Tuesday afternoon I posted the girlhoop.com/dunkers page to three subreddits: r/nba, r/wnba, and r/IndianaFever. By that evening only one of the three was still up.
r/nba — removed within an hour. No surprise. r/nba is strict on self-promotion and reference posts, and I expected that one to die on contact.
r/IndianaFever — stayed live. Small sub, specific to one team, welcoming to a piece about a Fever-adjacent player (Aliyah Boston's NCAA dunk history came up in the thread).
r/wnba — stayed live for about six hours, drew 4.4K views, 17 comments, 38% upvote ratio, 0 net upvotes, and then the sub removed it.
I want to write about that six hours, because it's the exact argument for owning your own venue.
what happened in those six hours
The community didn't upvote the post — they showed up to correct it. The top-voted reply (18 upvotes) called out three wrong claims in a single comment: Juju Watkins has not game-dunked at USC or Sierra Canyon, Kamilla Cardoso has no NCAA or WNBA dunks. All three pulled from the confirmed list and moved to the watchlist within the hour.
A Sparks fan asked for a Li Yueru dunk clip. Couldn't source one — moved to watchlist.
A Liberty fan pointed out Natalie Williams' dunks were likely in the ABL (Portland Power, 1996–98), not the WNBA. Entry reworked. Same fan surfaced that Michele Van Gorp dunked in Liberty practice in 1999 and possibly Margo Dydek too.
A top-1% commenter (Mercury / Dream fan) added five names I hadn't had: Mo Billings (attempted Unrivaled), Kiki Iriafen (practice video), Brittney Griner's Unrivaled first, plus two corrections pulling Angel Reese and Tina Charles off the watchlist.
A French commenter introduced me to Alicia Tournebize — 6'3", South Carolina, daughter of former WNBA player Isabelle Fijalkowski, first French woman to dunk in a game. Predated Malonga. Added to the confirmed list with full credit.
By the time the mods removed the thread, the community had done four hours of volunteer fact-checking and turned my top-10 reference into a better top-10 reference.
then it was gone
r/wnba's rules are what they are. Reference posts generally don't survive there, and the mods are entitled to curate their own sub. No grievance with the decision.
The grievance is structural: every one of those corrections belonged to Reddit the moment it was posted, and disappeared with the thread. If I hadn't been taking notes in a second window and pulling them into girlhoop.com as they arrived, four hours of collective work would have vanished.
That is the case for this BBS.
what this BBS does differently
A reference site needs a discussion layer. A discussion layer on Reddit is one mod decision away from being deleted. A discussion layer on Twitter is one algorithm change away from being invisible. A discussion layer on Facebook is one policy decision away from being unsearchable.
This BBS is none of those things. Every post sits on a server I own, in a database I control, mirrored nightly to B2 and a Backblaze-backed archive. The thread you are reading will exist ten years from now regardless of any platform's mood. The corrections that arrive here won't disappear because a sub decided.
The r/wnba thread produced better work than the original post. That work is preserved here, in girlhoop/11 and on girlhoop.com/dunkers. The Reddit thread preserved nothing.
That is why we have a BBS.
If you have a clip, a correction, or a name I missed — post it here. The venue won't remove you.
— paul / ~terry