@nickers said:
I would just say if your gonna choose moderators.. Choose them fairly.. by that I mean people who are on both sides of the Aisle.. Not all on one side... This can be done collectively.

Yea that's not a problem. @dutch-oven @westside-steve may have personal differences but they are both global moderators of every topic because I trust their judgement. Among @hoorta @ibleedbrown @flugel @mld-woody I either have met them personally and trust their judgements or they helped the transition and I've interacted with them for a long time. @calfoxwc may have vastly different opinions than myself but he's a true browns fan and regular so he has my respect completely.

I'm not going to run a circus or host conspiracy theories or dox people or do anything that's going to put me on a watch list. I trust the moderator group to be fair and unbiased based on the terms I set. I don't care if you insult each other and fight do whatever as long as it doesn't cross boundaries of getting too personal, etc. The terms are set and that's how it is.

Like I said, I don't really care. Just stick to the basic decency guidelines and you can swear at each other and still fight all you want. Just don't make threats, post illegal content, or dox people.

And Zombo I have no idea what the hell happened with that, he's also someone I respect a lot and I hope he becomes an active member again. Also someone I have met personally

@MLD-Woody said:
Great job, sir. Good riddance to the poli board. Happy to mod again if needed

Made you a mod

@nickers said:
Nice job on the reboot... However I will state... It was rather weak not to include the poliboard. You yourself didn't have to engage in it... At any rate... the site looks nice.. Go Browns...

I like the idea of it, and i'm not adverse to differing opinions and discussions. But regardless now I may be held responsible for what people post here (even though the ToS says I'm not, you never know how the law might interpret things). Leaving it archived is even questionable for me. It seems completely unmoderated to me at this point, there's doxxing and hateful remarks and various things that I'm not comfortable hosting.

Maybe if the moderator group proves they can adequately moderate the rest of the board I'd be open to re-opening a political board, but I can't allow anything that's very gray or 4chan-like that might get my servers flagged for anything malicious.

https://x.com/tjRT9s/status/2105439287843926351

I am deploying a fix for link detection

And as soon as I got a snapshot of the data I shut the board off as soon as I could, sorry about that. The reason is because any posts or messages that happened after the snapshot time would have been lost. So it was better to shut things down ASAP rather than let it keep running on invision.

So some posts, more recent ones, got lost. But only within a few hour window hopefully.

Disagree with each other blah blah. I'm sure there'll be problems and growing pains but I had to get this thing out before the Thursday game. Enjoy

Hi,

After successful coordination with Invision, @westside-steve , and @atenears widow the browns board, its data, and domains has been completely transferred to me. There are no doubts about who controls the data, domain, renewals, or anything anymore - it's me. Everything is completely off of invision's cloud service, the domain(s) are owned by me. I don't intend to keep a monopoly or make a profit or anything, I just wanted to keep the community alive in a sustainable way.

No more Invision

I had no intention to continue paying Invision's cloud service, nothing wrong with their business model - they have questionably raised prices by 300% in only a few years and things. But their target is someone who isn't tech savvy and can't manage things on their own (that isn't me)

The new forum is hosted in my own infrastructure, and using NodeBB . It's relatively similar in UI, I created some custom plugins, and used some existing plugins. It is an entirely different software but the data has been migrated. Old passwords will work, etc. (I could prove this with my OWN plain text password against the hash algorithm, to prove it worked) - neither I or invision has access to your actual passwords. They are one-way hash algorithms that can't be ran in reverse. But since I knew my own brownsboard password, I could test the one way (my password to the hashed version) to confirm the invision algorithm (which is just a basic bcrypt)

Nothing against invision - pricing doesnt make sense for someone like me.

In Memoriam

I archived some user accounts and gave them badges "In Memoriam" - this refers to some of the late great members who have passed away. Including the original board's founder @atenears, and other great contributors like @mjp28 @tour2ma @the-gipper . It's a small way to honor them, and my interactions with them on here is the main reason I pushed to keep the board alive.

If I missed anyone and I'm sure I did, let me know. Not intentional, I'm not the most active daily member so I only have a small memory.

Automatic Gameday Threads and Chat Rooms

A plugin I wrote for NodeBB will automatically make game day threads 1H before the game with the line, and keep it updated. Injury reports all that stuff. It will then close it after games for a post-game thread, and so forth. It will archive game day threads and make them read-only afterwards.

Moderators: There are None (yet)

I was not an admin or moderator of the previous browns board, so I had no insights into who was active or previously a moderator. I didn't migrate anybodys permissions or anything. I will make some members moderators just by default e.g. @westside-steve and @hoorta

But please help. I am happy to maintain the cost and burdens and backups. I don't want to be a moderator or police users on the forum. So I'm really hoping that other people can pick up the job of being the general police force to keep things on topic and inline.

I'm not that strict personally - I don't care if you talk about your frustration with Airbnb in the game day thread, but anything illegal or threatening will be an immediate ban and reported to the authorities - if it's perceived as a dangerous threat to another member of the board or society in general.

Political Board: It's Archived and Read Only

I don't care about your political opinions, I have my own. I don't care what you think politically. Political content is too sensitive for me to host on my own servers, so I do not want to open the political board again.

Steelers Week

I just received ownership of the board this morning, and I worked all day basically to hurry up and get this thing up because I realized it's a Thursday night game. And not having a browns board running for the first place battle is pretty crazy.

There will be bugs and issues, report them to me in private. I really wanted a few days to audit things and go over it all, but I didn't get a chance given the Thursday night game.

Zombo

I don't know what drama or things happened with zombo in the past, I met him once along with hoorta and others. I like him, I have his old account ready to be re-activated and assigned a new email if necessary so we can return to This week in the AFCN (hopefully)

Idk the drama, but I assume its nonsense - so I hope he comes back as a regular.

New Members

I have cloudflare turnstile and some other things active to prevent spam as a starting point. It's a baseline, I dont want to gatekeep new members too hard but also dont want to allow easy spam. So we may have to fine tune a balance over time based on how things progress.

Backups

I have backups for the board running completely automated backed up to Cloudflare R2 - both with wal-g (postgres) and daily snapshots kept up to 30 days. So we're good, in the case something goes wrong or whatever.

New Domain (brownsboard.com)

In my acquisition I learned that Stan/Kathy owned not only thebrownsboard.com but also brownsboard.com. I took ownership of both, and made brownsboard.com the default. thebrownsboard.com redirects to this one. I think its nicer to type less and it also works out so I was able to test things without people finding the link.

Tl;Dr

I don't expect to make a profit, I don't expect to gain anything. I just like this community and interacted with some great (some deceased) people here and wanted to keep the history and the board alive.

@ibleedbrown said:

I imagine this is an outside the box hassle for them, as it probably is for you, Steve and Kathy.

Is there value in pooling money to renew before the deadline for the sake of continuity? Then you have another year to sort out the 1s and 0s.

I don't feel bad for invision, it's their job after all and theyve been paid reliably for many years at this point. Kathy I feel bad for she has a lot going on but she insists she wants to help, and myself I also have a lot going on (new baby) but I have no problem taking over I just need the data dump. I run like 5 bajillion projects on the side already so no problem to take one more.

Even if it goes past the date of the renewal relapse, we can still bring the board back. I'm pretty confident we'll get the database dump from invision eventually - they just arent being very responsive about it.

@texasag1969 said:

So where are we on this and what was the name of that alternative Browns message Board in case this just can't be saved?

Trying to get invision to respond to requests for the data, Kathy has to get her estate paperwork and things. Hopefully happens, I'll keep harassing invision about it they didnt respond to the first inquiries from her

@browns149 said:

How Long is the delay going to be?

Weather is terrible right now in Tampa, and the forecast shows it as being terrible until 8pm or something crazy. But it's Florida so it can change quickly

@the-cysko-kid said:

He looks minimally competent like you would expect from an average quarterback in the league.

Id say above average, especially in the second half so far.

Watson actually looks pretty good today, as much as people will dislike it.

I don't think the board should proceed like it is now, in that I agree with Steve. It's in a limbo half operational state because nobody can fully control it or access its controls or access the data. Just paying the bill won't change that.

We have a promising path forward with invision saying theyll release the data to the late Stan's widow, though I feel bad for taking any of her time for having to deal with this - hopefully the people at invision make it painless and simple.

In my perfect world, invision gives a database dump to Kathy without much back and forth, she forwards it to me. Sends me the godaddy credentials and she never has to hear about this place ever again.

Then I'll spend some migrating the board to NodeBB or Discourse (havent decided yet), souping it up with live gameday chats and things again, and re-launch it and we'll be happily ever after talking about mock drafts hopefully.

@the-cysko-kid said:

I think...and forgive me for how this is going to sound...maybe someone with a little bit of technical knowledge should get involved here.

Steve wants to unload the board. Steve is a musician not a technician. To keep it with it's accumulated database of posts somebody needs to contact these invision guys and get the real skinny what we need. Im the service manager of a good sized company so im used to dealing with this sort of thing. I dont have the infrastructure to host but I'd be happy to serve as a liason with these guys to clear it up.

I'm in contact with Steve and Kathy and Flugel and invision and basically everybody else relevant so we're working on it.

Invision won't give up the data to anybody for legal reasons, except potentially the person who was left Stan's estate - so Kathy reached out to invision to request a backup copy of the data so we'll see how that works out.

I can write scripts and stuff to scrape the board of all of its data if it doesnt work out, but the gap would be knowing everybody's email address to retain the accounts (who owns what username, etc)

I don't think Sanders will be fun to watch at all, QBs that hold the ball for 20 years usually aren't.

But, watson has no future with the team whatsoever so playing him doesn't really make sense

@tinythinker said:

I wonder if any other fan-bases have declared that hope for the season is over in the first half of game one...?

I was thinking, "Maybe the Jets?", but they are up 7-3 over Tennessee

I think the browns fanbase had declared that hope was over in pre season game 1

Time to get the mock drafts started

I have no idea the situation with invision or the domain or anything, but all I need is the data dump and the domain name.

So much great history here I'd like to preserve it - especially posts from the late greats like gipper, tour2ma, mjp.

If you wanna coordinate with me on whatever, figuring out how to get the data from invision (I assume if someone is paying for it there's a login or something), similar for the domain (I assume someone is also paying for the renewal there). You can DM me, I'll coordinate on a call/zoom/text/email whatever.

(not interested in starting a new board without any of the history or posts since that's pointless)

I expect that if I email invision and say "hey can I take over thebrownsboard.com and get access to all of the data" they probably will say no, obviously.

I'm just confused by the process here. I assume you? or somebody has an account with invision and some registrar for the domain (godaddy, porkbun, cloudflare, whatever). And someone will have to coordinate with me to transfer the domain, and let me access the invision account so I can export the database (or just export the database and put it on gdrive or somewhere I can access it).

But as much as I wanna take over, I cant just reach out to invision and demand it otherwise I could hijack any invision board just by sending them an email.

@westside-steve said:

BB you can do whatever you like. As I've explained before the actual bronze board that we are talking about doing the we are in right now is part of a package deal with in vision. Part of their fee is hosting. If you'd like to put something up on your site similar to the screenshot you posted that's great. Anyone who keeps the format we are using now will need to talk to the people at Invision and will be issued a verification code.

That code died with stan. Kathy has no idea what it is I have no idea what it is zombo has no idea what it is. Best wishes WSS

I just need access to the code/hosting, whatever that is - invision community credentials to login. As well as ownership of the domain (thebrownsboard.com) - I would want to preserve the history, accounts, and data and not start something new