What made 442 forums so successful was the fans. It was a proper place for engagement. We even created a fan led football show out of it. We had a commentary team. 

Granted most of us who led those things have gone on to other careers and have not really found the time to be on here all the time. 

When I look at the forums, I'm thrown off by the constant threads posted by the IS bot. If I post in a thread and then come back later to see the responses, but the thread has been pushed to the bottom of the page by the IS bot articles, I don't really want to bother. Forums are successful when there is genuine engagement and that engagement leads to something substantial. With outlets like Reddit and Discord, people probably get there fix on those platforms. This forum needs to come back to it's core. The way it does that is through a fan led process. We need to make this forum a valuable resource for fan engagement on Australian Football. 

It needs a proper mod team to start so they can monitor and overlook the boards. Then you need to develop a clear vision for what the boards will be and what they will drive. Once you have that, then you can start to think about all the other little minutae. 

I remember Graham Arnold talking about why he chooses players in the scottish league and he seemed to engage points only mentioned here as far as I've seen. Wasn't a smoking gun but i did wonder...

Have to wonder how many people at FA actively monitor some of the discussion on here, its such a useful source of information regarding aussies abroad and general fan sentiment towards current domestic affairs. I mean, its free info for them...
.

Great list. Number 3 is now called Round Ball Australia, for anyone looking for it.

wish these guys would do a regular podcast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB5FyC0gnxw&t=555s

in order

1. soccerwhos
2. the global game
3. A leagues of our own
4. A league off air
5. Box2Box
6. Make australian football fun society
7. Kossie and Dom Uncensored
8. Front page football

a lot of a league bias in the podcast scene. I don't care about european leagues though unless there are aussies

Podcasts have replaced our magazines and websites even. Podcasts for easy listening and resting the eyes.

I like the Optus Football with Schwarzer. BBC Football Daily but it depends who is on.

Suited and Booted but only when they have a serious guest on like Hill or King. Otherwise they're stuffing around too much. Socceroos official has had some poor audio quality and the player interviews can be low energy. Soccerwhos are trying their best and they have some good chats. Fox was good during Covid when Bosnisch told all his stories.

What are your favourite podcasts? 

yeah the collapse in football media has really sucked in Australia, I loved reading 442 every flight i caught. We still have podcasts now

That's a good idea. It might need a new thread though because I doubt anyone but the OP can edit the existing thread anymore. I bet if someone put together a new one and it was good Bowden would sticky it. 

My first flight to Europe was with a 442. Oh wait, I left it in the car and my best mate read it on the way back. 

Got it a year later. Still in box at parents home. 

Loved 442 in England in 2007. Had them on the train and national express all the time. Still remember the interview with Scott Sinclair on loan at Plymouth while at Chelsea. How times change. 

ah I see. Can they be linked in the remaining sticky (topics of interest) along with osuassies, the youth thread and perhaps the nst thread since they get a lot of traffic? (Sometimes they slip back a few pages and 442 pages take a while to load for me for some reason)

This website does generate some revenue from agent-funded player puff-pieces e.g. the most recent few Birighitti articles trying to get him an A-League contract. Not sure how much revenue that generates though. 

That was me, I unstickied a few to try and save them as most hadn’t had a post for months / years. 

Yer I’ve just got on and it’s changed lol 

what happened to the stickied threads? lol

442 seem to have the best analysis in england. Shame they aren't interested in taking things back

You're right. It's changed over time though to what it is now.

It's pretty much self policed these days which is nice. Fuckheads that come in new and try and troll are regularly ignored which is the key I reckon. (I think these type of people thrive on burring others up and when they don't get a bite they move on. (Probably telling their mates that it's a bunch of softcock, snowflake, woke dickheads so don't bother.)

I'm not surprised forums are having a resurgence. FB is hopeless and IG is full of the nastiest, most hateful people on the planet. The comments on any post by any woman are enough to make you despair.

Whirpool, which is a massive forum, is highly moderated which is where I go if I can't find an answer to something else on the net. Lots and lots of high quality discussion over there.

No text-based media site makes any money anymore. Banner advertising is completely dead and 'sponsored' articles are dying too. The only real pathway to make money (or just to break even) is to put everything behind a paid subscription. It's unfortunate, but that's the reality we live in. Everything as a service. Forums are relatively low cost as the data/bandwidth required is negligible when compared to audio/image/video. The maintenance related costs would be unavoidable. Setting up a forum is pretty basic these days. I reckon I could setup this forum in NodeBB over a weekend. Migrating data across is where it gets interesting. But starting from scratch would be a breeze.

Interestingly, apparently forums in general have been seeing upticks in usage and new users. People have become so sick of the cesspit that is social media. They just want to have an honest discussion about a topic. Can't do that on social media platforms. Not sure why, but this forum is surprisingly well behaved. All forums have their fair share of trolls and assholes, but even they are kinda tame on here. I've seen way worse behaviour on other (non-football) forums.

What's the point of ftbl? They stopped the magazine so if the forum goes would anyone click on the website? 

God I miss the magazine used to get it all the time when I was about to go on a flight at the airport 

ROFL !

here they come :) .... lol

Yeah maybe..... Whatever is the Version 2 of this place, let me know... Ill jump on if thats the case.  If this place all disappears "in the middle of the night", post something on Reddit ill find it eventually :)

I reckon they'll do a desktop review and go 'what's this costing us?' and 'what are we making from it?' and decide to pull the pin. They'd have to be making next to nothing from it you'd think. Then again it seems most of the content is scraped from the net and and posted holus bolus and AI generated so maybe it doesn't cost a lot to run?

I just hope we get enough warning to get some replacement thing up and running.

Cheers for keeping this thing going mate....  And props to Bowden for moderating btw.

I know I can fly off the handle sometimes but I love having this "space" to get shit off my chest. 

Hahahaah I dont mind mate.... I did try and use the below but cant seem to find a way to change it on my profile :)

I can mention to the ten other people in the Melbourne city forum that they can join here 😆

No stress mate. I'll stick with the one I just chose, reminds me of the Socceroos 90s kit haha

Yeah I checked myself. I'm almost sure that in the past if you hit that 'add image' it gave you an option to upload an image.

Also can the bloke using Mono's avatar change it to something else please. Harambolus(?) or something.

I have just checked and it looks to me like the 'add image' function has been changed to just the ones now displayed. I am sure we used to be able to choose to search for an image on our computers and nothing lets me do that now.

Might be a size saving direction for the forum hosts so they don't have to maintain a set of individual thumbnails/images - once chosen, we could delete the image on our computers so they are stored at the forum end.