Neyer Boarders

From Wiki Gonzalez

Neyer Boarders are posters to a message board that Rob Neyer used to have at the ESPN.com site.

Among current Primates, bunyon (known as WillieIsAGod over there), Chris J (known as clespider99 over there), RossCW, miserlou (known as ducksnort), Voxter (as C. Miles McDermott), emancip8d (King of the Double Regression Study), PepTech (known as scruffyclaus), and penguinmobile were well-known Neyer Boarders.

SrulItza [now Srul Itza], cardsfanboy, OFF, Hammerin' Hank Scorpio (Crow T. Robot), Dave (dabrawnzz), Delta Socrates, villageidiom, Devin McCullen (spudsfan) and Rob Wood (rowinmv) also used to be regulars there. Shredder and Sean Forman also posted there once, and Jon Daly once admitted to occasionally lurking there.

Neyer-ites who haven't knowingly been heard from include NomarsGirl, modmajgen (AKA jerry), pwenthold, rogershornsby, and OPACY.

As to why they migrated to BTF, the simple answer is Primer's a better site with more people to talk to, and more ongoing discussion. Also, Primer's multi-threaded blog structure allows people to find the conversations they wish to participate in, rather than have to wade through all the ongoing conversations in one thread.

Another reason for the migration was that there was often a high ratio of trollage. Prior to going to Insider status, Neyer's articles were often crossposted to ESPN team pages. This predictably resulted in sudden overwhelming storms of juvenile trollage whenever he was deemed overly critical of some team. Of course, that did give rise to the Re: your stupidity thread, which Neyer Boarders often liken to BTF's (né BP's) own PETCO thread.

A few years ago a blogger named Andy Dolan took a disliking to Neyer, registered several names, and held a contest with the visitors to his site to see who could troll onto the board and start the longest thread.

"Hazel" was the name given by the board to a recurring troll who was apparently also a Jerry Lewis fan, as many of his handles had a basis in Jerry Lewis movies ("Geisha Boy" is one example). The name was based on the mother of the title character in the Vonnegut short story, Harrison Bergeron. Unlike most of the trolls on the board, Hazel enjoyed a certain amount of goodwill based on the frequently amusing nature of his references which, at their best, were nearly repoz-ian in nature.

The board also had a "recommend" feature which allowed a reader to highlight a post he/she thought was especially good. The posts that received the most highlights were jokes, call to arms against trolls, and especially transcripts from Monty Python's Flying Circus and server errors by ESPN.com.