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History of CougarBoard

In 1999, Ben Peterson (brother of former BYU quarterback Charlie Peterson) bought Ysite.com. There was a board called CougarTalk that was part of that site at the time. Just before the deal closed, the previous owner of Ysite.com decided to keep CougarTalk and make it a separate domain, so Ben did not receive that message board as part of the transfer. In late 1999, Ben started BYUBoard.com (seen here as a link from Ysite.com).

In 2001, El Jefe started working for Ben. He found out about this site called byuboard.com that Ben was running on the side, and started posting. There was a big problem with trolls, especially around the time of the Utah game, because you didn't have to even log in to post - you just said what your name was as part of the posting process. In late 2001, El Jefe wrote a new version of the board and made it so you had to log in, and also added the "ignore" feature.

El Jefe partnered with Total Blue Sports to buy the site from Ben on January 30, 2003. In October 2003, we stopped using the domain byuboard.com after receiving a request from BYU to stop using the trademarked term "BYU" in our name. El Jefe purchased Total Blue Sports' share of CougarBoard in May, 2005.

Since then, CougarBoard has gone from averaging a few hundred posts per day to a few thousand posts per day. We've added other new features, like direct messages ("boardmail"), post of the day, a mobile/responsive site design, friend groups, user groups, dark mode, and many others.