There may be some parts of this narrative that may be considered harsh or personal revenge, so be it
Originally, being a Strat-O-Matic player you had just a few neighborhood guys you shared the hobby with.
I finally started subscribing to the old Strat-O-Matic Review in 1986 and it opened a new whole world for me. I was mainly interested in filling in gaps to my collection and trying to get the original 1960s teams through the classifieds, but there were nice articles too. When Glenn Guzzo's Strat Fan Magazine came along, it was even better.
Then ....
The internet. My brother was a BIG executive in Silicon Valley. When I moved to Seattle briefly in 1989 he was up there on a business trip and we had dinner, He told me "we are going to change the world." I laughed. Then the internet DID change the world.
So somewhere around 2004 I discovered the Strat Fan Forum. OK. Some things I noticed or learned right away. It started out as just a small forum for a SOM football league. Someone quit being the admin/mod and this DP clown took over. A lot of us referred to him as "Mr. Small." The forum grew to the monster size it is today quite by accident. The administrator was really not that educated on sports, Strat-O-Matic, or much else. And he ran the forum like a Nazi. Mods with 5-10 years limited gaming experience would boss around us older guys who had been in the gaming community 20-25 years or more, telling us what we could or not post. It was laughable at some points. Many in the gaming community referred to it as the "Strat Fan Whiners Forum".
There is a line in the admin section:
Please note that due to spam bots and abuse FREE email accounts are no longer allowed. Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc and any other free e-mail provider will not be accepted for new account addresses.
then somewhere after that warning, it was stated (may still be the same today) "if there are any questions contact the admin .... at a YAHOO! email address"
gives you an idea of how this forum is run.
... and posting requests for trades, want lists or for sale items was strictly forbidden. The reasoning was very short sighted. I felt the internet was a godsend for us gamers and having the ability to connect with other gamers and help each other with our collections and wants/needs was a MAJOR item most gamers wanted. It was stated that "most of these posts and transactions turn into disputes" (factually incorrect) and "you can always just go to ebay" - well fine if you want to buy something or sell something but there was no way to post want lists or do trades etc. But they did allow threads such as favorite whiskey or which chick is hot, so much more related to the hobby than being able to buy sell or trade SOM items ... NOT~
Also, the forum is not open for browsing for non members. As the unofficial "official" forum for the game company (company members post there and run polls for new seasons, etc.) this is ridiculous. Nice way to NOT attract new customers. Boneheaded forum. Run by a Nazi. Does not allow browsing by "non-members". Forbids buying, selling or trading type posts. Bad for the SOM game company. Period!
So not long after I joined there was a slight debate and I found myself banned (along with a lot of other gamers). Nice. There is some personal accounting for this. I was a philosophy minor in college and of course taking logic and debating classes were involved, as was defending yourself in presenting upper division papers to the class and bearing the onslaught of attacks and questions (there is no right or wrong in philosophy) .. you just defend yourself as best you can. One of the teachers told me in my graded paper/presentation "you think very well on your feet". My dad once told me he had never won a debate with me since I came out of the womb. And having a photographic memory and a very high IQ (plus being ultra competitive) have led to many heated debates over the years and made me some enemies. Again, I admit it is a fault of mine.
Separately, I was frustrated trying to outbid the same guys over and over on ebay for stuff I wanted and figured I could solve both problems (not being part of a Nazi forum and not having the same guys drive ebay bidding up over and over) by creating an alternate forum. I can say I truly was one of the first to try an alternate forum (also thought of as a "splinter group"). My thoughts were we could all help each other with our collections, rather than drive up prices by outbidding each other on ebay.
I created my first forum in 2004 and called it "Strat-O-Matic Gamers Paradise" and landed on yahoo groups. Paradise was included as it was a way to get "Hawaii" into my forum name and also a slight pun on pair of dice (yes I know SOM uses 3 dice). We refer to this as SOM Gamers Paradise I. It got about 300 members right away. But there were some difficulties. The posts were sequential and not organized by thread. Post 324 could be about posting an item for sale. Post 325 could be about game announcement from the game company. Post 326 could be about a real sports game played last night. Post 327 could be a response to the item for sale post. Hard to follow.
So around mid 2005 or so, I made the decision to "move" the site to one that I could organize into categories (similar to most forums today). It was fun and got a lot of positive responses. But we "lost" many members during the transition. We refer the this as SOM Gamers Paradise II.
About 2006 or 2007 or so this site, which was doing very well got invaded by porn bots. It ruined the site. I tried to fix it for about 6 months and got nowhere. Very frustrated, I just gave up.
Then in early 2008 I decided to give it another try. I shopped and researched and narrowed it down to two hosts. I created sites on both hosts. One (referred to as SOM Gamers Paradise III) was a pay site (for the host, not members) and it had strong safety features that would guarantee no porn bots etc. It did have one drawback, though. It would not allow pictures. The second one I created at the same time was a normal conventional site similar to SOM GP II. It was a free site, did not have the safety guarantees, but did allow pictures. We call that SOM GP IV. I let the members try both sites for a week or 2 then put it up to a vote. The voting was about 9-1 in favor of SOM GP IV. So I closed SOM GP III.
IV did really well, but with all the transitions and changes and the 6-9 month period of no forum, we lost a lot of members. And of course, lots of other excellent forums opened up. Curiously many of them created categories and even tag lines that were exact verbatim copies of my original items.
Like the "Marketplace" where you "buy, sell, trade and post your want list". Too funny. I guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
And some of these forums (again) have so many categories along with amusing but confusing names for categories and then you get "warnings" for posting in the wrong category - sheesh. And then they have forum rules (the size of War And Peace) they are just plain over moderated.
I did find that there were many hobbyists who have a holier than thou attitude - quick to criticize myself or others, then doing MUCH worse things themselves ... and quite frankly others who were jealous of my collections and/or my ability to find bargains by clever searching on ebay. I also would tell stories of how I was able to describe items really well and/or position them nicely and sell them at premium prices with multiple bidders. This whole scenario made a few enemies who would snicker at me behind my back and sometimes to "my face". Then there were the troublemakers who would make bad deals or deal in bad faith, then misrepresent the facts on forums and others would buy into this garbage. I became very disillusioned
A few years before I had discovered a forum on De La Salle High Football, a nearby school who rose to national prominence with their 151 game win streak and other notable achievements. This was my introduction to Delphi forums.
Later I found the Strat-O-Matic Gamer Forum 2 on Delphi. Good forum but unlike the Strat Fan Forum which was run by a Nazi and you could not say anything and members always got banned, the Gamer Forum 2 was almost not managed at all, by the (very good) host who admitted he did not have the time to watch over this. Personal attacks, deliberate hijacking of threads, and worse were constant and false facts were always being thrown out by a few bad apples. Threads constantly turned into arguments, personal attacks and finger pointing. Uggh.
When I decided to discontinue my 100% loyalty to SOM and venture into other games in 2013 or so, I felt having a SOM forum did not make much sense. So in a series of moves and thoughts, I shut down SOM gamers Paradise IV (sometimes alternately known as SOM Traders Paradise).
But I liked Delphi so much, I decided to give it one last shot and opened Paradise V on Delphi. We have very limited action there but that is OK.
My goal with V is the same as when I started in 2004. having a sane alternative to the Nazi SFF, allow buying trading selling, and a place where gamers could discuss SOM and other TT sports.
Here is its link:
http://forums.delphiforums.com/GamersParadise
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