squirrel wrote:ValleyFAN wrote:As an outsider can somebody tell me why Bradley has multiple forums? I always check the Bradleyfans.com forum and didn't know that there was another board elsewhere.
The first, most widespread college sports message board was started by the PJStar (c. 1996-97). (There was a listserv that pre-dated that that provided the core of initial message board users). But it was a pretty big tent. It wasn't just Bradley fans, we had pretty good representation from across the Valley (including a few that still post here and on their respective home boards), along with a huge Illini user base and scattered other in-states.
The owner-operators of Bradley Fans went all in on the Jim Les era. They were privy to some good inside information, and given the volume of Illinois fans on the PJStar boards, many didn't like the outside fan opinion on some of those discussions, so having a dedicated Bradley board was a welcome opportunity.
But over time and as things went south for Jimmy, the overzealous owners of that site alienated themselves from most of their core users and many ended up migrating back to the PJStar boards.
There's much more to the story than that, but that's the crux of it.
That’s an accurate account, though exceptionally gracious and fair to Bradley Fans.
Some of those details behind “went all in on the Jim Les era” are an outrageous combination of funny and frightening. Tornado had a litany of sockpuppet accounts that were not terribly well concealed. You’d see some written language commonalities pop up, among other clues that made it obvious over time.
As the Les era neared its end, there was an infamous poll to rate how Jim Les was doing. The turnout was tremendous, and the opinion was overwhelmingly positive. Then folks looked into a little more and, what would you know, all the screen names starting with A and B were voting and they were all giving Les and A and B too! Including many otherwise dormant ID’s, as well as a poster from the PJStar board named BAM, who was an Illini fan and frequent Jim Les critic on the board.
That’s what all in for Jim Les looked like!