Once upon a time, I was petrifi.... No.. Let's try again.
I've been building websites for the last 20+ years, and as I've seen more and more people engage with CFB In The United Kingdom and Ireland, I decided to see what I could do as my latest project. Turns out the stars have aligned better than a "Night Clap clap clap Deep in the Heart of Texas".
A piece of open source decent forumesque software called Flarum has been rushing headfirst towards it's second major release. I've used BuddyPress and phpBB so many times over the years, but things have either been full of bloatware, poorly optimised code, or in the case of phpBB again a massive security breach. I refuse to use paid forum software such as VBulliten / XenForo as being closed source, developers can't easily make extensions, themes or the like. In fact, the person who has helped me a lot with this site to date was essentially blacklisted from one of these for doing just that.
The Current State of Play
Things are nowhere near perfect yet, however I have a framework and somethings still to fix. Some of the changes I need to do are going to cause people a headache until I do (Like having to navigate through the homepage to get back to the forum), but things are a mixture of bug reporting and load testing at this stage.
I want to be VERY CLEAR. I'm not aiming to step on anyone's toes. I know there are a few other CFB communities out there, and I've been very specific on what I'm doing compared to others. For example:
There won't be any specific NFL / CFL section on the site. If people choose to make posts in the General section I won't mind, but I don't want to be an active facilitator of replicating traffic and discussion at scale.
I'm hoping this will compliment not replace the Facebook Groups, Discord Groups, WhatsApp groups and so on. I once lived in a world where sites were competing to outdo and out traffic each other (Hi Linkin Park sites), and it's just painful and the end user suffers.
I don't want anyone to think I'm stealing their content. Everything produced outside of discussion in articles and supplemental content will be hand produced. I'm the one who added the Indiana University Plagiarism test to my university's pre-arrival / fresher curriculum and have looked over 100s of plagiarism cases. It's not fun, nor worth it.
I'm hoping that people will like to contribute their own content, and as someone who's also done production and direction in Esports, Motorsport and Podcast-World for over a decade, we would want to support people looking to produce any written, audio / visual content. We actually have tools to support this that will be rolling out at the appropriate time (See load testing).
How can you help?
Set up an account, either the standard registration option, or Google (Others SSOs / Federated Logins will be available in the future, it's a ball ache API wise these days)
Start off by posting an introduction at this link here.
Play a weekly game of Pick'ems, to test out load balancing. These are for all FBS games, and even though it shows every game, you can choose them all, or pick and choose. System doesn't care, even though your point score might (1 point per correct pick this season. A dynamic formula will be used next season all going well).
Check permissions on your profile and set them how you choose. You can also select your favourite CFB team which will be shown on every post you make. If you have more than one team, pick the one you would send your first-born to.
Let me know of any bugs. I'll be setting up a bug room which thankfully is nothing like the one on I Am Apparently a Celebrity, and I'm Complaining of a Free Holiday.
Additional Help
I will be looking for some moderators and back end support and development. In the words of the Scrubs intro "I can't do this on my own ... I'm no superman".
If you would like to write articles / long form content, then please let me know. I'm a massive writer myself, and it would be nice to get some long form content going. I will promise now, you will keep ALL RIGHTS for your work.
If you want to keep the lights on in the server room, contact me. It's not much right now, but may snowball, and I also pay for some of the custom extensions and support.
Thank You To....
The people who never saw that College-Football.co.uk is actually available as a site. It wasn't even a premium domain!
Ernest Defoe who has offered SO much help it's insane. He is an Alabama fan, so make this a point in history where an Alabama fan will work with an IU Hoosier, and someone who roots Blue and Orange in the Iron Bowl.
The people who've given me support over the past few weeks, especially as I was in hospital. I really appreciate it.
