Has Bill Archer finally gone mad?

I was not a matchnight person.

And as for that link, seeing Zak talk about Jesus in the first reply was as far as I needed to read.

 

Did matchnight have a political thread? Those are always fun.

 

I think I was a member of Matchnight for about 5 minutes before it went away. I looked at emails and it said I joined in Oct 06 and then shortly thereafter came over to BigSoccer.

 

i was on matchnight before here. cant remember the user name i had.

 

There was an off-topic forum which took on a strong political flavor. IIRC, this was around the time of the 2004 election. After a political sub-forum was created, a lot of people had already been chased off by the political stuff and the off-topic forum never really recovered.

After that, the other teams' forums disappeared (MN was sort of an "umbrella site" for a lot of sites run by fans of various MLS teams) and then it closed after that.

TheCrew.com was run by a few fans before the FO took it over. After the FO took it over, they started SoccerCapitalNews, which was Crew soccer and some occasional other Ohio soccer.

Those were the days when the fan-run website would have match stats up within MINUTES of a match and you'd have to wait an hour or more for details on the official site.

ThirdDegree.net was, and still is, the FC Dallas site.

WizardsFan.com was the KC site in the same vein as CrewFan.com once was. (The original idea was to have TeamFan.com sites for the entire league.)

MetroFan.com was the NY site which was part of BigSoccer's umbrella... After they fell out of favor with BigSoccer, they took up MetroFanatic.com. Oddly enough, they were partnered with another site that fell out of favor wtih BigSoccer.


Read BigSoccer's history here.

What they don't say is that when BS made the decision to jump from strictly USA soccer into a global soccer site, the people running CrewFan.com made the decision to split. I think a few other sites joined them, which is how MN was created. You'd go to the website CrewFan.com, but it would be SoccerBoards' forum with a huge black CrewFan.com.

Of course, that was all in the days when UltimateBulletinBoard was considered the top dog.


----


BTW.. I'm sure more than a few of you remember the version of TheCrew.com that was run by that modular trailer outfit somewhere in the Carolinas and was constantly crashing? I remember at least one game when all mentions of the website were omitted due to previously-said crashes.

 

Nope. Although he's been around longer than I remembered. This thread is pure win.

https://www.bigsoccer.com/community/threads/so-what-happened.241129/

The earliest posts on the NSR forum are an absolute gold mine.

 

Lol that thread is funny but a year before my time. But remember, he did come up with the name nordecke.

 

He ended up coming back to the site, didn't he?

 

He ended up coming back with the SN of "Beyond the Normal." Now, normally this isn't cause for alarm, but I bought a shirt the other day from Ultras.com and inside the collar it says "Beyond the Normal." Coincidence, or has he finally found his niche?

 

Apparently, he's back again? I guess it's the "if you don't remember your password, start a new sock" idea?

MLS Reserves & USL Pro Merger (CLB)

 

Do I recall correctly that for a while it was an automatic red card just for mentioning, let alone linking, to that site?

As I recall, that was what finally killed it. Supposedly the upside was that the guy down there would host the site for like 50 cents a month or something, which they jumped on.

Unfortunately it was only up sometimes for a couple hours a day, and if it went down any time after 5 you knew it wouldn't be back up until mid-morning because the guy had gone home, or was stoned or something.

 

I'm not sure about that. I do know onionbag.com was censored for a while.

The other joke about that rendition of the site was the splash page which was not much more other that cartoonish version of Crew Cat which looked like it was drawn by a ten-year-old. Oh, how I'm glad splash pages fell out of favor.

That was also when websites would take time to "propagate" or whatever. You'd get one version of the website at home and the other one at work.

Anyone remember CrewISP.com? Yes folks, the Crew actually had their own ISP! It was dial-up, right around the time when RoadRunner had 6Mbps and no other speeds. I couldn't imagine more than ten people actually had it.

 

After the website went away, I had it timed exactly to grab the crewfan.com address.

Somehow, Matt Bernhart got in ahead of me and stole it but I don't know that he ever did anything with it. No idea who owns it now.

 

For a while, it went straight to the MN forums. After that was when Shane, Sirk, Lee, and Matt had the official site in conjunction with SoccerCapitalNews. I know Fellrath was involved with the site for a while as well, but I'm not sure how. There was also an "Al Burzynski" or something like that who was transferred to another position within the other company, but that was a long, long time ago when that group first came together.

I want to say Shane was the original website guy as far back as 1996, but I could be mistaken with that.

Now, CrewFan.com appears to go nowhere. FWIW, CrewFan.com was, at one point, an entirely different site. Matt was a CrewFan.com guy until that site went under. After that, he became a thecrew.com guy.

That era from 1998-2004 (dates approx) were good times with the Crew fan sites. Two cars to DC constituted a road trip. It's all one of those "you really have a different appreciation for the present if you weren't around in the past" situations.

Sirk You have anything to say about this?


The other one was when a group of about 20-45 (perhaps not even that many) went to DC and the user insisted, ABSOLUTELY INSISTED that EACH Crew fan sit in their EXACT seat. Yes, there were about 41,262,801,683 seats in the upper level of RFK, but the usher said that EACH PERSON of about 20-45 people sit in their EXACT TICKETED seat.

 

What happened to Bernhart and Brian Woden?

 

Bernhardt moved to Boston late last year. He's still following the team and writes for Examiner and Massive Report occasionally.

 

I wish I could remember the site I was on pre-BS. I was living in North Carolina at the time, WC '98 was starting and, hot damn, I got a job at Duke with little oversight and a computer with a nice internet connection. Was there a CBS discussion board site? That sounds vaguely familiar. Anyway, for reasons I can't recall (perhaps the previous site going under), I wound up on BS in 2000.

 

Hey Peter, can you write my unofficial obituary on here when the time comes? Don't worry so much about the facts.

 

Ahh, memories.

My very first online articles appeared on CrewFan.com in the fall of 1998. I had been covering the team (poorly, I imagine) for a magazine called The Michigan Soccer News, but CrewFan was my first foray into online writing. For a few exciting months it was me, Bernhardt, Chuck Pearson, Kevin Cabral, and Andreas Stanescu. Lots of fun arguments there. Good times.

I then left to start my illustrious and long running 'zine, The Foreman's Soccer Journal. It was like Pictures of Chairman Mao, except shitty. Chris Gallutia (who, along with Mike Cornell, would join CrewFan as I was leaving) and Bob Morgan were my two subscribers. I probably still owe them a couple bucks since the zine lasted all of three money-torching issues before I moved on to TheCrew.com the first time around, in the middle of 1999. [BTW, I still have craploads of those zines in a box....maybe I could recoup my losses now after letting them "appreciate" for 14 years. Haha.]

When I first joined TheCrew.com, it was Shane Murphy and Al Burzynski, who had started doing the official site in 1997. They had also done the official site for the Columbus Quest. I only did a few things for TheCrew.com in 1999. For 2000, we added Jamie Fellrath. And that was the year that the Notebook debuted. It really debuted in the season opening 5-1 loss at Tampa, but the first time it was officially dubbed the Notebook was the following week when Warzycha scored the golden goal free kick vs. San Jose. Bernhardt joined us from CrewFan at some point, but I can't remember exactly when. I had a ton of fun during that era of TheCrew.com.

Starting in 2002 or so, TheCrew.com became part of the Matchnight network. In retrospect, it's kind of hilarious that a team's official site was part of this cobbled together network of fan sites.

After 2003, the league took over all of the team websites, so Shane and Lee and company started Soccer Capital News to take its place in the Matchnight network. I think it was around that time when the Matchnight / Big Soccer Crew War was at full boil. I blame Bill Archer From Big Soccer for being a mean meanieface.

And then it was around 2005 that Rich Fidler launched his perpetual beta of Hunt Park Insider. When Lee pulled the plug on Matchnight after 2006, I jumped over to HPI for 2007... although when football season rolled around, I focused mostly on my Browns writing and pretty much ignored the final two months of Crew season.

At that point, I was burnt out on Crew stuff and decided I wanted to write about other things. I had all but decided I was going to sit out the 2008 season and just watch as an unencumbered fan while I did something else with my summer..... and then Dave Stephany talked me into re-joining TheCrew.com for 2008. I went to lunch determined to decline the offer, but it was hard to say no to Dave's face because he's such a nice guy, so I found myself saying yes even though I didn't really mean it.

What a life-altering phone call and lunch meeting that turned out to be.

And then Massive Report came along to fill the void as the primary unofficial site, previously held by the likes of CrewFan, Soccer Capital News, and Hunt Park Insider. And there are also terrific Crew-related blogs today like MassiveCityFFC and Helltown Beer. And, of course, Bill Archer From Big Soccer still writes mean meanieface things on his Big Soccer blog. (Jack Warner, like Dorothy Mantooth, is a SAINT!)

Oh, and two footnotes:

1. The Foreman's Soccer Journal was the second Crew 'zine, following Bernhardt's "Timesheet."

2. A Massive Season was the second Crew book, following Chris Gallutia's "Addicted to Black & Gold", which chronicled the 1997 season through the eyes of a new fan.

So, um, yeah. There's my Krypto-esque ramble while stumbling down memory lane.

 

If there's an "original and most real Crew fan" it's probably either Bernhardt or Cabral. As far as I'm concerned, those two really got the fan/supporters ball rolling and it all snowballed from there. True, everyone after them did their own fair share (and probably more), but those two are the cornerstones.

Kevin Cabral, Chris Gallutia, and Andreas Stansecu are all fan legends. Dave Han and Chuck Pearson are in there too.

I'd love to have a time machine for that era of Crewfan-dom.

 

Is that for when you, Mister Zipsix, die or is that for when BS has driven you so mad that you can no longer post on here?

 

Cabral was so far ahead of his time it was almost annoying

 

The era of the printed "fanzine" was a brief but glorious one. I think Andy Mead's "Emerald City Gazette" probably lasted the longest, but "Pictures of Chairman Mao" is still the greatest name ever.

All time stupidest was "Bazaar Times" (the Clash) , and Dallas' "Burning Sensations" was just disturbing.

 

Small wonder that didn't make it with anyone . . . anyhow.