Posted by just4me on 6/15/2012 11:11:00 AM (view original):
Can't believe I missed this last night! It almost felt like the old days, three pages added in mere minutes...
How can we forget guys like david_brent and ozjohnno... or personal nemesis' leaffan10 and allsox, didn't matter the league I was always losing to one of those two in the playoffs/WS, or they were in my division keeping me out the playoffs.
Theme leagues would fill in hours and we even had special forums created off-site to socialize even more...
Or how about wissearch.net aec gave us advanced search options before WIS understood the need for them, and the guys that utilized it were at a huge advantage as WIS used normalization in its engine, but not its pricing, so bargains were everywhere and wissearch was the easiest way to find them. Still had search and team building functionality that WIS lacks and I wish it was still around.
Frazz may be right, the advancement of mobile phone computing, has slowed down things here, but I think it's more economic, 2004-2006 was a decent boom and now we're in the bust phase... not enough money to go around and alot of the characters (and the site's character) have moved on. Another bunch (jasonbbq, arlenwilliam, jsturgiss86, etc...) have all moved over to HBD, and rarely venture back...
oz was great and leaffan was certianly a HOF. jsturgis was a great owner as well. I followed those guys to HBD and tried hard to get them back on this side when I found HBD wasn't my cup of tea. Too bad as they were awesome owners. My personnal nemesis was newarkwilder. He OWNED me every single postseason. I don't think I ever beat him in the postseason.
wissearch was great, but I had tons of sites bookmarked that had AL/NL season batting averages, baseballreference.com was up every hour on my computer and we still were behind those guys. I still use BBR a lot, but not as much as I did back then.
The theme leagues back then were insta-fill, and waiting lists were everywhere. Everyone had such good ideas and every league was competitive. I second the cash aspect. WIS raised the prices from $9.95 a team to $12.95 and six packs went up, so that curbed my teams a bit. But all in all, it seems like HBD took a big part of the SLB base and it never really refilled.