do any of you old timer members from the original forum remember it’s origins?
i’m interested in the history of the forum and how long it has been around (in various versions). i think it started originally as a ticat forum somewhere like 20+ years ago?
Yup. It was waaay back in the 20th century. It started with mail correspondence. I’d mail a letter to a fan in Saskatchewan and he’d get it a week later. Then he’d do the same, in kind. Oftentimes, he’d draw a silly picture or write a joke. That was the forerunner of today’s off-topic culture.
Now back then, if you wanted to copy and paste, you needed scissors and tape. Or maybe glue.
Bob Young and team popped up the Ticats.ca forum in I believe late 2003. I believe a separate CFL forum started after and at some point they merged.
As related and as I will cross-post to another thread, in recent years, I’ve made a recurring infrequent hobby of referring to the prior millennium as “ancient history” when speaking to somebody well under 30 about some matter. I just pulled this off on Wednesday at work with an employee who is only 20 years old. He totally believed it.
They hardly ever catch the dry joke when I slip it in, so I continue on.
My next objective is to slip in something about the last of the dinosaurs until about 1980 and see if they catch on to that line.
I also have been able to successfully tell them that back in the day sometimes when there was a traffic jam, we didn’t complain but got out of cars and danced until it cleared up, as depicted in the video for “No Parking on the Dance Floor.”
Ah as most of you here well recall, those were the days.
Some of these fans from the 20th century who are around have been on the Council of Geezers since the prior forum, for which I have been merely an Auxiliary Member since I learned about them and was given the password for meetings.
When attending their infrequent meetings, I pull up a chair and sit in the back to listen at when they sit in a circle in which every member shares a prudently grumpy rant.
Then after the rant is over, there is the playing of the toms for several seconds, and then the old football in his hands is handed off to the next member for the next rant. Occasionally they line up in an actual formation, using a centre and two linemen, and snap the ball, which is the much older tradition that is now optional.
It is virtuous to glean wisdom from such oral testimony of such seasoned older fans, and well, here the rest of us all are thankfully still here in 2026.
yea these are the details i’m interested in. this community has a pretty long legacy and i want to know the origin story. i might even write a bloggy thing about it if i can get enough enough info.
i am currently brainstorming further / expanded content ideas for our forum, including adding an actual static website. i was thinking of something like fan-related stories and history that any members can feel free to contribute to, as well as fan-based critical and statistical analyses (hello @BetweenTheGoalposts). i admit i really enjoy reading @HammerDunner’s blog too. the cfl.ca site is hogwash journalism and 3dn is an ad banner cess-pool that looks horrible (plus, neither have a discussion forum now hehe). i like the idea of fan-based perspectives too.
Interesting timing. I’m actually working on a blog post on the CFL’s website launch back in 1995.
The Tiger-Cats went all-in on a forum after Bob Young purchased the team. His MRX company eventually took over all the CFL websites and merged various forums. If you recall the Tiger-Cat forum on the old CFL forums had way more posts than the others - that was the legacy of the early Ti-Cat forums.
I am happy to see a resurgence of fan-created content on the web. It’s a fun community to be a part of. This forum is a key component of the community.
awesome!!! i’m super interested in this. yea i’d love to hear any details you have about the old forum and website. also, really looking forward to your post 
Broadly speaking, this trend is happening more across social media that are not mainstream social media. Reddit is a bare medium on this front.
I’m sure before too long the corporate machine will in fact try to package what would be branded as authenticity and by then will not be any more, but we are still far from that time in the cycle.
The reason for this trend, as I suspect, is that since at least 2022, we have been fed more corporate and formulaic drivel than ever in our lives by dominating algorithms that are no longer driving independent content.
To be fair most of that independent content, such as produced especially during the pandemic when some people clearly had way too much time on their hands for far too long, is utter crap (for those who believe everybody has something to say, that’s true on the surface, but you clearly have not watched enough YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok videos yet to know well otherwise like most people over a certain age).
But it’s better to sort through the independent voices, who do have authentic and compelling content, so as to find a solid bunch rather than to be bombarded incessantly with the same ol’ corporate and political lines (of most any stripe, mind you), against which more people are rebelling now.
also, i have the only existing backup of the old forum with all the old data. i haven’t been able to restore it yet because it’s so massive and the data is kinda messy. i think, at some point, i need to rent a server with a large disc space just to extract the database from the 12GB compressed file lol.
I’m not sure how this is going to happen, but I just feel like somehow it will.
For now, I’m passing this insight along to Captain Timbers at lunch today, and we’ll take it from there.
If there is some way we can loot such a server, of course I will update you.
yea this is why there was no way i was going to sit back and let it die when the league pulled the plug on us.
i’m not the best content creator or writer, but i’m good at the tech stuff and i’d like to make this forum better, or a part of expanded online presence somehow. i think fan perspectives can be more than just a forum and often provide a unique window into different experiences we have with our teams.
for example, our friend the hydrolic goalposts ticat fan posted a bloggy kind of topic on the old forum about his typical game day experience of going to a ticats game; this was during a losing streak and they had lost recently, so the post had a somewhat negative tone to it, albeit a sarcastic and humorous one. but it was absolutely hilarious to read, and really illustrated the passion of a fan and his genuine connection with his team.
Hydraulic goalposts. 
Inflatable goalposts. 
Ah it’s also true, and on which we of course will help, we also have those topics that won’t ever die and don’t need data transfer too!
Alright, carry on.
I am liking this idea! Would have me reading.
Thought you might like this screen shot of the early Ti-Cat forums. Bob Young didn’t only bring much needed $ to the league, he also brought an immense amount of technical knowledge. The Ti-Cats even had “fan journals” where we could write blog-like articles. I’ve included a screen shot of those, too.
The forum, from my research and personal recollection, predates the Ti-Cat forums actually. The second version of the CFL website (I think 1996) had a message board called “The Huddle.”
the ticat forum, and many other team forums existed separate from cfl.ca and was amalgamated when a company with some connection to Bob Young took over running the forums.
interesting. I always thought the Fan Huddle was the first. What was the original called and when did it start?
It might’ve been called that. I’m just going by memory. Ha.
haha this is amazing! love the screenshots. thanks for sharing 
phpBB - damn i hated that software. i was admin of another forum around the same time (1999-2004) and we used it.
They took very high risks in those days in ancient history in the prior millennium, you know.
Look right there under General that there is the Off-Topic General Chat.
And the Moderators Bob, Carolyn, Schecky, and Tyrone77 and others toiled for free under hostile conditions on the battlefront understandably from undisclosed locations in those days too.
Wow, what could go wrong on the internet!?
