Some new people have arrived over the last week or two, so I thought I'd offer a general update.
I've hired a programmer (the one who did the arcade here) to do the stats engine to my specs, as well as intergrated game functions and management to cover our College Pick'em and March Madness contests here.
I have a thick stack of stats from the university, and they're being entirely cooperative trying to get the rest. Worst case scenario is probably play-by-play level detail for the last decade or two, and less going back. But I hold out hope, all the stats are out there somewhere, and there needs to be a resource that makes them available. That's how I've been describing the BP functionality I seek, as an unofficial media guide.
I want to be able to click a few buttons and find out what our average offensive scoring was in the 4th quarter of all home games in the 90s was, and then pull that info directly into a post on the board.
The programmer is part of the vBulletin community. The stats engine will be as integrated with everything else as the arcade is. Likewise, the 'portal' software I'll be using to create the front page, and various content pages, is already done and ready to go. It will be as seamless a part of the forum as the stats engine will, likewise, the stats engine will be a seamless part of it.
I *have* made some moves to introduce a news engine as well to all of this. My original interest was not to also do news because it's done so many other places, but I think there's definitely room to consolidate articles from both around the OSU fansite community, and from the greater internet as well.
Anyway, I expect the stats engine to be online late April or early May, but we'll probably be running and testing beta versions of it much earlier than that. Inviting you all to test and try to break all aspects of it.
By next Fall, we will definitely have more than just a forum here, but for the time being, I'm glad if people get something out of even just that. Enjoy yourselves here, BuckeyePlanet is a community, which is to say that its shape is influenced entirely by the people who comprise it. Our rules and expectations, as well as our direction, will be shaped by community desire and mores. That's easier than you might think, sometimes less is more.