Let me start by saying welcome to all the old freaks and new freaks alike. It has been a long strange trip, but here we are, a new Freak has been born at BroncosFreaks.
If you are new to BroncosFreaks, welcome aboard, register as a new user and start posting! If you are an old time Freak, get back in the game and start posting up! If you were a member of The Bronco Nation, unfortunately most of the old ‘Nation’ posts and data was lost.
How did this happen? Who runs this show?
Well let’s see if I can help explain a little…and now…onto a little history of BroncosFreaks…
Back in 2002, John (aka The Head Freak), started BroncosFreak and a few of his buddies who formed the original Mod team. In early 2003 I had joined the site, and maybe a year later I started pitching in to the community by donating web hosting space and took on a share of the administrative duties of the site. In late 2005 I had decided I wanted to work on a mock drafting tool and needed a place for it to run. I really didn’t think it would be much of a tool at first, but because of technical requirements, I couldn’t use vBulletin at the time, so I had to find a Microsoft based tool to use.
In steps The Bronco Nation and Community Server. I needed a community based tool that would give me some things like forums and user authentication, on which I could build the mock draft tool. Well, I figured I could attract more users and have a little more credibility if the tool were involved in an active NFL community, so The Bronco Nation was born. A couple guys from The Freak came on over and helped out with that. Around the same time, BroncosFreak traffic had been growing, and a dedicated server was in order for the old vBulletin site. The Head Freak decided to make the move around that time in early 2006, and I continued to try and be active in an admin/freak on BroncosFreak.
Well in comes 2007. The mock draft tool had been somewhat successful in 2006, so I made a push to turn it into a stand alone community: MyMockDraft. By the end of 2007 MyMockDraft was ready for prime time, and we made a big push for the 2008 draft. This left The Bronco Nation by itself in late 2007, pretty much a shell of a Broncos site. Some nice photos of cheerleaders, but no real members.
Around that same time The Head Freak decided to move BroncosFreak from a forum style format to a digg/news style site (it’s current format). He asked Derek (CanuckBroncofan a Mod/Admin on BroncosFreak) if he wanted to take over the old forum, and Derek approached me about hosting/helping him administer it. Well, I had The Bronco Nation sitting around doing nothing, so I said, sure, why don’t we give it a try, see if people want to head over there and post. Well, that wasn’t very well thought out. People obviously were not pleased having their Broncos Freak Home stripped away from them and then be herded into some new confusing forum format. Unfortunately, at the time, I was pretty divided between trying to get MyMockDraft up and running and looking great for the 2008 draft, and helping Derek out with BroncosFreak. A few people stuck around and tried to help keep The Bronco Nation populated, but it fizzled out through the summer. Most of the Freak Regulars circa 2007 moved onto BroncosForums and have since made themselves comfortable in their new digs.
Well in late July and early August there was a little surge in activity on The Bronco Nation, and some of the regular members there (HD, obi, rickomatic) started making some noise. They complained about various features of CommunityServer and the lack of membership. Well, CommunityServer had taken a turn for the worse, it had been a great open source development project, but now they seem to cater to corporations looking to run professional communities (they don’t even publish prices on their site anymore…that’s how expensive it has become). Given the fundamental flaws (like taking forever for new posts to show up), we decided to try and bring The Freak back. I had an old backup of the old BroncosFreak site from my days of hosting the site, so I bought a vBulletin license, and put that up on The Bronco Nation, and everyone seemed to love it. (To clarify here for those of you who may think this was used without permission, John gave Derek permission to take over the old forum. We would have used a more recent backup, however, John was unable to get a good dump of the old freak website database).
And that nearly brings us to today. The Bronco Nation was not a fitting name for the old freak, so we had a look and BroncosFreaks.com happened to be available….clickity click…and presto blammo, and here we are BroncosFreaks.com!
Derek (CanuckBroncofan) and I (Harkov) are the administrators of the site and at the moment there are no moderators (contrary to some public belief!)
So, I hope that helps explain a little bit about what happened along the way. Certainly there were tons of other details that went along with this, I could probably have typed 300 pages, but we’ll leave that for the forums. So get out there let everyone know that the RAIDERS SUCK!
