Fanhome

FanHome is a web community devoted to the discussion of sports, with a focus on the four major American sports: baseball, basketball, football and hockey.

Early History

The website was founded as Baseballboards.com in 1999 by Kevin Cabral while a Cornell University student. Kevin had been a long-time user of bulletin board systems going back to BBS and USENET days who saw the opportunity to bring something similar to the Internet for sports fans. Due to the site's huge popularity, Alberto Corral joined as a partner and the network grew to include Hockeyboards.com, Hoopsboards.com, Footballboards.com and RacingBoards.com.

The site developed a sizable following from fans who sought refuge from other forums which had become infested with trolls, spam and high degree of contention. This led to a number of communities relocating completely from forums like ESPN and TSN. Two of the first major communities to relocate to FanHome were the Montreal Expos and Toronto Blue Jays, which left TSN. This has led to a significant Canadian presence on Fanhome as well as the creation of more stringent Community Standards than typically found on other similar sites.

Development of Fanhome.com

In 2001, the Fanhome identity was developed to merge five different message boards—each one dedicated to one of the four major professional sports, plus auto racing -- into one. The Fanhome brand identity was developed by graphics designed Al Hidalgo and the company [http://www.vmai.com VMA Interactive] in Dayton, Ohio.

To facilitate the development of Fanhome, Matt Rogish was brought on as technical director and was responsible for the technical aspects that enabled the 4 independent communities to merge into FanHome.com. In those early years of the Internet, there were many technical challenges associated with running a site of Fanhome's size. This required the unprecedented step of porting the mySQL based vBulletin software to Sybase as well as creating a sizable server farm to run the sites.

Scout Years

In October 2002, FanHome merged with the Scout.com network (the online incarnation of Scout Media, Inc.). which claims to be the number one ranked independent provider of sports content on the Internet. [ [http://www.scout.com/3/Company.html Scout.com: Company Overview ] ] , and presently Scout itself has over 300,000 registered members who have written over 6 million separate posts.

During the Scout years, numerous problems cropped up including software problems. So many members of the basketball and hockey boards who had no publishers, i.e. revenue, were left to fend for themselves.

Independent Again

As of November 14, 2006, Fanhome is once again independent, having severed relations with Scout.com Fact|date=February 2007. The new site resurrects the design and identity of FanHome which had been lost during the Scout years and also features vBulletin software in place of EZBoard.

[ [http://fanhome.com Fanhome forum frontpage] . Retrieved November 20, 2006.]

References