meeting new friends and having a outlet to come to during the good and bad times with this team. Been a fan since the days of Riggo by the way!!
 
Just another former ExtremeSkin looking for a home. Seeing a bunch of familiar faces in here.

Been kicking the tires the last couple of days, finally took the plunge and its looking really good. Thank you again for the warm welcome Boone!
 
Chris 44 said:
Just another former ExtremeSkin looking for a home. Seeing a bunch of familiar faces in here.

Been kicking the tires the last couple of days, finally took the plunge and its looking really good. Thank you again for the warm welcome Boone!
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Well, I can tell you’re not a F1 fan because you didn’t say tyres.

Hi, C44!
 
KDawg said:
Well, I can tell you’re not a F1 fan because you didn’t say tyres.

Hi, C44!
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Was a huge F1 fan back in the 80s and 90s, Nigel Mansell, Nelson Piquet battles etc. Haven't really had the same passion since then. Before that Lauda and Hunt rivalry was a great one (golden years of F1 in my humble opinion), Rush is one of my all time favorite movies.
Great seeing you in here KD!
 
Hi all, o
Longtime es’er who hasn’t posted much the past few, no explanation needed, but nice to find new home for game days especially since we don’t suck anymore.
 
So, not sure where to put this so I'll just put it here.

This website is nice, it's a good setup, very similar to extremeskins and has all the tools to be extremeskins minus the politics and even though I definitely miss those discussions I could live without them.

The real elephant in the room here is that there's almost no traffic.

Am I missing something?

Is there a place here I haven't found where everybody is hiding?

I'm really not trying to be an asshole here and am grateful that i was welcomed here warmly but it's nearly impossible to have any meaningful engagement because there's only a small handful of people responding and threads die after a page or two.

Right now I think there's like 4 members in sons of Washington and 2 or 3 in the 5 o'clock club, that's just simply not enough to maintain a community that's vibrant and rewarding.

Again I'm not here to trash the place, by all accounts it seems like a very nice website with all the tools necessary just not enough people.

I'm starting to come to the realization that I'm a bit of a dinosaur and the fact that I hid on extremeskins for so long, now that it's gone the internet world has passed me by because I can't follow the crap I'm supposed to now like reddit and X they seem lifeless and boring and unfortunately the alternatives like message boards seem to be so much a thing of the past that they aren't popular enough to be sustainable.
 
Well we’ve been around for 15 years, so I’m not exactly sure what to say…?
 
First of all, being honest is never something anyone should apologize for. So I'm going to respond with the same kind of honesty (from my perspective).

Since you've made the 'bar' Extremeskins... there's ONE reason that site was so 'busy'.... it was the 'Official Messageboard of the Washington Redskins'. For a number of years, ES was promoted actively on the Redskins website and via other marketing tools. No privately owned forum or website could ever compete with that advantage, no matter what the quality.

That's it.

When ES began, there were a thousand other more meaningful reasons it became a mecca for Redskins fans. The quality and energy of the owners and staff. The obvious effort to create an innovative place for Washington fans to gather. If we're being honest, Bang! cartoons drove a ton of traffic to early ES and created the kind of numbers that attracted the team to it. Later on though, after the team took over the site, folks flocked to the site not because of the quality of the site, but because it was the team forum and easy to find. Ironically, the team never cared much about the site, what it looked like, what the user experience was like, or what the tone of the moderators there was. Fortunately for ES, the one biggest asset they had - a diverse and energetic group of loyal members - kept it the #1 Washington football site. But even ES has been impacted by the shifting whims of the internet-browsing public in recent years.

Forums are the original internet community entity but they have seen a huge decline. I've been a frequent visitor to the most popular forums over the years, and even on mega-forums, threads languished and traffic diminished. It's just what happened. Over the years, with the explosion of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, all forums - even Extremeskins - saw their traffic plummet. Most folks don't want to invest in a website. They want to click an icon on their phone, scan what's going on, make a driveby post, and move on.

10-15 years ago, there were tens of thousands of forums, centered on every topic imaginable. Nowadays, only those truly determined and committed remain. And for those that do persist and remain, they do so because they believe that the family owned Italian restaurant on the corner is a better experience than grabbing a Big Mac and fries at McDonalds.

We don't want to be McDonalds, or Twitter, or Reddit. We have a community here and regardless of size, it matters to those of us involved in it.

So my bottom line response to your comments is, thanks for the feedback, but we've been at this since 2009, and we will be at this a decade from now. We welcome anyone who wants to be a contributing member of our community. We are here and the largest most 'successful' Washington football forum ever is not.

Sometimes we will be busy. Sometimes, as in the middle of an extended losing streak, we may not be. But we will continue to be here welcoming new members, doing our thing, and making the best homemade pasta you have ever tasted.
 
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Very well said.

Might just be an adjustment period and also losing a lot of the people I used to communicate frequently with that has me feeling a little blue.
Like I said the people here have been great and it's been really nice still having a place to talk redskins football.
 
I was on ES regularly in the early days. It was very much then like BGO is now. I migrated here after the tone and tenor of ES evolved towards an atmosphere that I did not really respect any longer. This place was formed by long-time ES founders and members who also wanted something different, something better than the direction in which ES was headed.

From time to time over the years I would lurk there when I was bored. The main reason that threads there were more active (besides the obvious user numbers) was very much due to the minimalistic approach the moderators took. That combined with what I would term an excessive amount of off-topic banter inside the few allowed threads that posters engaged in created the impression of activity but it was often misleading activity.

The Tailgate was a political cesspool much like X etc are now. That is not something that anyone here is fond of being here. Lord knows there are enough alternative platforms for that if one desires.

Tldr- Those who have been here for any length of time have learned to appreciate it. BGO is not ES, nor does it ever wish to be. It won’t be for everyone and that’s very much ok.
 
heisenberg said:
Very well said.

Might just be an adjustment period and also losing a lot of the people I used to communicate frequently with that has me feeling a little blue.
Like I said the people here have been great and it's been really nice still having a place to talk redskins football.
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I would like to add that no one here will take exception to your comments or your point of view. That alone should highlight a pretty significant difference.

Would we like it to be more active? I think so, but I know that we prefer quality of posters over quantity of posters all day long.
 
As far as activity goes, that is something on all of us. If you want more activity then post more.

That said, there is a quality/quantity issue that I wrestle with. I remember often being on ES and seeing the free agency thread move seventy-five posts. I'd click on the thread something big had happened, but nothing had. It was just some ES squabble between posters followed by a lot of fluff posts. So, while activity is a good thing and even stupid posts are fun (Heck, I posted about evil Spock and Bizarro today), traffic for traffic's sake doesn't add all that much.
 
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