Mike

Hardly got a Chance.

I can't say I'm surprised that the Smith/Waggoner money is already spent. I'm fine with that, though.

Wow BG84 jumping in with the pairings. Nice! Ray and I split a double IPA from Foley Brothers in Vermont yesterday after our hockey game ... hops do not pair with sweaty locker rooms. Least enjoyable IPA experience ever.

It's nice to have it organized, but one of our friends is actually an event planner and she did an awesome job recreating everything for us last year. Same bus/hotel/ticket arrangements, but we did it for a group of 52 people for about $230 a person. Basically made enough profit to cover the costs of the trip for the one or two people who planned it.

I don't think it operates anymore, our crew was usually making up about 70% of their attendance annually and we kind of just came to the realization that we can do it for about half the price if we plan it ourselves.

We've evolved beyond what is available at our local liquor stores and now Ray and I have bi-weekly shipments coming in from take your pick of Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa or Vermont. What do you guys think of the Dandy in Calgary? Tried anything there yet? My friend also just brought back some unreal beers from a trip to Calgary, the NE Style IPA from Blindman and Apex Predator from Bench Creek (I think that's what it's called?) Both unreal.

let me see what I can do, we MIGHT have extras. I just sent Ray a text to check.

Doesn't do the whole forum thing anymore, but he's around. Just put his $100 on the Bombers to win the Cup this morning, actually. We're going to be in Regina for the season opener if anyone wants to drink a beer or thirty with us.

We love beer

Re: Sam Hurl I'm sure (hopeful) that the reason he is getting first team reps is because he knows the expectations of the position and can offer up an example to the young guys. Even if he can't execute, he knows the assignments. At least that's what I hope it is.

Follow through on his promises or as an alternative, allow us to follow through on them for him.

What we did was definitely a little more than that, since we created a thread on Ourbombers basically saying we were leaving and that if people wanted to follow us, this was where to find us. What I take issue with is this idea that we "poached" anyone. Maybe for the sake of clarity, it should be mentioned that Colin was almost entirely inactive as a site owner for over three years prior to us doing what we did. The staff was running Ourbombers, without the help of Colin. What we did was make the decision to a run a site we could improve, instead of running one we couldn't. Like I've said multiple times, I respect Colin for the contributions he made to the Bombers fan community. He did a lot of good things over the years and that shouldn't ever be diminished. That being said, I think painting us as "bad guys" for doing what we did shows some unfamiliarity with the situation. Should we have stuck with the guy that was promising us individually for three years that we would get the site upgrades we needed for it to be "functional"? Should we have stuck with the guy who trusted us enough to keep his site running and earning revenue but not enough to grant any of us access to any of the features that would've made our volunteer roles a lot easier? Or if some people think that's maybe a bit too selfish sounding and they wonder "how does that affect us?", should we have stuck with the guy who asked site members to donate in order to cover costs, but then turned around and offered me a monthly "salary" to turn my back on this place and come back to OB because he earned enough money off site revenue to pay me? Colin created an awesome fan community when he created Ourbombers. Whether through life getting in the way or personal choice, he let that site fall by the wayside and we made the decision we did to create something that we thought could be so much better. For someone like TBURGESS to infer that what we did was "unethical" when everything we did, we did as volunteers who earn a combined salary of $0 for the time and effort we put into this is ... at best, poorly thought out and at worst, incredibly stupid.

I'm a bit scared that Hurl is getting reps there too, but part of me is sure it's just to give the new guys an example to watch, since Hurl knows the expectations, even if he can't execute at a high level.

Every single active staff member moved from OB over here at launch. We formed the site together as a group.

Gotta be revisionist history, since Shankman wasn't a moderator at that time.

Curious to hear what you think the alternative would've been. Then again, I suppose I'm really not all that curious because as I've already said, you're just running your mouth without knowing all of the facts. There's lots more that went on than you know. So if you want to paint us in an unflattering light, go right ahead but it's not really at all accurate.

I wouldn't go after Woods. Great player, but injured far too much. Johnny Searsesque.

You're overreacting to the word suspended. It means nothing.

Nailed it.

The best thing for the community was to spread the word as efficiently as possible. With all due respect to Colin on this particular topic, if he had cared about what happened on his website as much as you seem to four years later, maybe none of this would've happened to begin with. Not that I really care what you think. Doing what we did has allowed us to give back to the community. All of the money this site makes goes directly back into things we are very proud of, including charities and prizes for our members. That wasn't the case with Ourbombers and that difference alone makes me feel just fine about what we did and how we did it.

Classic TBURGESS speaking about something he has no idea about.

I like TJ Thorpe but my god is that a bad highlight tape. He was out of bounds on the nicest run he had.

Paging @Geebrr

Oh yeah, one more thing: Happy 4th Anniversary to MorningBigBlue!

I could probably write a book about it if there was a market for books about online forum community nerd stuff. I guess it's a little easier to talk about it more freely now that so much time has passed. I don't harbor any bad feelings towards Colin, because as I've gotten busier with my life, I understand entirely how time can just get away from you. But to keep it short and sweet, basically what happened is that we wanted updates to the forum to allow it to grow, we were continually told they would happen and they never did, we offered to buy the domain and run it ourselves, the offer was refused and eventually, we got tired of putting in 100% of the work on a forum that was severely in need of work we were not permitted to do. I'm sure Colin will tell you the same thing now - he was very proud of OB and he wanted to keep it as "his own" but he just didn't have the time to make it happen. By the end of it all, I'm pretty sure the forum software was so busted over at Ourbombers that we couldn't even approve new registrations. We tried multiple times to buy the domain name from him so that we would have the ability to make the improvements EVERYBODY wanted and still keep the name to show respect to what he had built. Never worked out the way we wanted, so plan B was to form our own site. At that point, it's kind of difficult to say that the intent wasn't to "kill OB" even if that's a little bit dramatic. When you want to build a new house on the same lot, you have to demolish the old one. That's what we did.