HornFans

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HornFans.com, LLC

Type	Online community
Founded	1999
Founder	Katy Agnor & Bob Wheeler
Headquarters	Austin, Texas, USA
Website	www.hornfans.com

HornFans is a University of Texas at Austin-focused online community that was created in 1999. It is currently the 22nd-most visited college sports website, 13th-most visited team-specific website, and the 8th-most visited independent college sports website.^[1] The site has over 43,000 registered users as of December 19, 2006.

Hornfans was created as a partnership between Bob Wheeler and Katy Agnor, with an initial investment of $1000.^[2] Disputes between the pair led to a lawsuit being filed in federal court and led to the eventual ownership of the site by Agnor. ^[2] HornFans is currently owned and operated by Robert and Katy Agnor.^[3]

[edit] Criticism

HornFans has a strict policy against criticism of players or coaches.^[4] Moderators enforce it by deleting such posts and suspending (or banning outright) posters who go against this policy. One of the moderators admitted in 2001 that 620 total users had been banned as of that date.^[5]

Historically the forums have often become inaccessible due to the heavy traffic during Longhorn games which overloaded the hardware. For many years the computer hardware was not upgraded, even when posters offered to donate to pay for more servers and bandwidth (in early 2008 the Hornfans hardware finally underwent a major upgrade). Alexa.com rates the site speed as "very slow" with the average load time at 5.3 seconds.^[6] In late 2007, due to these concerns, several members parted to form a new website (shaggybevo.com).^[7]

The management of the site has also been called into question for a lack of general maintenance and attention to the site news. The news on the front page of the site is rarely updated. As of 14 May 2008, the front page of Hornfans.com contained "Top Stories" and "In The News" headlines from 1 March 2007.