First anniversary of Roughing After The Whistle

Online message boards have a bad reputation.

They're known as cesspits inhabited by trolls, with endless flaming matches and general nastiness. And some of them are that way. But there are also many interesting message boards full of interesting people.

In 2005, right after the NHL lockout ended, I stumbled across the message board at Sportsnet.ca. It became a regular stop for me when I was online. I loved talking to other hockey fans about the day's scores and news.

You see, for a hardcore hockey fan who knows every player and what they had for breakfast, talking to the people around you just isn't enough. When you're talking to people who aren't as knowledgeable about the game as you, you're not really getting your fix of conversation.

Which is why there are successful hockey message boards. They offer a chance to talk with hundreds of other people who are just as hardcore as you. The kind of people who can have a 10-page conversation about a player's Corsi.

Anyway, the Sportsnet boards were around for over a decade, and many of the long-term posters there became a family of sorts. They felt like they knew each other from all those years of talking about hockey. They got to know each others' opinions on things. And when I say family, I mean people helped each other out, on and off the board. I could name a number of times when a poster helped another with something in real life. And people grew comfortable with talking about their own problems in the off topic area. Hell, that community was a great comfort for me when I was dealing with severe depression.

Long story short, after a number of issues, Sportsnet shut down its boards a year ago. I didn't want to lose the tight-knit community we had, and others also expressed that feeling. So I created a new message board called Roughing After The Whistle.

My expectations at first were to get maybe, at most, 50 members. I thought it would be a very small group. Instead, it took off like a rocket and within a week we had 200 members. That eventually grew to nearly 600.

Although the web address was different, the community was the same. It's a pretty close group which has gotten to know each other over the years, so there really isn't a lot of nastiness. We have a lot of thoughtful, insightful members. That's not to say there isn't passion and civil argument. There's lots of that, whether it's about hockey, politics or other issues of the day.

We recently (last month) moved to a brand new website. Our previous one was hosted by FreeForums, and I had whipped it together in 10 minutes, basically. After a while, we started dealing with a lot of garbage from FreeForums - tons of ads, including porn ads and redirects, and a lot of issues with functionality. There were frequent outages and not only did they not have an explanation, they didn't even know it was happening. Support was woeful to say the least.

Over the last few months, I've been working with our other administrator to create our new site, which is located here. He did the vast majority of the work, as I don't know much about web design. We're thrilled with the end result and while our membership list has taken a bit of a hit, due to some not making it over yet, it will be a great home for us for years to come.

The task now is to grow the membership. While I realize it will be extremely hard, my goal is to eventually have representation from every fan base in the NHL. Right now we have forums for all Canadian teams, as well as recently opened boards for Boston and Chicago. That's to go along with boards for baseball, football, basketball, other sports, off topic, etc.

It's crazy to think of all the things that have happened in my life since I began interacting with this online community. When I found the Sportsnet board, I was in my second year of university. Since then I've graduated with honours, moved to Saskatchewan and am now working my second job in my dream field. I've also suffered a massive loss in the family and survived life-threatening depression.

I don't know how long RATW will last. Sportsnet was constantly getting new members because their forums were linked from their home page. We don't have anything like that to bring in new members consistently, so we have to work hard to advertise and use social media. Some people gradually stop visiting for a variety of reasons, so we need to work at replacing those members with new ones in order to sustain the site long term.

Here's hoping there are many more anniversaries.

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P.S. I am going to start blogging regularly. Promise! At least one new post a day.