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- Joined
- Apr 11, 2009
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- Alma Mater
Why did we create BGObsession.com and how did it come to pass?
Well, that’s a bit of a long story,..
Many of you have read the ‘History of Extremeskins’ document which goes into great detail regarding the origins of that once great and groundbreaking forum. The founders of BGObsession first came together as staff and owners at Extremeskins. What started out as online acquaintances became internet friendships and eventually real life relationships.
The most obvious question when looking at the history of ‘BGO’ (as we lovingly refer to ourselves) is ‘why start another forum’? If you’ve read the Extremeskins origin tome, you know that after some negotiations in July of 2005, the site became the property of the Washington Redskins. The ‘merger’ as we called it (since no real financial purchase was involved) afforded the site bragging rights as the ‘Official Messageboard of the Washington Redskins’, while giving the staff and owners unprecedented access to the team.
Why is this relevant to a conversation about the origins of BGO? One of the lesser-focused on aspects of the ‘merger’ was that the staff and owners no longer controlled the ES software. That seems like a small price to pay for the incredible payoff – more access to an NFL team than any fan community had likely ever had. But that major change in who actually controlled the forum turned out to be a big deal.
One of the driving forces that made Extremeskins such a special NFL watering hole was the creative energy of it’s originators. While the forum went through a number of iterations over the years, it was first and foremost an incredible website, with numerous homegrown innovations and features. Once the site became team property, administered by some fairly disinterested IT professionals, it lost a lot of the ‘magic’ of the early years, at least from a technical and aesthetic perspective. Between the transfer of technical control and the absolute explosion in membership which had been well under way even prior to the acquisition by the team, Extremeskins (while still a great site) lost some of that small town appeal and sense of community it had always had.
Success in life is always a ‘mixed bag’ and I think that was definitely true in regards to the evolution of Extremeskins.
After several years of doggedly covering every game, minicamp, training camp, and team event at home and on the road, the incredible access the team had given the ES staff and owners almost began to feel like a job. I know that sounds incredibly ungrateful and entitled. But with the travel, the workload putting up game coverage stuff, and the time commitment, it was a lot to manage for guys who all had full-time jobs and families. And while the team never said a word about site content, or what messages they wanted sent or voiced on the site, once the forum was their property, they seemed pretty ambivalent about it.
Some staff, most notably myself (Tarhog on ES, Boone on BGO) and Om, began to wonder if Die Hard had been right in being the sole ‘nay’ vote on becoming the official Redskins messageboard. The team didn’t care about the site, and the site itself had become an extremely busy but somewhat sterile shell of it’s former self. I had personally spent an enormous amount of time devoted to Extremeskins over a 3 year period, and truth be told, was approaching burn out. I began sending pointless entreaties to the staff group that we needed to speak to the team about improvements that could be made. The group rightfully and realistically responded ‘what do you want us to do about it?’ The truth is, it was what it was. We’d made a deal that resulted in once-in-a-lifetime opportunities and access for a select group of fanatical fans. Yes – there were downsides, but it was an incredible ride. What was wrong with me? It was a reasonable question.
I think I simply got burned out.
After several overwrought and frustrated ‘I’m having a meltdown’ email threads, I told the guys I was done and was stepping down. In the vernacular of the layman, I pretty much ‘showed my ass’. That was completely on me. And that was the end of my Extremeskins tenure. Looking back on it, I was so enmeshed with the site and dynamics that I think ‘blowing up’ was the only way I ever could’ve left and moved on. Like all of you who eventually left the site, I went through a period of mourning and second-guessing my ‘decision’, but once I’d blown up, I just decided to live with it. I lurked, made occasional posts over the next year, but I was more or less done and, increasingly, unwelcome.
Enter Om, and Neophyte, and Henry.
Over the years on ES, I had struck up a friendship with Om. We had grown up during the same era in Northern Virginia, we had a lot in common, and over the years, we became fast friends. We had actually crossed the Rubicon and met in real life and started hanging out when we had the opportunity. Ditto Henry. And although at that time we had never met Neophyte, he became another close friend. We were a close knit subset on the Extremeskins staff, and my ES meltdown probably surprised and upset them. While they didn’t storm out of ES as I had, I think they began to withdraw a bit from their previous level of commitment.
It's now 2007 or so.
With plenty of time on my hands now that I wasn’t immersed in all things Extremeskins, I became interested in website creation. Brother Om had a revolutionary idea – to build a forum focused on art, science, philosophy, music, astronomy and all of the myriad non-football topics we discussed when we weren’t obsessing over the Washington Redskins. A community for intelligent conversation about everything. He came up with ‘The Noosphere’ as a possible (and brilliant) site name.
Per Wikipedia:
“The noosphere (alternate spelling noösphere) is a philosophical concept developed and popularized by the biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vernadsky defined the noosphere as the new state of the biosphere,[1] and described it as the planetary "sphere of reason".[2][3] The noosphere represents the highest stage of biospheric development, that of humankind's rational activities.[4]
The word is derived from the Greek νόος ("nous, mind, reason") and σφαῖρα ("sphere"), in lexical analogy to "atmosphere" and "biosphere".[5] The concept cannot be accredited to a single author. The founding authors Vernadsky and de Chardin developed two related but starkly different concepts, the former grounded in the geological sciences, and the latter in theology. Both conceptions of the noosphere share the common thesis that together human reason and scientific thought have created, and will continue to create, the next evolutionary geological layer. This geological layer is part of the evolutionary chain.”
The only problem was – we had NO idea how to build a website. None. We’d had nothing to do with creating or managing the Extremeskins site. No technical skills or knowledge. But we decided to dive in anyway.
I know. You’re asking ‘what the hell does this have to do with BGO?’. I’ll get there. I promise.
We purchased the url/domain for www.thenoosphere.com. We invested in the vbulletin software (the original ES forum software we were at least somewhat familiar with). We purchased a ‘skin’ and began building a site from scratch. It turned out to be one cool little website. We got help from some other great friends from our Extremeskins days. Neophyte, iheartskins/Pravda, and Henry were a big part of our early ‘TN’ (our shorthand for the Noosphere) days.
There are moments I wished we’d kept ‘The Noosphere’ out there just for sentimental reasons, but sadly it no longer exists. We spent hours obsessing about the look of the site, the forum structure, the graphics and logos… and we even attracted some interested members. The Noosphere kept us busy for several years, but never took off or gained major traction. Whether the forum’s focus was just too broad, or whether (as we sometimes opined) people weren’t significantly interested in having intelligent conversations on the internet, it just stagnated. We had created a beautiful website that anyone would be proud of, we just didn’t attract enough active members to sustain the effort.
But we learned a ton in the process.
One day in casual conversation in late 2008, Om and I had a revelation. We mourned the loss of what had once been a very important place to us in Extremeskins. While I went out using the nuclear option (a character flaw that has surfaced a few times in my life), Om had simply drifted off and joined me as a now spiritually homeless Washington Redskins fan. It occurred to us – why couldn’t we create our own Washington Redskins fan forum? That had never been an intent, not even a fleeting thought when we’d left ES. But why not, now that we had the knowledge and technical skills to pull it off, create our own forum? Perhaps we could recapture some of the magic of those early Extremeskins days and rebirth a site where we had absolute control to make it whatever we desired it to be.
The original idea was to create ‘the Om Field’, a clever take off on Mark’s longtime username. But we quickly realized if we were going to be partners in a venture, we needed something broader. ‘Obsessed’ has always seemed like an apropos descriptor for our joint relationship with the Washington Redskins. We needed a name that described that state as well as one that could be shortened with an easily identifiable acronym. I came up with ‘BGO’ – a Burgundy and Gold Obsession (which we would later shorten to simply ‘Burgundy and Gold Obsession’. And thus began our journey from Extremeskins to The Noosphere to BGObsession.
*Note – Om eventually did create his own personal website, ‘The Om Field’ which still exists today (albeit in need of a little updating) at www.theomfield.com
I wasn’t the only key player at ES who had drifted away. Om as previously mentioned had also greatly curtailed his involvement. Henry and Pravda/iheartskins and Neophyte and Pete/Miles Monroe were invited to join our new effort and gladly accepted.
We began building BGO. Based on our intimate familiarity with the software, we chose vBulletin for the new forum. vBulletin was not only the most popular forum software at that time, but it had a robust community and independent support site at vbulletin.org where just about any ‘modification’ or add-on desire could be found, installed, or built.
Selecting a ‘skin’ or theme for the site was a huge part of the early design. Not wanting to go ‘too far’ down the path of copying the early ES site, we opted for a white background site. Not only did the choice of skin largely define the look of the site, but also the layout. We ended up setting the site up much as early ES had been, with a landing ‘Home’ page which included the most recent posts made, but also lots of features, as well as a ‘Forums’ page. Once installing our chosen theme, we spent countless hours on the color scheme tweaking the look of the site not only customizing colors, but all of the icons and buttons on the site as well.
We shamelessly tried to recreate many of the features that were part of the original Extremeskins site, courtesy of the creativity of Die Hard and Blade. We added forums to cover just about every conceivable topic including politics. We installed a countdown clock, chatrooms, NFL spy feature (where you could easily find and look at opposing team forums), a ‘member map’, photo and video galleries, a BGO store, and an incredible arcade, just to name a few features. We spent a ton of time on the look of the site.
With the help of our great friend Pete (‘Miles Monroe’ here on BGO) who had considerable graphics talent, we spent the better part of a month perfecting a site logo. We were quite proud of the result, ‘BGO’ in gold letters with a classic Redskins feather coming off of the ‘O’ and a barely perceptible faded image of the Redskins Native American logo inside the O. It was a hell of a logo that we used for several of our initial years. In addition to our banner logo, we designed just about every graphic on the site ourselves and have continued that tradition over the years.
In regards to our original classic Redskins-themed logo, we used that logo off an on for our first decade of existence. There was a period of several years where we used an alternate logo because of threats from the Redskins legal staff (someone had notified them we were using ‘components’ of the Skins logo in our own). Eventually we said ‘to hell with it’ and went back to it, mostly because we loved that logo and couldn’t imagine it was worth the Redskins time to take our little selves to court on the matter, particularly when we weren’t using the logo to make money. In other words, ‘**** them’.
In addition to our awesome original logo, Miles Monroe helped build our classic library of member Avatars which we continue to expand upon today.
As the Spring of 2009 progressed, we started inviting some of our friends in to take a peek. These guys represented our 3 original owners, myself, Om, and Neophyte, as well as future staff members Henry, Miles Monroe, and iheartskins/Pravda. We worked and worked on fleshing the site out with a goal of opening in early July.
Another cool feature we added, and I honestly can’t recollect who to credit the idea to, was our Rotating Image Banner. We scoured the web for every great Washington Redskins photo we could find. We ultimately had to hire a professional coder to build a widget that would rotate the images randomly cycling through our entire library of images. Today we have over 5,000 images, perhaps the largest collection of Redskins/WFT/Commanders images anywhere and continue to expand the library. It’s one of the coolest features on BGO to this day.
In addition to the ‘build’ of the site, we were very focused on setting a high bar for the future community, and defining the kind of member and member behavior we sought that might make BGO different, dare I say ‘better’, than most NFL sites. The culmination of our thoughts on this topic is found on our ‘About Us’ page. To save you a couple clicks, assuming you don’t have it memorized or tattooed somewhere on your person, here is the ‘Mission Statement’ we came up with:
“What We're About
Welcome to BGObsession. We knew what we were looking for in a Washington NFL fan site, but were unable to find it. So, this being a great country, we set about building it ourselves. For better or for worse, what you see is the result. In addition to providing an outlet for burgundy and gold obsessions, we are committed to three basic principles:
1. Providing a comprehensive, satisfying experience for fans of the Washington Commanders.
2. Fostering and encouraging a sense of community and tone of mutual respect.
3. Giving our members good old-fashioned customer service.
BGO was created for Washington Pro Football fans who appreciate adult sensibilities like common sense, reason, and the fact that passion and civility need not be mutually exclusive. We are fans - loud , proud and unapologetic. We are also grownups. If that combination appeals to you, we cordially invite you to consider BGO as home to your burgundy and gold obsession.
It will be our honor to serve you.
Hail.”
We’ve never altered our original mission statement - so I guess that means we mostly got it right.
BGO officially went live on July 15th, 2009 at noon.
In those first several months, we were inundated with new members. We mostly resisted the urge to troll the ranks of Extremeskins (which by now was a megasite) or other Washington football forums. Our thought was that the right kind of members would find out about us and simply gravitate our way because we could offer things those other sites couldn’t (intelligent posts, civility, minimal moderation, etc..). That did happen quite a bit. Guys like Monte51Coleman (‘Chris’ on BGO), Goaldeje, Yusuf06, DieselPwr44 along with countless others did exactly that. Some of those who found us stayed. Some found the pace too ‘Mayberry-ish’ and returned to their ‘home boards’ where they were more comfortable.
I was somewhat obsessed with the numbers and site traffic early on like any fledgling webmaster should be, but was frequently reminded by my smarter and better looking partner in crime Om that ‘all we ever wanted was a cool place to hang out and talk Redskins with 50-100 of our best friends’. After the first year of existence I had to admit we had certainly accomplished that, and then some.
Those first several years were smooth ones, but not without some challenges. Just as we had seen happen on Extremeskins, we allowed political posts and threads, but it was problematic. There was a segment of our membership who weren’t necessarily on BGO because the ‘Mission Statement’ resonated with them, but because they’d managed to get tossed from other sites for aggressive posting styles. Strangely enough (and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions here), most of our aggressive political posters were of the Right Wing variety. One of the things that was very important to us was not to have heavy-handed moderation. Henry (God bless him) being one of the most reasonable humans on the planet, did a ton of our ‘moderation’ during the early years. We tried a number of approaches to manage the political discussions. We moved all political posts to a dedicated forum ‘The Political Asylum’ so that those who weren’t interested didn’t have to be subjected to political bickering. We tried moderating those conversations aggressively. We tried slapping an ‘enter at your own risk’ warning on it and made it a completely unmoderated ‘you’re on your own’ forum, we implemented a ‘warning system’ where folks who violated our posting standards could be assigned ‘points’ that could result in a timeout or a temporary ban. Nothing seemed to work. Worse yet, we began to note some of the animosity generated in the political forum had begun leaking over into the other forums. We even tossed some folks who simply would not listen to our continual entreaties to ‘play nice’, although we did it reluctantly and with no joy in doing so. Finally, we just decided that there were plenty of places to ‘discuss’ (and I use that verb very loosely) politics, but we simply weren’t going to be one of them. We shut down our political forum for good and have never looked back.
During our initial 5 years of operation, we implemented a number of innovations unique to BGO. The first was ‘BGOverdrive’, another great idea from Brother Om. We contracted with a coding specialist who designed a modification that allowed members to vote on fellow member posts as ‘favorites’. If 3 members selected your post as an especially good one, it created a blog entry for that post on the home page. It was a cool way to recognize exceptionally well thought out posts (and to encourage them).
We also started a feature called ‘Blognostications’ where every game week a member would be asked to do a game blog discussing the upcoming match, what to watch for, who would prevail, and why. At the end of the year, we would vote on the absolute best entry and award a custom avatar to that individual.
We had a number of BGObsession Blogs during our first 10 years of operation. vBulletin had a ‘Blogs’ add-on which we installed. Our most prolific blogger, Burgundy Burner, began ‘Burner’s Burning Questions’ and his contributions to BGO content during our 1st decade of operation were just incredible. Ken moved on to bigger and better things and has contributed to a number of other Washington football sites such as Hogs Haven and others but his contributions to BGO will never be forgotten.
Neophyte had a great blog titled ‘Behind Enemy Lines’ (he lives near Dallas), and I spent a good deal of time on my ‘B.G.O.C.D.’ blog. Another crucial member during the early years of BGO was servumtuum. We first met serv on The Noosphere. We were never sure if he was really a Redskins fan, but he followed us over to BGO when we created it, and was a great early member. I started what I thought was a cool blog idea ‘Redskins Recon’ where I’d visit an opponent’s fan forum, and give a sneak peek at how they viewed their upcoming game with us. Servumtuum eventually took that over and did an incredible job for several years. You can still find those blog entries in our ‘Articles’ section if you are interested. Blogs are so 2010 though, so we’ve mostly moved on from that format.
Contests have always been a big part of the site. We started the NFL Pickem Contest in 2009, the same year we opened and just finished our 16th consecutive contest. In 2010, we opened our first ‘BGO Ballers’ Fantasy Football league that continues to this day. And we’ve added contests along the way, most recently a ‘Crystal Ball Pool’ contest where players identify every playoff team before the season, and predict what will happen in the playoffs through the Super Bowl. We’ve added a ‘Keys to the Victory’ contest where the member with the best game prediction wins a vintage Redskins-era keyring from our collection. This year, we will re-open our BGO Survivor Contest. We have made having fun a big priority on the site, and have spent a small fortune over the years providing prizes out of pocket for our top contest finishers and winners.
This raises another point… we have kept BGO free and open to any and all members at no cost to our membership. For well over a decade, our 3 primary owners funded the site. We have implemented some ‘ads’ but the revenue from them has always been minimal. About 5 years ago, we relinquished the 3 individual owner model, and now have a large and robust ‘BGO Ownership Group’ that funds the site via monthly recurring payments. This has been a very successful model for us and we encourage any established member who wants to become a bigger contributor to the site and to become more involved to consider joining us. Other than a few Google ads, our only active advertising is via the ‘Al Galdi Podcast’, an affiliation we are very proud of as Al is an advocate for and fan of the site.
After nearly a decade of operation, we faced a dilemma. vBulletin, our forum software vendor, was struggling. They had released several new versions of vBulletin which turned out to be quite unpopular with drastic changes many forum owners viewed unfavorably. vBulletin came under new ownership which promptly took over the vibrant support site that, frankly, had been our schoolhouse in learning how to start and manage an internet community. vBulletin.org was essentially dismantled and many of the great add-on creators there were run off. It became clear that if we were going to move forward as a forum, we would need to transition to another forum software.
This was a massive decision. It meant rebuilding the site from top to bottom. New software, new learning curve, new skin/theme, recustomization of the whole site, and recreation of the numerous modifications we had added over the years. We looked at a lot of different options, but it soon became clear that Xenforo was the software product that would best meet our needs, would be viable in the future, and had an energetic support community that we could leverage along the way.
We went through several coding specialists to help us with the transition, but as was referenced in the Extremeskins History document, we found that hiring a great coder who could actually do what you were asking them to do at your specifications and at a reasonable cost – is no small task.
We ended up doing most of the work ourselves.
We needed help migrating the site over from vBulletin to Xenforo in order to retain almost a decade of posts and content. We were able to find a great resource in Ken at Driven2 Services to help us accomplish that, solve some of the transition issues we ran into, and reconstitute our beloved Rotating Image Banner for us. As part of our transition to Xenforo, we also purchased a number of official add-ons.
We installed the Xenforo Media add-on which allows us to highlight and store any number of media items including social media posts, videos, photos, and files. The Media add-on is also home to the ‘Bang! Cartoon’ library with links to all of John Tayman’s amazing Bang! Cartoons. We installed the Xenforo ‘Resource Manager’ which powers our ‘Articles’ section where we house member blogs and articles. We installed an ‘NFL Pickem’ software that allows us to run our contest right here on the site.
One of our most popular features over the years has been our chat software which we primarily use for our infamous BGO Game Day Chats. From our inception, we have sought to make game day special by giving members a place to celebrate and/or commiserate together on game day. We have gone through a number of vendor add-ons over the years, but our current chat software is the best we’ve ever found. If you aren’t already joining us on game day, you should give it a try in 2025.
Some of our features on the new Xenforo site were homegrown. Back in Extremeskin’s days, one of Die Hard’s many ongoing projects was to acquire all of the Redskins Media Guides and eventually to create a digital library where anyone could access them. The Media Guides ended up with me, probably because I was the guardian of the original Extremeskins game dvd library. It wasn’t until BGO was born though that I ever had the time or inclination to do something with those guides. I scanned and uploaded as many of the guides as was reasonably possible to our Media section as the ‘Redskins Media Guide Library’. I will confess that we never acquired all of the early guides, and as they got lengthier and more complex, scanning said guides became so cumbersome and tedious, I could no longer justify the time spent on them. But there are a number of incredible older guides available on BGO should anyone want to revisit the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s…
One of the most difficult things about an internet community like BGO is – first, that you come to love people. And then – you lose them. We have had a number of beloved members of our website community depart us. In the worst cases, for example with one of our members ‘Fear The Spear’, the member just vanishes. Here one day, a prolific poster, then after years of membership, they are gone. No goodbye, no explanation, nothing. It sucks. One has to assume the worst, and we had quite a bit of that during the COVID 19 breakout. In some cases, we at least find out a member we treasure has been lost, as in the case of Docsandy and Posse Lover, two core members who have passed aways in recent years.
We now have an ‘In Memoriam’ section of the site, accessible under the ‘Members’ tab, to recognize when a cherished BGO member has departed us. On a side note, if you ARE a long-term member here, please let your loved ones know that you wish us to be notified should something happen to you. It matters to us – it really does.
With the BGO transition to the Xenforo platform, there have been a hundred modifications installed to improve the member experience… such as auto-embedding of social media tweets, or a ‘Moods’ feature so you can express your current state of mind. There have been countless improvements, too many to name.
When the Redskins announced that they would be changing the team name, we also decided to go a different direction on several fronts with this huge transition. Obviously, we first adopted the ‘Washington Football Team’ moniker and then ultimately ‘Commanders’ throughout the site. We didn’t want to. We weren’t thrilled to do so. But once those were the team names, adopt them we did. Secondly, we decided that the transition to a new team name gave us an opportunity for a new clean look and new, less Redskins-centric logo. And we also decided to go back to the original black ES background as our default viewing experience (with the option to toggle to a white background) as a tip of the cap to our past.
I am very proud of how our new (and current) logo came about. It was this amazing, organic event in a simple thread where multiple members chimed in and gave feedback on what the new logo might look like. One of our other graphic site gurus, Knightingale (a UK resident and author) came to the rescue this time. Rather than ‘Redskins’ focused (setting aside our personal desires to retain those references), we opted to make our logo ‘Washington’ centric. The background of our logo was the DC flag. We went with bold block letters for ‘BGO’ and used subtle camouflage to highlight the vague military connotations of ‘Commanders’. And we incorporated our origin date in the logo as well. It was a true community effort and the result was a very clean, classy new BGO logo.
In recent years, we have reconstituted our BGO Arcade (although we had to create the Arcade on Wordpress and link it to BGO to accomplish that). We have also birthed a number of active social media sites that, with the help of members Burgundy Burner, Canadian Hog, Chris, Silent Threat, and burgold, let folks know BGO is out here and welcoming new members.
In the years since the team changed the name, we have experienced a lot of change. None of the changes we’ve navigated were as big as the departure of team owner Daniel Snyder. As the allegations surrounding the Snyder tenure and the inevitable truth about what transpired during his era came out, BGO did not stand still. We called for ownership change publicly, loudly, and frequently on our social media pages.
In March of 2021, BGO member Silent Threat approached BGO staff about the possibility of launching a BGO official podcast. Derek was the driving force behind the creation of ‘BGO Blind Pig’ from coming up with the name, format, and purpose of the pod and bringing it to life. Since then, BGO has recorded nearly 200 episodes of the Blind Pig, with core participants Om, Boone, Neophyte, Canadian Hog, Enforcer, and of course Silent Threat (as Emcee) contributing.
During the years 2022-2023, BGO, through site content, and via the BGO Blind Pig Podcast, aggressively pushed for the sale of the team, and advocated for Daniel Snyder and other executive leadership to be held accountable for the hostile and inappropriate work culture that had existed during their tenure. We were proud to host Megan Imbert, who witnessed and gave testimony to a number of these questionable behaviors on BGO Blind Pig, and we were outspoken advocates for change. Many Washington fans either did not want to hear about these topics, or didn’t believe anyone would ever be held accountable for these behaviors, but we were steadfast in our support of the many victims of the Dan Snyder era, and demanded change.
It finally came.
It is a new day for Washington fans. It has been one hell of a journey, both for Washington NFL fans, and for members of our website. New ownership, new coaches, a winning tradition in it’s infancy, and a thriving BGO. Late in 2024 and without warning, the Commanders shut down the ‘official’ Extremeskins messageboard. Many of us at BGO were not surprised and may have some opinions as to why this transpired. As Extremeskins was the original home and love of the folks who began BGO, we have worked hard to make this a welcoming landing spot for our ES brethren.
Thank you to all of our great members who, since 2009, have made this a special place. We hope to remain home to your Burgundy and Gold Obsession for many, many years to come.
Well, that’s a bit of a long story,..
Many of you have read the ‘History of Extremeskins’ document which goes into great detail regarding the origins of that once great and groundbreaking forum. The founders of BGObsession first came together as staff and owners at Extremeskins. What started out as online acquaintances became internet friendships and eventually real life relationships.
The most obvious question when looking at the history of ‘BGO’ (as we lovingly refer to ourselves) is ‘why start another forum’? If you’ve read the Extremeskins origin tome, you know that after some negotiations in July of 2005, the site became the property of the Washington Redskins. The ‘merger’ as we called it (since no real financial purchase was involved) afforded the site bragging rights as the ‘Official Messageboard of the Washington Redskins’, while giving the staff and owners unprecedented access to the team.
Why is this relevant to a conversation about the origins of BGO? One of the lesser-focused on aspects of the ‘merger’ was that the staff and owners no longer controlled the ES software. That seems like a small price to pay for the incredible payoff – more access to an NFL team than any fan community had likely ever had. But that major change in who actually controlled the forum turned out to be a big deal.
One of the driving forces that made Extremeskins such a special NFL watering hole was the creative energy of it’s originators. While the forum went through a number of iterations over the years, it was first and foremost an incredible website, with numerous homegrown innovations and features. Once the site became team property, administered by some fairly disinterested IT professionals, it lost a lot of the ‘magic’ of the early years, at least from a technical and aesthetic perspective. Between the transfer of technical control and the absolute explosion in membership which had been well under way even prior to the acquisition by the team, Extremeskins (while still a great site) lost some of that small town appeal and sense of community it had always had.
Success in life is always a ‘mixed bag’ and I think that was definitely true in regards to the evolution of Extremeskins.
After several years of doggedly covering every game, minicamp, training camp, and team event at home and on the road, the incredible access the team had given the ES staff and owners almost began to feel like a job. I know that sounds incredibly ungrateful and entitled. But with the travel, the workload putting up game coverage stuff, and the time commitment, it was a lot to manage for guys who all had full-time jobs and families. And while the team never said a word about site content, or what messages they wanted sent or voiced on the site, once the forum was their property, they seemed pretty ambivalent about it.
Some staff, most notably myself (Tarhog on ES, Boone on BGO) and Om, began to wonder if Die Hard had been right in being the sole ‘nay’ vote on becoming the official Redskins messageboard. The team didn’t care about the site, and the site itself had become an extremely busy but somewhat sterile shell of it’s former self. I had personally spent an enormous amount of time devoted to Extremeskins over a 3 year period, and truth be told, was approaching burn out. I began sending pointless entreaties to the staff group that we needed to speak to the team about improvements that could be made. The group rightfully and realistically responded ‘what do you want us to do about it?’ The truth is, it was what it was. We’d made a deal that resulted in once-in-a-lifetime opportunities and access for a select group of fanatical fans. Yes – there were downsides, but it was an incredible ride. What was wrong with me? It was a reasonable question.
I think I simply got burned out.
After several overwrought and frustrated ‘I’m having a meltdown’ email threads, I told the guys I was done and was stepping down. In the vernacular of the layman, I pretty much ‘showed my ass’. That was completely on me. And that was the end of my Extremeskins tenure. Looking back on it, I was so enmeshed with the site and dynamics that I think ‘blowing up’ was the only way I ever could’ve left and moved on. Like all of you who eventually left the site, I went through a period of mourning and second-guessing my ‘decision’, but once I’d blown up, I just decided to live with it. I lurked, made occasional posts over the next year, but I was more or less done and, increasingly, unwelcome.
Enter Om, and Neophyte, and Henry.
Over the years on ES, I had struck up a friendship with Om. We had grown up during the same era in Northern Virginia, we had a lot in common, and over the years, we became fast friends. We had actually crossed the Rubicon and met in real life and started hanging out when we had the opportunity. Ditto Henry. And although at that time we had never met Neophyte, he became another close friend. We were a close knit subset on the Extremeskins staff, and my ES meltdown probably surprised and upset them. While they didn’t storm out of ES as I had, I think they began to withdraw a bit from their previous level of commitment.
It's now 2007 or so.
With plenty of time on my hands now that I wasn’t immersed in all things Extremeskins, I became interested in website creation. Brother Om had a revolutionary idea – to build a forum focused on art, science, philosophy, music, astronomy and all of the myriad non-football topics we discussed when we weren’t obsessing over the Washington Redskins. A community for intelligent conversation about everything. He came up with ‘The Noosphere’ as a possible (and brilliant) site name.
Per Wikipedia:
“The noosphere (alternate spelling noösphere) is a philosophical concept developed and popularized by the biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vernadsky defined the noosphere as the new state of the biosphere,[1] and described it as the planetary "sphere of reason".[2][3] The noosphere represents the highest stage of biospheric development, that of humankind's rational activities.[4]
The word is derived from the Greek νόος ("nous, mind, reason") and σφαῖρα ("sphere"), in lexical analogy to "atmosphere" and "biosphere".[5] The concept cannot be accredited to a single author. The founding authors Vernadsky and de Chardin developed two related but starkly different concepts, the former grounded in the geological sciences, and the latter in theology. Both conceptions of the noosphere share the common thesis that together human reason and scientific thought have created, and will continue to create, the next evolutionary geological layer. This geological layer is part of the evolutionary chain.”
The only problem was – we had NO idea how to build a website. None. We’d had nothing to do with creating or managing the Extremeskins site. No technical skills or knowledge. But we decided to dive in anyway.
I know. You’re asking ‘what the hell does this have to do with BGO?’. I’ll get there. I promise.
We purchased the url/domain for www.thenoosphere.com. We invested in the vbulletin software (the original ES forum software we were at least somewhat familiar with). We purchased a ‘skin’ and began building a site from scratch. It turned out to be one cool little website. We got help from some other great friends from our Extremeskins days. Neophyte, iheartskins/Pravda, and Henry were a big part of our early ‘TN’ (our shorthand for the Noosphere) days.
There are moments I wished we’d kept ‘The Noosphere’ out there just for sentimental reasons, but sadly it no longer exists. We spent hours obsessing about the look of the site, the forum structure, the graphics and logos… and we even attracted some interested members. The Noosphere kept us busy for several years, but never took off or gained major traction. Whether the forum’s focus was just too broad, or whether (as we sometimes opined) people weren’t significantly interested in having intelligent conversations on the internet, it just stagnated. We had created a beautiful website that anyone would be proud of, we just didn’t attract enough active members to sustain the effort.
But we learned a ton in the process.
One day in casual conversation in late 2008, Om and I had a revelation. We mourned the loss of what had once been a very important place to us in Extremeskins. While I went out using the nuclear option (a character flaw that has surfaced a few times in my life), Om had simply drifted off and joined me as a now spiritually homeless Washington Redskins fan. It occurred to us – why couldn’t we create our own Washington Redskins fan forum? That had never been an intent, not even a fleeting thought when we’d left ES. But why not, now that we had the knowledge and technical skills to pull it off, create our own forum? Perhaps we could recapture some of the magic of those early Extremeskins days and rebirth a site where we had absolute control to make it whatever we desired it to be.
The original idea was to create ‘the Om Field’, a clever take off on Mark’s longtime username. But we quickly realized if we were going to be partners in a venture, we needed something broader. ‘Obsessed’ has always seemed like an apropos descriptor for our joint relationship with the Washington Redskins. We needed a name that described that state as well as one that could be shortened with an easily identifiable acronym. I came up with ‘BGO’ – a Burgundy and Gold Obsession (which we would later shorten to simply ‘Burgundy and Gold Obsession’. And thus began our journey from Extremeskins to The Noosphere to BGObsession.
*Note – Om eventually did create his own personal website, ‘The Om Field’ which still exists today (albeit in need of a little updating) at www.theomfield.com
I wasn’t the only key player at ES who had drifted away. Om as previously mentioned had also greatly curtailed his involvement. Henry and Pravda/iheartskins and Neophyte and Pete/Miles Monroe were invited to join our new effort and gladly accepted.
We began building BGO. Based on our intimate familiarity with the software, we chose vBulletin for the new forum. vBulletin was not only the most popular forum software at that time, but it had a robust community and independent support site at vbulletin.org where just about any ‘modification’ or add-on desire could be found, installed, or built.
Selecting a ‘skin’ or theme for the site was a huge part of the early design. Not wanting to go ‘too far’ down the path of copying the early ES site, we opted for a white background site. Not only did the choice of skin largely define the look of the site, but also the layout. We ended up setting the site up much as early ES had been, with a landing ‘Home’ page which included the most recent posts made, but also lots of features, as well as a ‘Forums’ page. Once installing our chosen theme, we spent countless hours on the color scheme tweaking the look of the site not only customizing colors, but all of the icons and buttons on the site as well.
We shamelessly tried to recreate many of the features that were part of the original Extremeskins site, courtesy of the creativity of Die Hard and Blade. We added forums to cover just about every conceivable topic including politics. We installed a countdown clock, chatrooms, NFL spy feature (where you could easily find and look at opposing team forums), a ‘member map’, photo and video galleries, a BGO store, and an incredible arcade, just to name a few features. We spent a ton of time on the look of the site.
With the help of our great friend Pete (‘Miles Monroe’ here on BGO) who had considerable graphics talent, we spent the better part of a month perfecting a site logo. We were quite proud of the result, ‘BGO’ in gold letters with a classic Redskins feather coming off of the ‘O’ and a barely perceptible faded image of the Redskins Native American logo inside the O. It was a hell of a logo that we used for several of our initial years. In addition to our banner logo, we designed just about every graphic on the site ourselves and have continued that tradition over the years.
In regards to our original classic Redskins-themed logo, we used that logo off an on for our first decade of existence. There was a period of several years where we used an alternate logo because of threats from the Redskins legal staff (someone had notified them we were using ‘components’ of the Skins logo in our own). Eventually we said ‘to hell with it’ and went back to it, mostly because we loved that logo and couldn’t imagine it was worth the Redskins time to take our little selves to court on the matter, particularly when we weren’t using the logo to make money. In other words, ‘**** them’.
In addition to our awesome original logo, Miles Monroe helped build our classic library of member Avatars which we continue to expand upon today.
As the Spring of 2009 progressed, we started inviting some of our friends in to take a peek. These guys represented our 3 original owners, myself, Om, and Neophyte, as well as future staff members Henry, Miles Monroe, and iheartskins/Pravda. We worked and worked on fleshing the site out with a goal of opening in early July.
Another cool feature we added, and I honestly can’t recollect who to credit the idea to, was our Rotating Image Banner. We scoured the web for every great Washington Redskins photo we could find. We ultimately had to hire a professional coder to build a widget that would rotate the images randomly cycling through our entire library of images. Today we have over 5,000 images, perhaps the largest collection of Redskins/WFT/Commanders images anywhere and continue to expand the library. It’s one of the coolest features on BGO to this day.
In addition to the ‘build’ of the site, we were very focused on setting a high bar for the future community, and defining the kind of member and member behavior we sought that might make BGO different, dare I say ‘better’, than most NFL sites. The culmination of our thoughts on this topic is found on our ‘About Us’ page. To save you a couple clicks, assuming you don’t have it memorized or tattooed somewhere on your person, here is the ‘Mission Statement’ we came up with:
“What We're About
Welcome to BGObsession. We knew what we were looking for in a Washington NFL fan site, but were unable to find it. So, this being a great country, we set about building it ourselves. For better or for worse, what you see is the result. In addition to providing an outlet for burgundy and gold obsessions, we are committed to three basic principles:
1. Providing a comprehensive, satisfying experience for fans of the Washington Commanders.
2. Fostering and encouraging a sense of community and tone of mutual respect.
3. Giving our members good old-fashioned customer service.
BGO was created for Washington Pro Football fans who appreciate adult sensibilities like common sense, reason, and the fact that passion and civility need not be mutually exclusive. We are fans - loud , proud and unapologetic. We are also grownups. If that combination appeals to you, we cordially invite you to consider BGO as home to your burgundy and gold obsession.
It will be our honor to serve you.
Hail.”
We’ve never altered our original mission statement - so I guess that means we mostly got it right.
BGO officially went live on July 15th, 2009 at noon.
In those first several months, we were inundated with new members. We mostly resisted the urge to troll the ranks of Extremeskins (which by now was a megasite) or other Washington football forums. Our thought was that the right kind of members would find out about us and simply gravitate our way because we could offer things those other sites couldn’t (intelligent posts, civility, minimal moderation, etc..). That did happen quite a bit. Guys like Monte51Coleman (‘Chris’ on BGO), Goaldeje, Yusuf06, DieselPwr44 along with countless others did exactly that. Some of those who found us stayed. Some found the pace too ‘Mayberry-ish’ and returned to their ‘home boards’ where they were more comfortable.
I was somewhat obsessed with the numbers and site traffic early on like any fledgling webmaster should be, but was frequently reminded by my smarter and better looking partner in crime Om that ‘all we ever wanted was a cool place to hang out and talk Redskins with 50-100 of our best friends’. After the first year of existence I had to admit we had certainly accomplished that, and then some.
Those first several years were smooth ones, but not without some challenges. Just as we had seen happen on Extremeskins, we allowed political posts and threads, but it was problematic. There was a segment of our membership who weren’t necessarily on BGO because the ‘Mission Statement’ resonated with them, but because they’d managed to get tossed from other sites for aggressive posting styles. Strangely enough (and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions here), most of our aggressive political posters were of the Right Wing variety. One of the things that was very important to us was not to have heavy-handed moderation. Henry (God bless him) being one of the most reasonable humans on the planet, did a ton of our ‘moderation’ during the early years. We tried a number of approaches to manage the political discussions. We moved all political posts to a dedicated forum ‘The Political Asylum’ so that those who weren’t interested didn’t have to be subjected to political bickering. We tried moderating those conversations aggressively. We tried slapping an ‘enter at your own risk’ warning on it and made it a completely unmoderated ‘you’re on your own’ forum, we implemented a ‘warning system’ where folks who violated our posting standards could be assigned ‘points’ that could result in a timeout or a temporary ban. Nothing seemed to work. Worse yet, we began to note some of the animosity generated in the political forum had begun leaking over into the other forums. We even tossed some folks who simply would not listen to our continual entreaties to ‘play nice’, although we did it reluctantly and with no joy in doing so. Finally, we just decided that there were plenty of places to ‘discuss’ (and I use that verb very loosely) politics, but we simply weren’t going to be one of them. We shut down our political forum for good and have never looked back.
During our initial 5 years of operation, we implemented a number of innovations unique to BGO. The first was ‘BGOverdrive’, another great idea from Brother Om. We contracted with a coding specialist who designed a modification that allowed members to vote on fellow member posts as ‘favorites’. If 3 members selected your post as an especially good one, it created a blog entry for that post on the home page. It was a cool way to recognize exceptionally well thought out posts (and to encourage them).
We also started a feature called ‘Blognostications’ where every game week a member would be asked to do a game blog discussing the upcoming match, what to watch for, who would prevail, and why. At the end of the year, we would vote on the absolute best entry and award a custom avatar to that individual.
We had a number of BGObsession Blogs during our first 10 years of operation. vBulletin had a ‘Blogs’ add-on which we installed. Our most prolific blogger, Burgundy Burner, began ‘Burner’s Burning Questions’ and his contributions to BGO content during our 1st decade of operation were just incredible. Ken moved on to bigger and better things and has contributed to a number of other Washington football sites such as Hogs Haven and others but his contributions to BGO will never be forgotten.
Neophyte had a great blog titled ‘Behind Enemy Lines’ (he lives near Dallas), and I spent a good deal of time on my ‘B.G.O.C.D.’ blog. Another crucial member during the early years of BGO was servumtuum. We first met serv on The Noosphere. We were never sure if he was really a Redskins fan, but he followed us over to BGO when we created it, and was a great early member. I started what I thought was a cool blog idea ‘Redskins Recon’ where I’d visit an opponent’s fan forum, and give a sneak peek at how they viewed their upcoming game with us. Servumtuum eventually took that over and did an incredible job for several years. You can still find those blog entries in our ‘Articles’ section if you are interested. Blogs are so 2010 though, so we’ve mostly moved on from that format.
Contests have always been a big part of the site. We started the NFL Pickem Contest in 2009, the same year we opened and just finished our 16th consecutive contest. In 2010, we opened our first ‘BGO Ballers’ Fantasy Football league that continues to this day. And we’ve added contests along the way, most recently a ‘Crystal Ball Pool’ contest where players identify every playoff team before the season, and predict what will happen in the playoffs through the Super Bowl. We’ve added a ‘Keys to the Victory’ contest where the member with the best game prediction wins a vintage Redskins-era keyring from our collection. This year, we will re-open our BGO Survivor Contest. We have made having fun a big priority on the site, and have spent a small fortune over the years providing prizes out of pocket for our top contest finishers and winners.
This raises another point… we have kept BGO free and open to any and all members at no cost to our membership. For well over a decade, our 3 primary owners funded the site. We have implemented some ‘ads’ but the revenue from them has always been minimal. About 5 years ago, we relinquished the 3 individual owner model, and now have a large and robust ‘BGO Ownership Group’ that funds the site via monthly recurring payments. This has been a very successful model for us and we encourage any established member who wants to become a bigger contributor to the site and to become more involved to consider joining us. Other than a few Google ads, our only active advertising is via the ‘Al Galdi Podcast’, an affiliation we are very proud of as Al is an advocate for and fan of the site.
After nearly a decade of operation, we faced a dilemma. vBulletin, our forum software vendor, was struggling. They had released several new versions of vBulletin which turned out to be quite unpopular with drastic changes many forum owners viewed unfavorably. vBulletin came under new ownership which promptly took over the vibrant support site that, frankly, had been our schoolhouse in learning how to start and manage an internet community. vBulletin.org was essentially dismantled and many of the great add-on creators there were run off. It became clear that if we were going to move forward as a forum, we would need to transition to another forum software.
This was a massive decision. It meant rebuilding the site from top to bottom. New software, new learning curve, new skin/theme, recustomization of the whole site, and recreation of the numerous modifications we had added over the years. We looked at a lot of different options, but it soon became clear that Xenforo was the software product that would best meet our needs, would be viable in the future, and had an energetic support community that we could leverage along the way.
We went through several coding specialists to help us with the transition, but as was referenced in the Extremeskins History document, we found that hiring a great coder who could actually do what you were asking them to do at your specifications and at a reasonable cost – is no small task.
We ended up doing most of the work ourselves.
We needed help migrating the site over from vBulletin to Xenforo in order to retain almost a decade of posts and content. We were able to find a great resource in Ken at Driven2 Services to help us accomplish that, solve some of the transition issues we ran into, and reconstitute our beloved Rotating Image Banner for us. As part of our transition to Xenforo, we also purchased a number of official add-ons.
We installed the Xenforo Media add-on which allows us to highlight and store any number of media items including social media posts, videos, photos, and files. The Media add-on is also home to the ‘Bang! Cartoon’ library with links to all of John Tayman’s amazing Bang! Cartoons. We installed the Xenforo ‘Resource Manager’ which powers our ‘Articles’ section where we house member blogs and articles. We installed an ‘NFL Pickem’ software that allows us to run our contest right here on the site.
One of our most popular features over the years has been our chat software which we primarily use for our infamous BGO Game Day Chats. From our inception, we have sought to make game day special by giving members a place to celebrate and/or commiserate together on game day. We have gone through a number of vendor add-ons over the years, but our current chat software is the best we’ve ever found. If you aren’t already joining us on game day, you should give it a try in 2025.
Some of our features on the new Xenforo site were homegrown. Back in Extremeskin’s days, one of Die Hard’s many ongoing projects was to acquire all of the Redskins Media Guides and eventually to create a digital library where anyone could access them. The Media Guides ended up with me, probably because I was the guardian of the original Extremeskins game dvd library. It wasn’t until BGO was born though that I ever had the time or inclination to do something with those guides. I scanned and uploaded as many of the guides as was reasonably possible to our Media section as the ‘Redskins Media Guide Library’. I will confess that we never acquired all of the early guides, and as they got lengthier and more complex, scanning said guides became so cumbersome and tedious, I could no longer justify the time spent on them. But there are a number of incredible older guides available on BGO should anyone want to revisit the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s…
One of the most difficult things about an internet community like BGO is – first, that you come to love people. And then – you lose them. We have had a number of beloved members of our website community depart us. In the worst cases, for example with one of our members ‘Fear The Spear’, the member just vanishes. Here one day, a prolific poster, then after years of membership, they are gone. No goodbye, no explanation, nothing. It sucks. One has to assume the worst, and we had quite a bit of that during the COVID 19 breakout. In some cases, we at least find out a member we treasure has been lost, as in the case of Docsandy and Posse Lover, two core members who have passed aways in recent years.
We now have an ‘In Memoriam’ section of the site, accessible under the ‘Members’ tab, to recognize when a cherished BGO member has departed us. On a side note, if you ARE a long-term member here, please let your loved ones know that you wish us to be notified should something happen to you. It matters to us – it really does.
With the BGO transition to the Xenforo platform, there have been a hundred modifications installed to improve the member experience… such as auto-embedding of social media tweets, or a ‘Moods’ feature so you can express your current state of mind. There have been countless improvements, too many to name.
When the Redskins announced that they would be changing the team name, we also decided to go a different direction on several fronts with this huge transition. Obviously, we first adopted the ‘Washington Football Team’ moniker and then ultimately ‘Commanders’ throughout the site. We didn’t want to. We weren’t thrilled to do so. But once those were the team names, adopt them we did. Secondly, we decided that the transition to a new team name gave us an opportunity for a new clean look and new, less Redskins-centric logo. And we also decided to go back to the original black ES background as our default viewing experience (with the option to toggle to a white background) as a tip of the cap to our past.
I am very proud of how our new (and current) logo came about. It was this amazing, organic event in a simple thread where multiple members chimed in and gave feedback on what the new logo might look like. One of our other graphic site gurus, Knightingale (a UK resident and author) came to the rescue this time. Rather than ‘Redskins’ focused (setting aside our personal desires to retain those references), we opted to make our logo ‘Washington’ centric. The background of our logo was the DC flag. We went with bold block letters for ‘BGO’ and used subtle camouflage to highlight the vague military connotations of ‘Commanders’. And we incorporated our origin date in the logo as well. It was a true community effort and the result was a very clean, classy new BGO logo.
In recent years, we have reconstituted our BGO Arcade (although we had to create the Arcade on Wordpress and link it to BGO to accomplish that). We have also birthed a number of active social media sites that, with the help of members Burgundy Burner, Canadian Hog, Chris, Silent Threat, and burgold, let folks know BGO is out here and welcoming new members.
In the years since the team changed the name, we have experienced a lot of change. None of the changes we’ve navigated were as big as the departure of team owner Daniel Snyder. As the allegations surrounding the Snyder tenure and the inevitable truth about what transpired during his era came out, BGO did not stand still. We called for ownership change publicly, loudly, and frequently on our social media pages.
In March of 2021, BGO member Silent Threat approached BGO staff about the possibility of launching a BGO official podcast. Derek was the driving force behind the creation of ‘BGO Blind Pig’ from coming up with the name, format, and purpose of the pod and bringing it to life. Since then, BGO has recorded nearly 200 episodes of the Blind Pig, with core participants Om, Boone, Neophyte, Canadian Hog, Enforcer, and of course Silent Threat (as Emcee) contributing.
During the years 2022-2023, BGO, through site content, and via the BGO Blind Pig Podcast, aggressively pushed for the sale of the team, and advocated for Daniel Snyder and other executive leadership to be held accountable for the hostile and inappropriate work culture that had existed during their tenure. We were proud to host Megan Imbert, who witnessed and gave testimony to a number of these questionable behaviors on BGO Blind Pig, and we were outspoken advocates for change. Many Washington fans either did not want to hear about these topics, or didn’t believe anyone would ever be held accountable for these behaviors, but we were steadfast in our support of the many victims of the Dan Snyder era, and demanded change.
It finally came.
It is a new day for Washington fans. It has been one hell of a journey, both for Washington NFL fans, and for members of our website. New ownership, new coaches, a winning tradition in it’s infancy, and a thriving BGO. Late in 2024 and without warning, the Commanders shut down the ‘official’ Extremeskins messageboard. Many of us at BGO were not surprised and may have some opinions as to why this transpired. As Extremeskins was the original home and love of the folks who began BGO, we have worked hard to make this a welcoming landing spot for our ES brethren.
Thank you to all of our great members who, since 2009, have made this a special place. We hope to remain home to your Burgundy and Gold Obsession for many, many years to come.
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I will say, thru it all, you have been the rock, pretty much since 99. And on top of all that challenges you mentioned, you kept this place going thru the worst of the miserable, losing snyder years when fans had all but abandoned the team. I know you didn't do it alone, but the long term commitment is to be admired.
