rob f Appreciation Thread

I just saw your posts, Jamie H, and yes, that "rob f" and I are one and the same.

Those Freep Forums were my starting point too---I initially started out on the Freep as "R Bob" for a short time but soon changed it to rob f. The Freep back then had separate sports forums for fans of Michigan, the Tigers, the Lions, the Red Wings, the Pistons, and the spartans, besides forums for current events and politics, if I recall correctly. I dabbled in both of those briefly (political "discussion" was already awful enough back then) but eventually posted mostly to the Tigers and U of M Forums, somewhat also the Red Wings (and I remember you from all three of those). Occasionally I'd also venture into the Lions forum mostly to lurk, and even sometimes visited the spartans forum, for trolling purposes only.

Like you said, the Freep shut down all their forums, which were on the Worldcrossing platform, and the core groups of Michigan and Tigers fans both opened up their own separate Worldcrossing (WX) sites. A lot of folks, like both you and I, belonged to multiple forums on the Freep. While I tagged along and stayed with that main Lions group on a completely different non-WX platform (they eventually merged onto a tap-a-talk platform), I very soon completely lost track of nearly all that group of Red Wings fans forever.

Some 14 or 15 years ago, WX changed from a free site to a paid membership site, then suddenly a year later gave notice they were going to shut down entirely.

By then I had begun lurking here on MGoBlog but stayed mainly with the remnants of the original Freep Michigan fan group (do you remember "Linesman"--- he worked for MichiganBell/AT&T and was a high school football referee/linesman, thus his nickname); when eventually WX closed they found a platform by latching on to that same very active Lions tap-a-talk forum as a separate sub-group, enabling them as Michigan fans to stay together. I had become a moderator there while we were still on WX and continued for a few years on the newer site but eventually got burned out. Probably the biggest reason leading up to my decision to quit modding there was a badly deficient policy there on dealing with politics----ugh.  It wasn't so much the long-term members as it was an outside group from another college football fan site who infiltrated and brought along their bad habits; up until then we more or less went by the unspoken rule that politics were to be left at the door. 

I still stop there and post somewhat infrequently; you'd probably recognize a handful of them from the Freep forums days and even a very few there who posted back on the Freep Red Wings forum. MGoBlog, however, became the primary sports home for me within a couple years after I initially signed up here in 2010.  

As for that group from the Freep Tigers Forum, they stayed intact on WX, but scattered widely when WX ceased to exist. Many at first formed a group called "The Tigers Clubhouse Gang"; it still exists but barely--- among other things, the website is awful to navigate. Most of that group now is on a Facebook private group called something along the lines of "The NPGWH Tigers FanXPerts". I used to visit their page to lurk, up until the last year or so when beefed-up Facebook security procedures drastically restricted non-member access to FB pages.

The Tigers Clubhouse Gang is now down to about a dozen members and nearly extinct now as a result of what the pandemic did to the baseball season. Because of this, I'll probably soon finally begrudgingly join Facebook, if only to be able to stay in touch better with that long-suffering group of fellow Tigers fans.  Dedicated self-induced martyrdom, I suppose.