Welcoming The Talking MMA Community To Fightful

Sean Ross Sapp here, Managing Editor of Fightful.com.

Over the coming days and weeks, you’re likely to see some new names and faces show up on our Disqus boards. We’re welcoming with open arms Talking MMA, at the recommendation of a respected friend and longtime mod, 777. 

Disqus has never been my strong suit, and I’ve wanted a committed community since we launched, and I’m really excited to see how it works. We’re always striving at Fightful to improve our coverage, and your input is important. We have James Lynch — who interviews as many fighters in the game as anyone, Showdown Joe– a longtime, respected member of the media,  David Tees– our news and live coverage workhorse, Carlos Toro– quickly becoming one of the best boxing writers in the game, Joe Hulbert– specializing in features that have caught the attention of fighters and wrestlers. Myself and Jeremy Lambert are also on staff covering news, and our team are open to picking up some events that you’d like for us to cover that maybe we haven’t in the past. 

If you want to be better in tune with our video coverage as well, we launched a dedicated MMA & Boxing channel in the recent months where we post podcasts, individual fight review clips, social media posts, news videos, interviews and a lot more. 

Below is a post from Talking MMA announcing the move. We welcome you!

(Originally posted by Sadowolf)

Happy new year to all the members of the Talking MMA community, new and old!

This is a very important message, as it concerns the future of our community. New years are often met with change, whether sweeping or insignificant, and this one in particular embodies the former. From this point onward, Fightful.com will be the new home for our community! 

This decision was not made hastily or without much careful consideration from us active moderators, and after much deliberation we decided that it would be in all of our best interests to embrace the move. Some of you may already be familiar with Fightful, whether for MMA, boxing, or pro wrestling. If you’ve checked out their MMA section, you might notice something about their community: they don’t really have one. This is where we come in! We essentially have a blank slate to fill on a well-run, already established fight news platform! What does this all mean?

More News Content
We appreciate all of you in the community who stepped up and took the time to create posts about MMA news and announcements. However, we all have other obligations in life so news articles never came consistently, and often in short bursts followed by stretches of absence. With Fightful we won’t have to worry about finding and posting the news; just discussing it. While this does mean that we’ll no longer have the ability to post news that isn’t on the site, I think ultimately the benefits will outweigh the drawbacks.

Podcasts
Fightful does a live podcast after every event, and that just gives us another platform to discuss the sport we love. In my experience, being live, they also sometimes address the comments section.

Disqus Ain’t Going Nowhere
I’m sure most of you who came from the Junkie community remember the disappointment of MMA Junkie adopting a new comments system. It reset any rep you had as a poster, people initially weren’t even allowed to use their familiar names (I remember I had to be sadowolf88 or something for a while haha), and the new platform just plain wasn’t and still isn’t as good as Disqus. Well thankfully Fightful uses Disqus for their comments, so everyone can have smooth transition over!

The Pick ‘Em Competition Lives On
Some of you may be thinking “We had finally gotten a full year out of the pick ’em competition, and now we’re moving to a new site?” Not to worry, the competition will remain a staple of our community. I don’t know the details, but we may even have some organization and recognition from the Fightful itself. It could be similar to how MMA Junkie used to acknowledge their reader pick ’em tournament and its leaders (before the change in commenting platform screwed that up too haha).

What the Hell is Still Happening?
One thing I was anxious about was whether the move to an established site would facilitate my “What the hell happened?” post-fight recaps, and I’m happy to say they that will continue on Fightful. I do them because I love it and you all seem to be fond of them as well, so I’m happy to be continuing that tradition!

Easier Moderation
Most of you don’t know the situation with site concerning administration, but it’s a mess. Those of us who are active mods (which has been just me and 777 for a while now) have no real control over the site because the original creator deleted his account and disappeared, and the new admin left and won’t affiliate with the site anymore. This meant that we were unable to do things like create new mods. Moreover, this place has become inundated with spam. I occasionally find and delete spam articles, but 777 deletes up to five articles every day. And not to mention the restrictive language rules on this page, something else we can’t change that won’t be a problem at Fightful. With this move we’ll have much more control, directly and indirectly, over the community…in a completely non-tyrannical way of course.

 

So there you have it, there’s the big news that you were totally not waiting for because we never teased a big announcement! Hopefully you all can see this as a positive change and we can pick up right where we left off in the new digs. Whatever your feelings and/or questions, feel free to discuss them in this thread. I remember being reluctant to start visiting this place regularly after Junkie, but it eventually became home, and I hope Fightful can create that same feeling for us all. In the meantime, if you’ve never been before then check it out and get a lay of the land; we won’t be able to send invites to you all like we normally do, but as long as we follow you on Disqus we should be able to take you in threads, and you can do the same. Otherwise, we’ll all have to get used to just visiting the site regularly to stay up to date (something I always have to get used to with new sites). I know it could be a bit overwhelming, but we hope to see you all there!