As you may have noticed, this blog, Morning Brief, and our ISC II blog, The Deuce, permit readers to post their own comments on any story posted, by clicking that little comments link below this post (the one that says “No Comments” at the moment 😉

A simple, one-time registration is required, much like that used at the Fastpitchwest Forum, where you pick a login handle and enter your email. You can remain anonymous by choosing a generic login, e.g. “fastballfan” etc. You then receive a password via email to login (which you can change to something simple the first time you log in)

If you’re like me, you probably find the login/password to be a bit of a nuisance. Why hassle with it? Well, unfortunately, there are little spam ‘bots that crawl the internet, posting advertisements and worse, so the login prevents that.

We love to hear what you think on any of the stories posted at Morning Brief, so we invite and encourage you to post your comments.

p.s. And if you’re one of those people that loses passwords easily, feel free to forward it to us, at savemypassword@fastpitchwest.com
where we’ll save it til you need it. Just be sure to add your name so we can locate it later, or send an update if you change the original password assigned.

We are pleased to announce the addition of a couple new moderators to the Fastpitchwest Forum. Our goal in the coming year is to provide more information through our forum sections, and to foster discussions in those forums.

ISC II Commissioner Blair Setford, from Ontario, Canada will be moderating the ISC II forum section, so you’ll be getting ISC II info straight from the top. Blair’s posting handle is “ontariofastball”. Blair hosts a very popular fastball website of his own, http://www.ghfl.ca, for the “Golden Horseshoe Fastball League”. Lots of great stuff there.

Brett Bresnahan, webmaster of http://www.minnesotafastpitch.com will be moderating our “Midwest” regional forum section. Under the umbrella of Minnesotafastpitch.com, Brett also hosts a number of team sites. If it has anything to do with Minnesota fastpitch, chances are, Brett has the info on it.

Please take the opportunity to welcome Blair and Brett as moderators for the upcoming 2006 season, and make them feel right at home. I think you will find them both knowledgeable and helpful.

We are working to line up additional moderators for some of our other forum sections, so if you are interested, or know of someone who would make a good moderator, please email me at jim@fastpitchwest.com

For those who might be wondering, we’re in negotiations with “Sledgehammer22” to host the 2006 Rumor Mill, in view of the overwhelming popularity of his 2005 forum section. He just sailed past the 8000 page view mark the other day. We’re waiting for a call back from his agent Scott Boras.

The Fastpitchwest Forum belongs you all of you, so we hope that you enjoy them, and take the opportunity to use them, whether it’s to share information, ask a question, or just comment on whatever the topic of the day may be.

We pass along the following note from Al Doran regarding the recent problems the Escribe site that had been hosting his mailing list:

eScribe is down and maybe out, maybe for good.

eScribe went down over a week ago, just as the ISC’s were getting underway. This is not the first time they have crashed and been down for more than a few hours. In June 2004 they went down and were down for weeks while the owner bought and set up all new servers.

eScribe is privately owned, my company has nothing to do with it. Al’s Fastball is just one of hundreds of list servers that make use of the services provided by eScribe. This service has always been free.

Last year in June we learned that the owner, Scott Paterson, was working with a couple of unpaid volunteers to keep eScribe going. He had to buy expensive computer equipment to replace the servers that had worn out and died.

This week we learned that they major technical problems and the prognosis is not good.

See Scott’s note to me today:

Al

Dead power supply and lack of financial support and non-paid volunteers. Going to try to fix it myself as soon as I have time, but really, with no end-user financial support, it’s most likely done for.
-Scott

This does not sound good.

Thousands of fastball fans miss their easy access to recent posts AND to a virtual gold mine of history on the game, posts from the past several years. We are encouraging Scott to carry on, which is not easy as he cannot receive email any longer @escribe.com, the system is totally down. We do write the occasional very short note to Scott at his work address but I cannot give this out, his employer frowns upon getting private email at his work place.

In the interim, we have been using Jim Flanagan’s TEMP site, as our only site for posting fastball news. That site is: http://www.fastpitchwest.com/alsfastball.htm

For now we are not calling it the TEMP site, its our only site at the moment.

We are looking at other options as the temp site does have some drawbacks, including the fact that the latest postings are at the bottom of the page and not the top. As well, if someone sends me a post and then changes their mind, its not that easy to remove the post in error as eScribe was.

Jim Flanagan has very kindly provided this site and I would most appreciate if you could tell your friends about it, many fans may not know about it. We have almost 2,000 fans on our subscriber list but we estimate there are at least that many who were looking daily at eScribe to get their fastball news.

Thanks
Al Doran