New SJ Owner

Hi all,

I'm the new owner of SportsJournalists.com - I heard the previous owner was looking to sell, and after spending some time checking out the community here, liked what I saw, and was able to come to an agreement to purchase the site.

A little about me--I'm not a big company and I have no employees, I'm just a quiet guy with a wife and a two-month old daughter working out of our guest bedroom. This is my second forum, so I'm still getting my feet wet as a forum owner/admin.

My favorite sport is definitely basketball--I'm 6'4" so I've got an advantage there. I ref'd highschool basketball for years, and now play pickup 1-2x a week at the local university--I find the college pickup games are a lot more fun because the younger guys run harder and they aren't constantly fouling.

Straight out of college I interned at TechCrunch, a popular tech blog, and then from there transitioned away from straight writing/blogging into marketing. I started a small agency specializing in Facebook marketing, and among our clients were the Phoenix Suns and the Washington Redskins. We helped the Redskins become the fastest growing FB page in the NFL until they lost three games in a row... no amount of marketing can overcome a losing team.

As far as my plans for this site...

From my initial poking around over the last few weeks, this site seems pretty well run despite little involvment from the previous owner. I've chatted with the mods and skimmed the moderation log to see the decisions they've made. They seem to have a good handle on things without being overly dictatorial and the last thing I want to do is screw that up.

The main thing I'd like to change is switch the forum software over to something more mobile-friendly. 33% of the site visitors are on phones/tablets, and the current theme doesn't have a mobile-friendly layout. I've asked some other forum owners, and the general consensus is that Xenforo is probably the right solution--it's mobile friendly right out of the box. It also provides better built-in spam traps, so that's a nice bonus. If you have feedback on swapping site software, I'm all ears.

Beyond that, I don't have any major changes planned. If you as users have things you'd like to see changed, either technical or site culture, let me know either in this thread or via PM.

I look forward to getting to know the folks around here in the months/years ahead.

Kind Regards,

Jeff

 

Thanks for the warm welcome guys!

 

I strongly agree that it's important to retain reputation/status/seniority markers, and I certainly appreciate where you're coming from--I'd hate it if someone hit reset on my StackOverflow points (a programming community).

What that would specifically look like though I'm not sure because there's a couple of options on that front, and I haven't spent much time thinking about the specifics.

Xenforo by default does it slightly differently than SMF (the current software). SMF uses a basic user title system based on post count, whereas Xenforo by default uses a points system that is very customizable and flexible: https://xenforo.com/help/trophies/ If you have ideas of things you'd like to see titles/trophies for let me know. I don't want to go overboard, but I do think there's room for more in addition to post-count.

I'm mostly inclined to first migrate the board and then figure out the user title system--I'm not very good at thinking about more than one topic at a time, and right now my brain is full of Nginx, MariaDB, and other server admin stuff because I'm also planning to switch to a different hosting company when I do the migration.

User titles would be one of the immediate priorities once the migration was finished.