I haven’t given Northern Illinois Sports Beat much thought lately due to all of the commitments with working two jobs and such. But for those who have lived under a rock for the past 2 years, here’s what’s going on …

I announced after the Fall of 2013 that NISB’s content portion — the sports stories and the like — would shut down in favor of a new website about Sterling, Rock Falls and Newman sports. The message boards would continue to survive.

I came back to Sauk Valley Media in the Fall of 2014, and thus abandoned the NewRocSter Sports concept (which never really got off the ground due to family and friendship commitments). I decided to keep the message boards open, but warned everyone there that my commitments to running the board would be minimal due to the demands of the new journalism job.

This past winter, I reiterated my lack of commitment on keeping the message boards running. People kept telling me that no one is posting on the board anymore, as if they wanted to know if there was something I could do about it. I made those points perfectly clear in the announcement on the boards that I was going to “cut the rope” and let it drift. I also made perfectly clear that if someone wanted to take over the message boards, that they could contact me and we could set it up.

Simply put, my life, professional, and sports commitments have become greater demands than that of running a message board.

I have become recently aware that the message board’s database includes the emails of message board users. Having not maintained the board for quite some time, that has essentially left this information virtually untouched and free. This leaves such information open to the evildoing computer people out there in this crazy world. That being said, I really CAN’T let the message board simply drift off to nowhere with all of that informative cargo on it.

So here’s what I’m doing to do about it …

Again, I will make an offer to anyone on the message board … If someone would like to have the torch passed on to them, I would be willing to do so. HOWEVER, this NEEDS to be done before December 31, 2016.

If I do not receive an offer for the handoff of the NISB Message Board by December 31, 2016, then I will effectively shut down the message board.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see a local high school sports message board out there. One has existed for our area for nearly 20 years. However, if I don’t find a willing taker by December 31, I’m shutting this thing down.

And those are the final plans for NISB.

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