THE DAILY BLOVIATION
At some point in every move there is a moment where you are standing in the kitchen of the new place, holding a box labeled MISC in your own handwriting, with no memory of packing it and no idea where it goes. I have been having that moment constantly since Monday at midnight.
For those just joining us on WOIO or elsewhere, the OBR spent the last several years living inside CBS Sports and 247Sports, after CBS snatched up the bankrupt Scout.com. That arrangement ended for various reasons, and on September 15th at about a quarter past midnight, this site went live on its own two feet for the first time since it was called BrownsTNG.com back in 2001. I have been running Browns websites since 1996. I have never been this tired, and I have never had this much fun. Both things are true, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
I have learned a few things in the last four or five days.
LESSON ONE, NOTHING COMES WITH YOU: This is the one that has caused the most grief, so it goes first. When you leave a platform like 247, you leave everything. Not just the software. The member list, the post history, the subscription records—all of it is theirs, and they are under no obligation to hand it over. Legally, I could not import a single byte of your information. So every one of you who has been posting here since the Butch Davis era had to sign up again like you’d never heard of us.
I barely even thought about the ramifications of this, and when I did, I buried it in a long page of gobbeldy good that no one read. I didn’t fathom that people would expect their old 247Sports login to work because I’m a webdork and my brain doesn’t think like that.
Your post count will carry, in the sense that you can look it up on the old site and give it to me on by filling out a form.. Your subscription did not follow you here and could not. LIkewise, your login information stayed with the old corporate “partner”. Tallow explained it better than I have: if you can enter into the form me how much time you had left on your old subscription, that time gets added to the end of the new one. (I’m trying to figure out a way to get a program to do that because there are far too many for me to do by hand now). Six months left plus a year purchased equals eighteen months. There is also a monthly option, which is a toggle at the top of the subscription page. All that equates to lower revenue for the site over time as we absorb the time, but some Browns fans / investors (which I’m still recruiting) have helped us prepare for that.
LESSON TWO, THE INTERNET REMEMBERS YOUR OLD ADDRESS: For years, theobr.com quietly forwarded people to our 247 pages. Browsers are diligent little creatures, and they memorized that. So ten hours after we flipped the switch, people were still typing in theobr.com and landing on the old site, wondering what all the fuss was about. There was nothing I could do about it from this end. Your browser had a note taped to its fridge that said “Barry and the other (smarter) people live at 247,” and it was going to keep reading that note until you took it down. Clearing the cache or opening a private window fixed it. Some people had success typing a sub-page, like https://theobr.com/forums. Explaining that to several hundred people at two in the morning is its own kind opportunity for self-teaching. I thought it would just “work”. It didn’t. The nature of the internet is such that it’s all over the place, and any change ripples out slowly.
LESSON THREE, EVERY DEFAULT SETTING IS SOMEBODY ELSE’S OPINION: New software arrives with a thousand knobs (in this case, I think maybe 5,000) already turned to positions chosen by a programmer who has never met a Browns fan. I’ve spent the last nine months twiddling my knobs. (Wait, phrasing). Some of those positions were fascinating. Paying subscribers, for example, were capped at a 50 kilobyte avatar while free members got ten times that. Free members could attach one megabyte to a post, which in 2026 means “no photo taken by any phone made in the last decade.” The site defaulted to dark mode, and one of the links in the sidebar defaulted to black text on a brown background, which is the design equivalent of witness protection. All of it’s fixed now, and all of it got fixed because somebody posted about it. Which brings me to the Site Tips thread Browns34 started, where members are teaching each other how to resize an image by dragging the corner. I should have thought about that well before turning the lights on.
LESSON FOUR, YOU WERE WRONG ABOUT WHAT PEOPLE WANT: Before launch, I built a little star that shows you’ve posted in a topic. Then I decided nobody needed it and took it out. The first night, somebody asked for it. It went back in that evening. Same story with a Back to Topics button. I have been doing this a long time, and I still don’t know what you want until you tell me, which is a humbling thing to type. The feature poll has been the best window into that. Signatures, or “tag lines” as popuppy calls them. A GIF search. The old “Member Since” field. Tallow wants the toggle back that let you see only staff replies in Ask the Insiders, which is a genuinely good idea and is on the list. And T-Dog asked for “a good football team,” which is outside my department, but I agree with it, and I’ve forwarded the request. I’m not sure who’s in charge of “winning” over there, so I sent it to the receptionist.
LESSON FIVE, PLUMBING IS INVISIBLE UNTIL IT STOPS: Nobody thinks about the podcast feed. The podcast feed just works, until the day you move and every pipe you forgot existed comes apart in your hands. AndraDavis asked in Ask the Insiders how to get Gang of Three and Pete & Joe after the transition. Answer: There’s a new Podcasts page in the menu at the top of the site now with Apple, Spotify, and Amazon links, and the feeds are being reconnected one at a time. KotlinRambler asked whether This Side Up could go out as audio too, then talked himself out of it because the film breakdown wouldn’t translate. He’s right about the film, but I heard him. If something else you relied on has gone quiet, tell me. I probably don’t know it’s broken.
LESSON SIX, IT SHOULD NOT BE THIS MUCH FUN: I did not see this one coming. For the first time in decades, when somebody asks for a feature, the answer isn’t “I’ll pass that along to a company that will ignore it.” The answer is “let me see if I can build that.” I wrote as much in the first post of that feature thread, and I meant it. I’ve been busier than at any point since the site started, mostly because every one of you had to rebuild an account from scratch, and I am having the most fun I’ve had in a long, long time. KatDawg came back to the Watercooler this week, brought the Friday Musings with her, and wrote “Feels like coming home.” Yeah. That’s the whole thing, right there. That’s why I hauled the boxes.
OK, enough about the building. There’s a football game tomorrow, allegedly.
GABRIEL, EVENTUALLY, MAYBE: shunn asked the Insiders whether Dillon Gabriel could jump Shedeur Sanders if Watson keeps struggling and Sanders doesn’t progress in practice. Pete Smith says maybe, but not soon: Gabriel can’t practice while he’s on IR, so whenever he does come back, he’ll have missed at least a month of reps with his teammates. For those keeping score at home, that’s a quarterback room where the starter is 9-11, the backup can’t get on the field, and the third guy can’t get on the practice field. Normal stuff.
THE SURVIVAL POOL IS LIVING UP TO ITS NAME: Thirty-four members went out in Week 1, thirty-two of them on the Chargers, which is the most Chargers thing that has ever happened. Twenty-seven of you are still standing. Get your Week 2 picks in. I would offer advice but I have no standing; I’ve been picking the Browns to cover since 1999.
And one more from the Watercooler that isn’t about football at all. curdawg99 said goodbye to his dog Elvis this week after thirteen years. I’ve spent this week bribing mine with cheese to take his pills, so that one landed. Sorry, brother.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
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THE LIFT
Positive news from the world of sports and beyond...
Big Think has a piece on becoming “high agency” in the age of AI, and the part that stuck with me came from Cate Hall, who wrote a book called You Can Just Do Things. She says the price of changing your life is a stretch of time she calls “the moat of low status”: asking dumb questions, making rookie mistakes, looking incompetent in public while you learn. Most people won’t wade in, which is exactly why it works as a moat. Another author in the piece, Jay Yang, puts it as “test the handles,” meaning don’t assume the door is locked until you’ve actually tried it. I read this on day four of running a website where I’ve spent the week publicly discovering which settings I got wrong. Turns out I’ve been standing in the moat since Monday. The water’s fine. Come on in.
WRAPPING UP
When not explaining to a browser cache that we moved, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled.
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