Ralph's Rag

A sad end came to the #1 national FCS messageboard community today. A group of over 14,000 members helped revolutionize and galvinate a disparate clan of people who came together for one reason only, to chat about the highest level of NCAA championship football.

AnyGivenSaturday.com locked its domain.

Yesterday the stat totals read:
Threads: 65,864, Posts: 1,482,456, Members: 14,114

Now nothing but silence.

Remembering how it grew from the I-AA days in the early years of the 2000's to become a site that had over 8,000 people crashing its servers on this past selection Sunday leaves members like me with a lot of memories.

You see, I was the domain name holder until last year. I was there at the very beginning along with a small set of others when we embarked on the journey that would coincide with and encourage the growth of our favorite brand of football.

Rather quickly the membership increased, bringing along with it a good bunch of football fanatics and the usual group of pranksters and no-goods. But AGS kept going.

A Board of Directors was established among oldtimers which recruited moderators and help run what was already the largest and busiest national FCS community. Soon the AGS Poll was created, a poll that would never be outperformed by any other. There were contests and auctions of cool FCS stuff, and a general camaraderie amongst members. Even on the hotly contested political board!

One of the other neat things is that AGS never had advertising and was completely run on donations by members.

Happily it sailed along, year after year. Competitors came and went but no other national board caught on and came close to AGS. Haven't even to this day. Every Conference and nearly every school were represented by members and viewpoints abounded.

A couple years ago I got very ill and I had to make a decision to conserve my energy. I had to let go of AGS and concentrate on CSN, no longer able to be heavily involved in both.

So I sought out a company that would take it over, either for the love of it as we did at AGS or to market it and make money from it. My only stipulation was that they not change the content and let it continue as it had been going. In April 2009 a deal was struck with a fan who took it over and just let it keep operating as it was.

Then in December the fan suffered a financial crisis and pulled out. Scrambling, I spoke with another company about taking it over. Actually it was they who asked first. They wanted AGS to market it and make "a ton of money."

I told them the stipulations and they agreed, and a deal was struck.

Almost immediately after everything was switched into their name they began changing AGS. The new admin argued with members and laid down mandates, switched boards around creating confusion, let numerous spammers in, took away rights from the old admin, and many longtime members openly complained.

There was nothing I could do and I shared their disappointment.

Now the company has decided to back out on their deal and shut down AGS (even putting a message on it that there are unpaid invoices - don't they pay themselves?).

Many of us share in the grief of the situation.

Today marks the demise of an old friend.