Board maintenance

[Jared]

Heads up - I'm doing some forum maintenance this afternoon/evening, so there may be some intermittent downtime. Will post again when everything is up and good.

[RobVarak]

Wow! It's a whole new world!!

Thanks as always, Jared, for giving us a place to hang out.

[Jared]

Board maintenance should be done. I upgraded the forum software and hopefully it will be stable. If there are issues that you notice, feel free to post here or PM me - will try and figure it out.

[Diablo25]

Jared = Stud.

[pk500]

New look! Very cool!

Thanks for keeping this place alive for this merry band of lunatics for 20 years, Jared.

[Jared]

Yeah - I just noticed that the forum has been around for 18 years. It's a bit wild to me. Thanks for everyone who make it a great community!

[JOZ]

I don't post a lot, but been here since the beginning. Hard to believe it has been 18 years. Thanks Jared.

[J_Cauthen]

Cool Jared... it kinda looks a bit like Reddit would look with a functional makeover! Thanks for giving the flame a place to burn

[RobVarak]

Yeah - I just noticed that the forum has been around for 18 years. It's a bit wild to me. Thanks for everyone who make it a great community!

It's a rare active remnant of the old, good internet.

[Zeppo]

Thanks Jared! I’d reiterate what others have said - hard to believe it’s been that long, and even though I don’t post much at all anymore, I still really value this place and keeping tabs on what folks are talking about. Thanks for keeping it alive.

[dbdynsty25]

Wow...crazy. 18 years and it's almost jarring to look at the board w/ the new software!

Anyway, thanks for keeping the place alive Jared...it's really the only forum I visit daily.

[Teal]

Sonuvabitch...18 years! s***, I remember coming over here from the old site...lol. And connecting with dial up. Damn, we're old...lol

[pk500]

Sonuvabitch...18 years! s***, I remember coming over here from the old site...lol. And connecting with dial up. Damn, we're old...lol

You're not still on dial-up?

[Rodster]

I'm with Teal, I remember when DSP had reviews and Randy M did racing game reviews. Sometimes it feels like I'm still using dial up.

[Sudz]

pretty crazy. How long was the site around before the boards? I wrote for the original Digital Sports years ago.

Anyway, glad to have you people in my life.

[fatheadX]

I don't post a lot, but been here since the beginning. Hard to believe it has been 18 years. Thanks Jared.

Old timey lurkers unite!

[Jared]

pretty crazy. How long was the site around before the boards? I wrote for the original Digital Sports years ago.

Anyway, glad to have you people in my life.

Hmmmm....it started in 1997. There was an article on the early history of the site in the Hartford Courant in 2000 - it's pasted below

https://www.courant.com/news/connecticu ... story.html

One of the Web's first gaming sites dedicated exclusively to sports started publishing in 1997. It's still around -- a lifetime in Internet time -- and it's still one of the best.

Digital Sportspage (www.digitalsports.com) covers console and PC sports games with a staff of seven writers, all of whom write about games as a sidelight to full-time jobs. But you'd never know it.

The staff includes writers who have jobs ranging from a dentist to a nuclear plant technician, but the common thread is the thoughtful, thorough treatment each gives in their reviews. The site's writers cover nearly all the major software releases and do it with more depth and insight than most other sports sites.

The site grew out of a multi-genre site, Digital Gamescape, founded and designed by Frank Eva in 1994. Eva eventually found managing all the genre's too difficult. He also was running out of server space -- the site was getting too big and discovered about 40 percent of the site's traffic was accessing sports material.

So he joined forces with John Cauthen, whom Eva had previously hired as a sports correspondent, and the two relocated the site to Cauthen's Internet provider's server in Rock Hill, S.C., exclusively as a sports site.

News, previews, press releases and screenshots are all in the mix at Digital Sportspage, but at the core of the site are the reviews, which have a distinct structure. Each reviewer breaks down a game in four categories -- graphics, audio, interface and game play -- with each getting a numerical rating along with an overall bottom-line rating.

"That's something that's worked for us from day one," said Cauthen, who is the site's golf editor as well as being involved in the administration with Eva. "In each category are key things that we're looking for, and any time [we] make a claim, we want something specific to back that claim up. We try to keep editorializing out of the review.

"We have a pretty rigid author's guidelines that we give the writers. We try to downplay the rating numbers part of the review. We prefer not to give numbers, but we found that if we don't do that the protests are enormous."

The site has gone through a number of frustrations with sponsors, including affiliations with Imagine Games Network and Unified Gamers Online, and it went off-line temporarily in September 1998.

"We actually pulled the plug on the site," Cauthen said. "It put a lot of demands on our free time because we handle the brunt of the administrative work. We were getting diminishing returns from UGO despite having our traffic almost triple in the time we were with UGO."

Eva posted a message that they were off-line and later that day Netizen Islands 3D, a community site builder, contacted Eva about a sponsorship. He negotiated a contract that gave him full editorial freedom, while NI3D maintained ownership and advertising.

It's no surprise that the site's audience includes older gamers, since most of the writers are in their 30s and 40s. Cauthen, 45, has degrees in economics and electronics engineering technology, and works at a nuclear power plant by day.

"It's refreshing to know that this is a hobby that is undertaken by your peers and you're not some lunatic that's out there being a kid again," Cauthen said. "It's amazing how many people we hear from that are in their 30s, 40s, even 50s.

"The thing that amazes me more than anything else is the number of adult gamers who write to tell us how reassuring it is to know they are not alone. We have doctors, lawyers, all sorts of professional people who write us to tell us that they appreciate what we're doing."

Other writers at the site include Dan London, Marty Goldstein, Randy Magruder, Matt Kraus and Jared Madina -- all worth checking out, as is the site, one of the best resources for avid sports gamers.

[RobVarak]

Wow that is quite the relic! Any chance that a mid-sized city's daily paper wrote an expose about the SR diaspora?

[Rodster]

Jared, is it possible to add themes to DSP so we can change the look when we log in? Maybe allow us to add colors and maybe even go back to the way DSP used to look? If it's too much work then nvm.

[Jared]

Rodster - I just uploaded two themes; one being the "old" look (called subsilver2). On some forums, it's a little wonky with the updated software, but I just tested it and it seems to work. To make the change:

1. Click on your username in the top right and select "User Control Panel" from the dropdown.
2. Click board preferences.
3. Under "Edit global settings" there is an entry called "My board style". Select "subsilver2".

Let me know if this works.

[Rodster]

Rodster - I just uploaded two themes; one being the "old" look (called subsilver2). On some forums, it's a little wonky with the updated software, but I just tested it and it seems to work. To make the change:

1. Click on your username in the top right and select "User Control Panel" from the dropdown.
2. Click board preferences.
3. Under "Edit global settings" there is an entry called "My board style". Select "subsilver2".

Let me know if this works.

Good job Jared, I tried them all and they work. I made the request on behalf of Danimal. I actually like the look of the new refresh.

[Danimal]

Rodster - I just uploaded two themes; one being the "old" look (called subsilver2). On some forums, it's a little wonky with the updated software, but I just tested it and it seems to work. To make the change:

1. Click on your username in the top right and select "User Control Panel" from the dropdown.
2. Click board preferences.
3. Under "Edit global settings" there is an entry called "My board style". Select "subsilver2".

Let me know if this works.

Thank you so much for this!

[vader29]

I preferred the old look also, thanks for adding that option back.

[XXXIV]

I preferred the old look also, thanks for adding that option back.

Ditto that!

Thanks for all you do Jared.

[Jared]

Great - if there are any problems with the old skin on the new software, don't hesitate to let me know.