Oh, the TBV to TC history goes a little something like this, my memory and recollections only, obviously, and they’ve possibly faded a little with the passing of time…
Dom, who was the owner of TBV, saw potential to make TBV more than a message board, and to be fair he was perhaps ahead of his time in that regard. TBV was definitely the most prolific of the Carlton boards at that point. I can’t speak of the CSC split or history, but TBV was THE Carlton forum of the day and was instrumental in getting the support and mobilising of members to hold the EGM that saw Elliott given the arse after the salary cap cheating.
Anyway, Dom had bigger ideas for TBV and was thinking of adding news sections, interviews with players, articles and the like so the message boards would form one part of a larger, broader TBV website. That side of it was all pretty standard stuff, especially by where we are today in the land of Web 2.0.
There were quite a lot of people who just wanted TBV to remain as it was. If Dom wanted to do those other things, fine, but leave TBV as a simple message board and start a new site for all the other stuff. Of course TBV had the name so it was easy to understand why Dom wanted to expand TBV’s offering. At least, that’s my memory of the general view on his proposed changes.
Where things got sticky for Dom was when he said he wanted to have advertising on the site and he was questioned as to what would happen with the money generated from any advertising.
As I recall, Synbad, in particular, pressed Dom for answers, tagging him as MoneyBaggers (his username was GoBaggers). Dom didn’t handle that line of questioning very well at all and Synbad’s theory was Dom wanted to monetise the site for solely his own benefit (ie. no money would be shared with the moderating team, or the club or put towards sponsorships etc).
That’s kinda how capitalism works I guess, but Synbad’s position was TBV was a community and not Dom’s business plaything and the community should have a say in the direction of the site if it were to change.
This to and fro went on for a few weeks, maybe months. And more and more Dom was getting fed up with people not patting him on the back and applauding his vision (I never got to meet him in person, and I think he was an okay guy, but his ego was easily bruised).
I was on the TBV mod team, along with Mrs Caz and a few others who made it across to TC (apologies my memory is failing me). Behind the scenes in our mod forums things weren’t much clearer and we were trying to get Dom to better explain his ideas and to especially be more open about what he would do with the money. I mean if he wanted to make cash for himself, just say that and let people decide if they were up for that, but he just kept dodging the question as I recall.
And, then, finally, he just cracked the shits, booted me out as a mod without notice, and other mods as well I think, before, finally just flicking the switch and shutting down the site shortly after with nothing left visible except a long post telling everyone to GAGF. And that was that, mostly.
In the immediate aftermath of Dom’s meltdown a few makeshift message boards were setup on somewhat unstable free sites; and Wolfister established one which he called TalkingCarlton (a play on the Talking Footy TV show). A few of us banded together following an offer from Jarusa to host a board and then me, Bluechucky and Jars set about building TC along with input from other TBV regulars. Within a few days, it might have even been over one weekend, we had TC up and running as pretty much a copy of TBV… we made no bones about that, my view (which I think was shared by the others) was that people wanted a message board, no more, no less, and that’s all TC was intended to be.
I think Dom might have been a bit surprised by how quickly we were able to react and essentially replace TBV. He did join TC with an alter ego, but it was pretty easy to work that out and he didn’t last very long. After a few weeks, or maybe months, he reopened TBV but the damage was done and the traffic there was not even a shadow of the site in its best years. It was kept live for another couple of years I think and kind of just withered away. It was definitely a shame how it all ended.
So there’s a summary of the TBV to TC days from my side. Happy for anyone to add, disagree, or share their memories.
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cheers 
