I think enough of us have enough email addresses and messanger tags to reconnect, but where would we go? I started thinking about it and one thought lead to another and I got to thinking, why don't we start our own message board, throw a few articles on it, put a couple ads, maybe pay for FIDO or even create a prize pool?

just a thought, we've got the resources for it

Not a bad idea. I wouldn't mind writing an article or two every now and again, and with as many people as we have here, we could probably get content on a regular basis without making anybody very busy.

Hell, with with Ravage's affinity for posting news, we could probably start a full website and not be very far behind the curve.

I know this has been talked about before between at least 3 of us. I think part of the reason it wasn't mentioned much after was in part because we all think we're pretty good and everything and would have a hard time dividing the labor.

Can you imagine one of us doing trying to get rankings that are agreed upon by at least the majority of us? Unfortunately even though there is much talent among us there isn't much agreement.

quote:

Originally posted by ravage:
I know this has been talked about before between at least 3 of us. I think part of the reason it wasn't mentioned much after was in part because we all think we're pretty good and everything and would have a hard time dividing the labor.

Can you imagine one of us doing trying to get rankings that are agreed upon by at least the majority of us? Unfortunately even though there is much talent among us there isn't much agreement.

Wouldn't need to be agreement. Each contributor would have their own rankings and then there would just be an aggregate average. That's how other places do it.

That happened last off-season. The link to the message board didn't work and "fantasyinsights" was some individual league's website. I recall it was like that for a day or so until it got sorted out. I thought it was over and, at the time, didn't have many email addresses.

Let me know. I'm game.

quote:

Originally posted by gianmarco:

quote:

Originally posted by ravage:
I know this has been talked about before between at least 3 of us. I think part of the reason it wasn't mentioned much after was in part because we all think we're pretty good and everything and would have a hard time dividing the labor.

Can you imagine one of us doing trying to get rankings that are agreed upon by at least the majority of us? Unfortunately even though there is much talent among us there isn't much agreement.

Wouldn't need to be agreement. Each contributor would have their own rankings and then there would just be an aggregate average. That's how other places do it.

Yep. Would actually be better to do it this way than to come up with a single common cheat sheet imo.

Not that I have a lot of time, but I could find enough... Seeing as you are a moderator here Ten, perhaps you have some inside info?

I've thought of that a few time myself. The biggest hurdle would be getting someone to organize it and set up a web site.
I could get us some free space to host it.

Also, someone would have to proof read anything I wrote.

It would be fun for anyone that enjoys writing articles and things of that nature. I think easily there are enough of us to contribute and with the vast opinions it only makes things more interesting.

If we did it, we could host an over 40 women's tournament to garner up some more interest

I think the biggest obstacle is funding for domain names and software for the board and then time to put it all together from design to updates. Most sites have some form of sponsorship no? Just stuff to think about. I would definitely like to be a part of it if it ever were to happen.

Well I've been thinking about this a bit lately and this is what I think we should do. Let's make 2 lists, list 1 is what this kind of site would require, list 2 is what each of us can offer to the site. Would help us find out if we are capable.

Also I was thinking, it might be cool to make it more open source than traditional fantasy websites are. Allow anybody to submit a front page article (that would be reviewed by us and submitted). I mean everybody's got an opinion, why not give the common man a chance to play the role of fantasy expert in a forum other than a message board?

I think the one thing that we all need to remember is that a site will take a lot of time. Maybe more time than some are willing to give.

I would think that some kind of new content should be happening almost everyday and everyday during the season.

What happens when there are 2-3 guys who seem to contributing all of the content and the remaining 4-5 do something once in a while.

These things take a lot of time and some money for those who run them and want to run them correctly. If the work doesn't go into it, it's just another site among many thousands on the web.

quote:

Originally posted by ravage:
I think the one thing that we all need to remember is that a site will take a lot of time. Maybe more time than some are willing to give.

I would think that some kind of new content should be happening almost everyday and everyday during the season.

What happens when there are 2-3 guys who seem to contributing all of the content and the remaining 4-5 do something once in a while.

These things take a lot of time and some money for those who run them and want to run them correctly. If the work doesn't go into it, it's just another site among many thousands on the web.

Agreed. It's like running a small business, a lot of overtime, except that it doesn't really generate any income. It'd have to be a labor of love, not something we are doing to make money. It's tough, I remember I would do a weekly email for my hometown league where I predicted the result of each fantasy matchup, going into detail on key matchups and what not, and before the end of the season it became more like a chore and not as fun as it was when I started out.

1 well thought out article per week might be more than most of us are willing to take on. And I can see us having a problem during the season where we simply don't have enough people to watch every football game and can't give the kind of in-season coverage people want to see.

The costs involved with the domain itself are minimal. The web I host I use is very inexpensive and I recommend it highly. I have used others which were slow or always seemed to have space issues. I have been with my current provider for a little over a year and have exactly zero issues. Most others exhibited problems within the first couple of weeks.

As to forum software...I would have to investigate that. There may be something pretty solid which is open source.

Once the basic format is in place, the bulk of the time ends up being articles and information. From the beginning, a decision would need to be made regarding the goal of the site.

I believe incorporating a news feed would be a bad idea. With any number of other sites with the resources to do it, anything we would attempt in that regard would be little more than duplication.

Obviously there would be a desire to have forums.

As to the rest of the content, it would need to be something we could manage. I have no problem with there being regular contributors and part-timers. But I think expectations would need to be in place at the beginning. One hurdle we start right out with is what each of our backgrounds/experience are...I don't imagine that everyone here has web site experience.

And the last thing on my mind at the moment is that we would not want to be just a place of regurgitating what everyone else is already doing. There are a lot of sources on the web right now... Perhaps this simply becomes a site of collaboration and not end-user based? Difficult to say. Planning is everything. We need something manageable and useful. Otherwise we'd be spinning our wheels on a project which does nothing more than waste our time.

quote:

Originally posted by Skip:
And the last thing on my mind at the moment is that we would not want to be just a place of regurgitating what everyone else is already doing. There are a lot of sources on the web right now... Perhaps this simply becomes a site of collaboration and not end-user based? Difficult to say. Planning is everything. We need something manageable and useful. Otherwise we'd be spinning our wheels on a project which does nothing more than waste our time.

A while back I used to instigate player debates where I would assign 2 FI members a player and a side, and they would go back and forth with fact driven rebuttals. It was a successful way to produce concrete positive and negative statistical analysis on a player and let the reader make his own judgement based on the facts, but it took time and we really only hit the most controversial players, not nearly every player. I would definetly want this to be a part of the new site, in fact I think that along with the cheatsheets it would be our best feature and something we should devote a lot of our time to.

For articles I was thinking maybe we are all assigned 1 day per week, or bi-weekly, based on our schedules, and work to have an article produced and submitted on that day. We could have dialogue once a week to discuss who is doing what kind of article to make sure we don't have 2 people doing the same thing. Maybe we make it one person's job to scour the internet to find out what kind of information is out there, what isn't, what people want to see, and what people don't, an editor/marketing type guy.

Glass and Rav would obviously be in charge of our NFL draft substance and we could throw Gian in to add some analysis on dynasty impact. Speaking of Gian, how about an article on the art of trading? But I'm getting ahead of myself with what roles everybody would fill.

IDP- this seems like something that could take up a lot of time and wouldn't be useful to many people, so maybe we should avoid it, that would be my vote. At the same time if we excel at IDP it could be something that sets us apart. I don't know jack about IDP and don't care for it personally but maybe one of you has a passion for it that we should be using.

I think there are plenty of us willing to contribute to spread the tasks out, but I agree with Skip on trying to find a focus at least initially and then maybe gradually adding things. After a season, we also would find out who really wants to be an "involved" contributor and who just doesn't want to wast the time.

I think we would have a good contrast of views and ideas to help make it interesting and who knows maybe we at least find away to cover the maintenance costs eventually.


As Skip and I discussed briefly, within our small circle I don't see any of the technical issues being much of a battle with at least Glass, Skip, and I all being in the IT field.

Ten, I know that Sportsline does the player debates on their site as well, but they don't do a very good job at it. They do one debate per week during the season.

I've also even thought about trying to get a couple of people together to setup a weekly or bi-weekly internet radio talk show on blogtalkradio.com. It could be another forum to drive traffic to the site if we really did succeed in getting something running one day.

If this is going to be done these are a couple of the things I would like to see.

There are a lot more dynasty leagues in the last few years and having a section devoted to the dynasty format would be a big plus I think.

New articles at least every other day, especially in the offseason. The offseason is when you will gain members, along with just as the season starts. I don't think they have to even be long just as long as something new is there to look at. I also like the idea that someone had of allowing "regular people" to submit articles to be posted as well.

As far as daily news goes I agree with Skip there are several places to find that, making whatever we did just a carbon copy. Maybe having links to a couple of places would be a good idea though. That way they'd be able to come to us to their way to other sites. It may increase the traffic.

I like the Ten's idea of player debates. That, of course, would be part of the articles. Or maybe not part of them but it would be counted as new content.

Rankings for both dynasty and redraft/shallow keepers.

I'm sure I will think of more.

I like Rav's idea about the dynasty section, especially now that fantasy football is becoming more of a year round event.

One thing we would definitely need is a small team of editors. We would want everything going out as clean as possible as it concerns to grammar and spelling that is.

A couple thoughts on logistics.

Domains are cheap, and my company where I work hosts hundreds of sites. I can control DNS and space for free. So this could be done at a minimal cost as long as someone is willing to do the development work on the site.
If you want an open source solution with the ability for anyone to add content, or even selective people, then a wiki page is the way to go. I've setup mediawiki servers in just a few hours including the OS. It's the same software that runs wikipedia so you know it's stable. The catch with that route is you need a dedicated server to do it.