Forums vs Blogs

Why I Blog

The World of Baseball Simulation Forums

As you probably already know, most baseball replay projects take place on forums. Delphi Forums, which is somehow still relevant after some 25 years of existence, tends to be the center of most replay reporting.

There are some well-known forums on Delphi. APBA Between the Lines, for example, has been around for well over 20 years, and served as the chief hub for the APBA community after the demise of The APBA Journal. Delphi is the home of major discussion forums for Replay, 4th Street Sports Baseball, the legendary (and now defunct?) Ball Park Baseball, and Dynasty League Baseball, and even offers a seldom used Diamond Mind Baseball forum to boot.

And I can’t talk about Delphi without at least mentioning Tabletop Sports, which is probably the most influential and important forum in the entire industry.

Delphi doesn’t have a monopoly on forums, either. I’ve already mentioned the Fans of Diamond Mind Baseball forum, for example. Action! PC Baseball offers an excellent forum as well, and the OOTP forums are quite helpful (as is the OOTP subreddit).

With all of these communication options available, why start a blog?

Longevity

I’ll let you in on a little secret. This isn’t my first baseball simulation blog.

I started a different blog way back in February 2008 (hard to believe it’s been 15 years!). The real funny thing is that it’s still up.

One of the nice things about using a blogging service is that your blog can stay up as long as you like — provided that the service sticks around, of course. If you’re working hard at a replay, you probably want to remember certain things about it — maybe an exciting game that you had, or an insight you developed into a certain player, or even what playing with hopeless losing teams in the dog days of summer felt like.

Replays are as much about the journey as they are about the destination — and what better way to remember the journey with a record that you can refer to again and again?

The best part about having a public facing blog is that you can easily find your own project. There’s no need to pay Delphi Forums money just to use its search feature, or to ask some kind soul to find your old thread and bump it for you. Once it’s on your blog, it’s always on your blog.

And others can find it as well — even if you did abandon it in 2009.

A Case Study

You probably don’t realize this, but there are those among us who have impressive records of playing these simulations.

Take Mike Mathias on the Replay Sports Forum, for example.

You might recognize his name. I’ve linked to some of his replays before.

Mathias is one of the most prolific baseball replayers I’ve ever seen. Per his annually updated My Replay Anniversary post, he’s inching towards the coveted mark of 30,000 individual games played, scored, and reported — reaching that incredible mark in less than 20 years.

But there’s a problem.

The problem here is that the Mathias replays are all hidden on the Replay specific forum. This is why you likely have never heard of him.

Mathias does have his own website — you can find it here. It’s helpful if you want to see final standings and look at his statistics. It’s not all that helpful, though, if you want to read through his game stories. All you can do is go through the old Delphi forum threads, some of which contain well over 1,000 posts, and read through his capsule-sized game summaries.

A Better Way

I find the blogging model superior to forums for many reasons. These include:

• Blogs tend to perform better in search engines than forums over time (despite what they tell you about Substack’s SEO problems).

• Blogs tend to be more permanent (just ask anybody who participated in the Diamond Mind forums before Dayne Myers came along).

• Well-designed blogs are much easier to search through. This is a notorious problem with Delphi Forums. It’s taken me weeks to finally find posts about my 21-year-old 1980 DMB replay, including posts about games I completely forgot about.

• Blog formatting is much easier than forum formatting. Tapatalk is particularly notorious for formatting that is unfriendly to gamers.

The drawbacks?

It’s not easy to convince people to leave the fourms to visit your blog (though you’ve obviously done this if you’re reading this).

Forums offer a larger captive audience.

I’d welcome your thoughts and ideas! Though commenting here is limited to paid subscribers only, you can also contact me for free on Twitter.