This ones for you guys

[CJD]

The food, parking, souvenirs etc of one person going to 5 games a year is probably enough to cover at least 1 month for that website. And that's a conservative estimate. If just 12 people were offended by the message boards closing (again, very conservative estimate), the losses they would incur from closing the forum would have outweighed the cost of the message board.

I am unsure how much bandwidth that forum had, but high bandwidth forums can go for anywhere from 200 to 400 dollars per month.

I can't imagine it would be advisable to potentially alienate several hundred fans just to save a couple hundred bucks a month, so let's assume it was the ritziest of the ritzy servers, for whatever reason, and it cost them 1000 dollars per month to maintain that website.

They just told anywhere from 100 to 1000 active users to go **** themselves when they closed the forums. That is 100 to 1000 people who could potentially stop going to games or buying merchandise (as in the OP's case) purely out of spite for them closing the message boards.

Now, I also know there was some beer advertisement at the top of the message boards that I would occasionally accidentally hit, so that is more revenue that they threw away for seemingly no reason when they closed the message boards.

All this tells me is that it was not a financial reason for closing the forums.

Unless I am severely underestimating how expensive that website was, or severely overestimating how much a consistent advertisement from a major beer company (I want to say Miller?) would bring in.

My guess is some player or owner or some type of upper saw the website, was offended by some of the things on it, whether they be about the team or in the P&R section of the forum, and decided to shut the website down.

But I don't think they'll notice people not going to games, because that obviously was not part of their reasoning to begin with.