[Posting in AF for visibility]

G’day

It’s no secret that activity levels on this beautiful and once-vibrant forum are at all-time lows. If you’re reading this right now, it means you care even a little bit about this place, and probably have some ideas on how we can breathe life into it again.

Over in the mod subforum we've been brainstorming some ideas but really need a whole lot more brainpower, hence this call to arms.

I’d like to request 3 things from everyone:
1. How did you initially discover the forums?
2. What’s kept you around?
3. Any ideas for acquiring new users?

e.g. for me:

1. Article comments linked to the forum. This was how I and many others actually discovered the forum’s existence in the first place. I was a commenter for a good few years before even realising there was a forum connected. InsideSport still gets a decent amount of traffic who visit for the articles, and it seems like the lowest hanging fruit for getting new users involved.

2. Initially it was Joffa keeping everyone up to date with EVERYTHING. Legit, the FFT forums were almost entirely my one-stop-shop for Aussie football news because Joffa would scour the internet daily and collate all the relevant stories for everyone. Is there any way we can beg him to come back? (I don't know him outside of the forum)

3. Kind of already summarised above, but my two ideas are re-connect the forum to the articles, and bring back Joffa.

I know we're all a negative bunch sometimes, but can we please keep all criticism in this thread constructive/as positive as possible? No negative comments about other forum members here please - save that for another day when we hopefully still have a forum to express said feelings...

1: I can’t remember.
2: Pretty much all news and rumours are posted here.
3. Be stricter on trolls and multis and sack a certain new moderator.

1: I discovered the forum through links from club forums.
2: The news about Australian football and at times the dicsussion, what drove me away for long periods of time was the incessant trolling and attacks.
3: Having Ftbl/Inside Sport advertise the forum through social media potentially featuring a "comment" of the week or some such.

I found the forum by the comments section on the old fourfourtwo articles, the comments were synced with the article and the forum, at first I didn’t even realise there was a forum. I remember once that feature was removed there was a sharp drop off in user activity.

Since the merge, political bs has crept into the Australian Football section. Nobody comes on a football forum to read posts about women deserving to be bashed up, right wing/left wing bs. Keep ALL politics outside of AF and in ET.

Merge AF and WF into one forum (Football). Someone might come across this forum and discuss something like an Mbappe transfer, and then stay for other football discussion. Things are too segregated. 

Get rid of the rumour mill - allow rumours (from certain sources) to be posted as their own individual threads - this creates discussion. Nothing generates interest like player signings/potential signings - capitalise on this. 

Purge the obvious multis. Some might seem harmless, but they're experts at steering the discussion into the exact place they want it to go for other sentiments to be expressed (mainly political). 

100% agree with this

1. I was googling for something football related and came across the forum
2. When I first started visiting, this was my first stop for football info, rumours and updates.  Also I really enjoyed the banter and there were some really classic posts which really did make me laugh out load. Unfortunately, these have all dropped off in recent times but it is still my go to for football news and occasionally there is still great bantz, like paulbagz's Nuovo new dawn bitter stubby sig, which I still laugh at. The forum it is now becoming a bit drab and who ever though it was a good idea to make decentric a mod is either mad or wants to kill the forum
3. Probably need to make the forum "fun" again and people need to take a chill pill and not take it so seriously. It is a public forum. If you want new posters then you need to repsect their right to post even if you dont agree with them, trying to sanitise every comment and getting upset because people dont agree with your opinion scares people away and then you end up with no variety of comment or perspective. I know many people got upset with adthro (me included), yes he was a multi and probably pushed it too far in the end but I thought he was entertaining much of the time and miss the color the brain dead monkey used to bring. Of course it should also be safe to express yourself so abuse and inappropriate content should be moderated, no argument.

💯 to all of the above.

jlm 4 mod

-PB

A number of posters play in football and futsal teams.

It could be an idea to try and recruit many of these players’ teammates to 442 football forum. 

It's been quiet because we have had no Socceroos games for such a long time. When the WCQ starts again it will pick up. This period after the Asian cup is always a void where there's not much going on.

I'm only really interested in the Socceroos, I find the a-league a pretty boring competition. I only see it as a league for players to develop for the national team. Winning the a-league after a series of playoffs at the end of the season and having no promotion/relegation ruins the credibility of the competition. 

Once this WCQ campaign gets underway and I expect it to be on a knife edge more people will post on here. We're just in a barren period after the Asian cup where there's nothing going on in Australian football. Not to mention the poor results of a-league clubs in the ACL.

The period after the Asian cup is always like this.

442 gained a lot of traffic and new members when the articles were linked. 

Constant new blood assists breadth of discussion. 

Most of your post I agree with Zord, apart from the HAL being boring. 

What we we need are ideas to draw interest. 

At one stage, Kevin Airs organised other staff to interview footballers like Ljubo and Dylan MacAllister. Then they went on the forum to engage with 442 punters for an hour or so. 

It seemed to generate interest. 

Can this be reintroduced? 

lol I have several ideas but mainly one system idea that would convert it to a crazy forum. Not sure how you would populale the old data into the new database though.

How you would drive any more traffic then their currently is though. I have one idea for that though. 

this is smart. what happened to being FourFourTwo ?

In my new system al new posts from al over the baord can be accessed through a 'recent posts' board.

New articles would also end up there. there would be a live recent posts area where all new posts whether they are diff categories or not 

posts are streamed live. 

One big problem for the Forum is how hard  it is to use on mobile, it's probably impossible to convince anyone from Inside Sport to upgrade it again though.

Completely on the money. 

I would add that I'd like to see the ban hammer used for once and certainly a lot quicker on some of the more fucked posts. That recent rant that inferred woman deserved to be bashed was one of the most fucked things i've read in a sports forum and was allowed to stay for way to long. 

Ok so my idea is use NodeBB

I have comprehensive knowledge of this system except merging databases between different forum software, but there is multiple ways to do it with Nodebb. I could possibly help someone do this. However, I have written plugins for this forum and have in depth knowledge of it. from writing theme's and adding jscript to make it do what you want.

The main thing with this forum is that it is very unique and streams posts from al users live. So for example, if someone posts it pops up on the screen as soon as it happens.

Addressing some of Bowden's points.
1. Article linked to forum. OK driving traffic. I suspect using twitter or something like that and marketing the board on that "talk football" talk.insidesport.com.au. Or something that would work better.

2. Nodebb has an RSS auto post plugin that does the dirty work for you and grabs the latest up-to-date rss feeds and checks them the set hours.

I can help implement a ratings system, with achievments and etc. One of the contributors recently created a fully fledged system

I have used this forum for quite a long time and have enjoyed using it despite its shortcomings. The real reason I think it has died is that generally the hype since 2006 has tailed off severely. I still however enjoy checking up on what is happening footbal wise then come to the forum and see what people are saying. 

Perhaps someone could help me implement this new system. 

NodeBB is complete 100% responsive, as long as you don't change the main template to much. 

Banning ppl aint going to do shit.

1 Found it via the old 442 website.

2 Aussies Abroad is an absolute joy and any significant news is always here pretty much first. This is an absolute escape for me while living in Germany enabling me to keep up with all things Australian football.

3 linking and even just mentioning the forum to others in conversation. I have a lot of conversations at work and we often refer to what people have said in forums. 

Personally I'd like to see everyone make more of an effort to go to world football and Asian football instead of using Australian football. It's a fascinating phenomenon on so many forums I've seen that new threads always get opened on the Page with the most threads and arguably most attractive title. I'm as guilty as anyone posting AFC results in the national team thread as no one will really read it in Asian football.

Extra time is good value but definitely goes off the rails a bit at times. 

Does Ljubo still have an account? :D perhaps people have also left to simply watch and enjoy all the different channels on social media now. 

If you had the 'recent posts' category, every one of these threads would come up in the top 10 recent posts. My idea with using NodeBB originally, was to pull in all the latest new popular articles and topics into one central thread (recent posts)

But obviously still have the categories layout as well

Agree 100%. There was another post where someone said women are too crazy to be in positions of power.

People, especially women aren’t going to post here if odious shit like that is tolerated.

1. By fluke looking at ftbl website.

2. Most of the people here have something interesting to say. I’ve learnt a lot about the off the field stuff I would like to talk about on the pitch performances more.

3.more creative topics instead of the the same threads criticising the ffa and promotion and relegation 

Let me know if you want to integrate NodeBB. I've written plugins for it, to integrate facebook / twitter & instagram posts just by pasting links. 

https://github.com/highkick05/nodebb-plugin-facebook

I perhaps have some time after exams finish. If you can work out how to pull in FOurFourTwo's forum database into NodeBB , that would be a great start.

Perhaps give that a shot first then I can help with the rest. 

Another awesome thing about Nodebb is the image (media) plugins and being able to just post links and then have the forum notice the markup and just embed the image on just a link. Giphy plugin also. Some of the plugins are insanely useful for this type of forum

I joined way back in the early 442 days, when Joffa was the inspiration. I was here under another name, which also had Canberra in the title, for a few years, then with no Canberra side in the A-League, drifted away. I came back after a number of years away in the long lead up to the last World Cup, maybe in mid-2017,  as I love the Socceroos and also for the discussion around Canberra possibly getting into the A-League again. I have no interest in the A-League now and only am interested in the Socceroos. When i have tuned in lately, I have noticed an awful lot of bitter twisted freaks, pushing all sorts of nasty political crap. Both left and right wingers. They should bugger off and find a political forum. I don’t, sadly, have any ideas how to energise the forum but will give it some thought.