Blog World

Since I likely won't be around on July 31st, the official 1 year birthday of this forum, I thought I'd right a blog early.  We've had some ups and downs, original members deleting accounts then coming back, format, colour and banner changes that would make your head spin over the first few months but, I think now things have finally settled into a nice slow growing community of solid non-trolling members.

Where we began:

I along with the Co-founders, Cronie (Cronenbergfan), Spezdispenser (504Heater) and many of the members here, started out over at HockeyBuzz, commenting on Kevin Lee's Senators blogs when he was there.

Kevin Lee went AWOL and that started the litte rat in my brain running.  We decided to start up what would eventually be this site.  July 31st, 08 I signed up with Forumotion and we made GMCentralHockey.forumotion.net.  Those first few days were trial and error, setting up forums, having discussions amongst Co-founders before we flooded other forums with requests to join GMHockey on August 5th, 2008.  How many of you remember this?


And that wasn't even the original banner.  Unfortunately I don't know what happened to that old yellow one I used to have up.  Lets not forget the daily, who am I kidding, hourly colour changes along with the multitude of format changes that invariably made things go wonky.  Remember the regular suggestion box posts and topic threads more or less saying WTF!  Ahhh good times those were.  

  You can still see today the evidence that this site isn't a typical Hockey Forum.  It doesn't organize itself as logically as most other forums because we just dove right in to the deep end and built this forum as we felt it needed more.  We thought we needed a blog component but as history has shown, this blog is almost a ghost town now.  I'll keep it up and running because there are still a lot of good posts in here and I encourage you all to have a look around.


A little inbetween

We went through more banners than I can count and have added many forums and categories, changing the names of them along the way as well.  We've made friends/affiliations with several sites, which we now have in a convenient little scrolling bar on our Portal page.  We tried and failed to get a GM simulation game running, which Howie is currently trying to resurrect.  We've had people call in to Team1200 and saw the activity spike to over 100 people online at once.  We've been through a trade deadline, Cup final, Draft and Free agent frenzy and came out the other side with members covering more than two thirds of the 30 NHL teams.

Some Stats:

Membership:  Went from 3 in July (50 in August) to 216 as I write this blog
Posts: Went from a handful in July with excitement over hitting our first 1000 to currently over 85,000.
Topics: Went from a few scattered topics and some empty forums to almost 2800 as of today.

Our most active month for topics was October with 321 and that was with less than half our current membership.  I can't wait to see what this October looks like.  We've also hit a bit of a growth spurt with 22 new members in June and another 25 so far in July.  Previous to that we had 44 members join from January to May.

Where we are now

Now we have 216 members, very little trolling and very little posts that are simple one word or emoticon posts.  We seem to be building relatively slowly but I'm OK with that if it means keeping the trolls out.  This was always a fun endeavour that I hoped one day would earn some real money for myself and the Co-founders.  And if it doesn't that is fine because if I wasn't here I'd be somewhere else chatting it up about Hockey.  By the way, my google Ad account has made just over $50 for almost a year worth of having them up there so...no we're not making money on this yet.  It definitely covers the cost of our domain name which is still nice.

So I would just like to say thank you to all our members and to the other Co-founders for making this site a fun place to hang out and talk Hockey and to wish the site a Happy First Birthday!

Cap'n Clutch