1) I found FourFourTwo and looked for a forum because I couldn't believe there wasn't one. It's been downhill ever since. The broad range of topics and range of people to argue with kept me around. The forum has become increasingly boring and dominated by multi's and has been poor since the big personalities left (long-term users will know who). 

2) There is no other forum I like bar the newcastlefootball one and I get my news here since I deleted Facebook. I have also posted too much to let fade that post-count into meaninglessness.

3) Make me moderator. Converge the sub-forums. Make the forums and website more accessible and obvious. Ban multi's. Find Joffa. Bring back the Touchy Subjects thread. Find the old users who weren't chickenshit. Connect the forums through a podcast that includes me. Bring back that time when Ljubo posted on here for a Q&A.  

So there are all sorta of views here ranging from types of posts, marketability and added functionality of the forum. Plenty to work on

Sensational engagement so far. Thanks everyone <3

1. Recent posts category / thread.
2. NodeBB Soundcloud plugin, converts link directly into embedded soundcloud widget. 

1. Article on the Nixs.
2. Wellingtons uncertain future 
3. Better admins.

Right, that'd be good to have the recent ones keeping things popular and current. A lot of interesting things seem to disappear onto page 2 and 3 with other silly things getting bumped up. 

Agree with this 100%!

442 is much better with a desk top.

 

I'll have to look this stuff up. No idea what it even means. 

I think you could be right.

I hate to admit it though.

It's just like purchasing shit on Google Play or Itunes man. Easier (quicker) access the information, more likely person will , well in that case purchase the product.

Ecommerce 101 these days 

NodeBB is brilliant. I originally thought this forum went that way, but doesn't look like it did. You could copy the theme layout, pretty easy. Colours etc.

It's plugins make posting super easy. Has image upload from within the forum editor. Can even create groups and displaly the badge, i.e. for those in M80 group.

Victory, Glory , Newcastle... do the math there

Make recent posts. the home page, and then market the posts over twitter. Twitter user 'clicks' the link, drops them right into the 'recent posts' thread on FFT forum.

Option to browse all the 'latest' posts. Yes, yes its brilliant, thank me later

Ahhhh I remember fondly my arguments with that Sydney FC supporter troll forgot his name and I offered him out and he never showed up I wish I knew his name ! I had the convo on my sig for ages !

Number one would be to fix the mobile website. It's unusable because you can't quote anything so it makes it hard to have a discussion. Also, for some reason you can't easily scroll through pages. If the thread is only 5 pages long or so, you can't click directly onto that last page - you have to scroll through which eats up time and data. It's minor but using the forum on mobile is pretty annoying.

I think there's alot more competition now. Reddit has a pretty sizeable A-league community (about 11k subscribers) so I imagine that's cut into the userbase. There's club forums individual fans (eg. forvucksake for Victory fans), twitter is alot more prevalent and there are groups like CAFF on facebook. 

I don't think the forum is any more toxic than it used to be so I don't think that would be driving people away. People forget those annoying m80 years and the endless quote pyramids. There doesn't seem to be the constant shitflinging between users like there used to be like Afro vs. Notor, or Gazgoldcoast. The forum is relatively tame now. 

Highkick may have a lot of good ideas, except they exceed my knowledge of technology.

This was the first thing that came to mind.

If u have someone who sorted out this forum, pretty sure they could merge it across to NodeBB. I could setup a whole new server

NodeBB can be difficult to setup originally. I could tweak plugins with some server access

Literally I have done everything with NodeBB. Geotargetted forum categories by country, specific widget embedding by forum category. Done it all.

The inside sport header, probably easy. NodeBB has custom script bits in the admin panel, just add your code there. 

+1 (or whatever it is to this).

Also, jlm 4 mod.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wVty-kewGII

Nodebb looks interesting indeed. 

I'm a first time poster, but I have been lurking these forums for almost four years. 

1. How did you initially discover the forums?

Four years ago, I was looking for information about A-League expansion and the "A-League Expansion" thread was one of the things that came up in my search results. I decided to browse through the thread and as a result, I've been lurking this forum since. 

2. What’s kept you around?

Interesting topics.

3. Any ideas for acquiring new users?

I can't speak from other people's perspectives, but for me personally, the one thing that discouraged me from creating an account on here sooner is the hostile, troll-like behaviour that quite often occurs on these boards. It's a real turn off. For instance, there's a sizable minority on here who constantly talk sh*t about the "mono-ethnic" NSL/NPL clubs and post the same, repetitive garbage about how they are not open to people of different ancestries. I realise that people have their own opinions and I respect that, but there's no need to shove your views down other people's throats and disregard the viewpoints raised by others. To be fair, that doesn't happen as much now, but it used to plague these boards back in 2015-2017 and that was the main reason as to why I didn't create an account at the time. Those "new nuvu dawner" comments are a real turn-off as well.

If the moderators/admins stamped out the troll behaviour that occurs on these boards, the forum would gain more new members. I'm sure of that. I enjoy reading most of the posts made on this site, but there's a few on here who ruin the forum for everyone. 

COYS! That was great value.

I'd be happy trying to help out by linking latest articles from around the place, but the sad truth is that this forum is merely reflecting the decline in interest in the A-League across the board.

Less people interested, less media interest, fewer people on 442.

Totally agree with some of the main points on here.   

Comments on the articles going straight to the forum seems to be how you get members,  without this it is dying out.  I think this is how I got here. 

Find some way to converge the forum sections better,  everything except Australian football becomes invisible and it chokes discussion. 

Forums in general are struggling against large social media so it's an uphill battle...  Good luck. 

There's still the tail end of news articles on facebook that a lot of people don't bother commenting in fb. Primarily, because there's like about 250 comments on some major news articles (1K on some)

I could setup NodeBB on my home pc here (think it is already) and see if I could merge the forum.db posts into it if u could send me a dump of the .db ?

Then I could try design the theme of the forum similar to this one (pretty easy) has a custom style.css area that overrides the original.

Then I could send u a link to access it and you can see what you think. Could also provide a how to post on new forum features. 

Just message me if you want, I have exams so would probably be after this anyway.

THATS THE ONE ! hahahaha 

#bringbacktheSIGS

1. Recommended by a family member
2. Used to be the one stop shop for football news.
3. Encouraging people for posting relevant articles on football (in line with what joffa did), merge asian football, aussie football, aussies abroad  and rumour mill into one forum. Cracking down on multi's, troll comments (for example every article having new dawners mentioned) and even people talking off topic would be great. Nothing worse than trolling through pages of two people arguing about something when you just want to discuss the topic. Trying to make the forums at list a little bit more positive too, at the moment even articles with good news gets turned into something negative somehow. Once this is all done, people will come back because all their football news will be in one place

1.)  Through the old comment section on the 442 website

2.) This is my main source for football information and I find it easy to use on mobile

3.) Less trolling and stupid arguments. This is the main reason I stopped posting and just stuck to reading the articles/interesting insight

I agree with 433, I don’t think the forum is anymore toxic than it was back in the day. If not less so.

i find it interesting people want Joffa back, I remember people constantly shitting on him so i’m not surprised he left.