HornFans
| File:Hornfanslogo.png | |
| Online community | |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Founder | Katy Agnor & Bob Wheeler |
| Headquarters | Austin, Texas, USA |
| Website | www.hornfans.com |
HornFans is a University of Texas at Austin-focused online community that was created in 1999. It is the 22nd-most visited college sports website, 13th-most visited team-specific website, and the 8th-most visited independent college sports website.[1] The site has over 43,000 registered users as of December 19, 2006.
Hornfans was created as a partnership between Bob Wheeler and Katy Agnor, with an initial investment of $1000 from Agnor. At the time Wheeler was a relatively well-known contributor to sports message boards and crafted a bi-weekly Longhorn newsletter under the pseudonym "LonghornBob", and was to provide content for the site. Agnor was an accomplished web designer and was to program the site.[2] Disputes between the pair over checking account issues and site content led to a lawsuit being filed in state court by Agnor, and led to the eventual purchase of the site by Agnor. After mediation Wheeler, author of Forged of a Hotter Fire, reportedly received approximately $50,000 for his 50% share of HornFans.com, and subsequently opened the now defunct (but still registered) LonghornFanZone.com.[2] HornFans is owned and operated by Robert and Katy Agnor.[3]
Criticism
HornFans has a strict policy against personally criticizing players and posters agree to this policy before posting.[4] As is usual for BBS', moderators enforce it by deleting such posts and warning violating posters. Subsequent violations result in suspensions (or banning outright) of posters who go against this policy. One of the moderators admitted in 2001 that 620 total users had been banned as of that date, many of which were posters from other schools (trolls) and people registering numerous usernames in order to avoid administrative action.[5]
Historically the forums have often become inaccessible due to the heavy traffic during Longhorn games which overloaded the hardware. For many years the computer hardware was not upgraded, even when posters offered to donate to pay for more servers and bandwidth (in early 2008 the HornFans hardware finally underwent a major upgrade). Alexa.com rates the site speed as "very slow" with the average load time at 5.3 seconds.[6]
References
- ↑ Alexa: Sites in College and University
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Hornfans.com -- About us
- ↑ FAQ
- ↑ Post-loss BBS phenomena
- ↑ hornfans.com - Site Information from Alexa
