Forum Revamp

F1-mania wrote:

Yeah, I think it officially closed on the first of the first 2012, but hung on a day or two beyond that due to it being holidays and that kind of thing. Remember trying to get the unofficial forum up and running. Still reckon Ridah did a cracking job on the site, but alas without any sort of influx of members it was never going to happen. Still love something to open up though, somewhere to vent would be absolutely crucial. Feels like there's something missing where I can pretend to be important and just talk all the shite out of my system that I couldn't bring out in general conversation for fear of being sectioned!

like where ?

Like the forum we are talking about, you fool.

Fuck I miss this place, well Stick Sports too, but just you gays guys who were always there to listen to my BS. I really wanted this to work out, but without Pav it was really fucking difficult because we'd just brainstorm for time before making decisions. I wanted to bring the old gang back together, I couldn't do it as I couldn't get hold of most of them. And the problem with having a forum like this is like...you'll never draw people in. Look at one of the biggest forums on the internet: bodybuilding.com. Did the makers of that forum intend for it to blow up like that? I doubt it, but it did and now the majority of the users on there are fat no avi phaggots who don't even lift. It's one of those vicious cycles: you want to build a community, but the best way of drawing people in is by having a community that interests people enough to join.

So yeah, I think I've changed a lot these past couple of years, especially my interests but I think my character has changed as well. I want to stop saying "I'm going to do this" and become the person who does it. There were times when I was getting emotionally beaten up, at school and at home, and talking to you guys would be my escape from all of that shit. What I'm trying to say is...I actually have no idea. SS was a fucking crutch at times and when things got difficult in my life I knew it would be there. Maybe it's good that I let go, shit I dunno. I'm doing ok in life now, much better than at school actually, but I would like for something to talk to some of you again. There has to be a way.

I will now sign out in true Choob fashion BOOBS SHEPP BUM WILLY CARDIFF CARDIFF CARDIFF AUSTRALIA SMELLS...respect my legacy *farts into hands* LATE NIGHT VENTING COMPLETE

Good lad the choob. Miss sticksports, even if it was just for a wee vent and then be done with it. I'm never going to be as active now as I was when I was 15/16, but considering I used to log on pretty much daily and have my standard 6/7 posts that's hardly surprising.

I always found the forum to be some form of productive release. I used to not be able to formulate an argument to save my life, but due to the ridiculous debates had with Glinn over the years I managed to sort that out, and am now pretty proficient at writing. Stood me in good stead so it did.

I'm also finding I'm not as up to date with everything as I used to be. I used to be able to tell you what cricket matches were on when; who was on form, who was out of form. Now I kind of stumble around, and kind of pick up on things more by chance than anything else. I'd basically consider myself less tuned in to current affairs than I was 3/4 years ago, as I simply don't care if I can't make a comment about it.

Basically, I'm getting sick of wasting my time in front of facebook. At least when I was writing some, albeit useless, I was having some kind of interaction and had the ability to express my views on different topics. I'd love to find something that I can use like that again. I can never see me being the kind of guy again who'll spend half his day on an internet forum, but something I can look at every couple of days and contribute to wouldn't go amiss if I'm honest. But, while I've had a bit of a look for a forum like that, I've always found they're either to big and you don't get to know any of the regular members, or they're too inactive and I get bored with them. I said I don't want to be spending my life on a forum, but if I come back 2 days later and there's been no new posts, that's not really any fun either.

F1 out.

Howdy lads, what's happening ?

There's a dubstep happening in my pants.

PAV YOU'VE BEEN ONLINE THIS YEAR MESSAGE ME OR SOMETHING SO I KNOW YOU'RE ALIVE JEEZ

I'M BUSY AS HECK I ACTUALLY HAVE FLU AS I TYPE THIS BUT I WOULD LOVE TO BUILD A COMMUNITY I NEED THE HELPZ

DUBSTEP IN MY PANTS

DUBSTEP IN MY PANTS

REPLY IF YOU READ THIS LETS DO A MOTHERFUCKING ROLL CALL

i have a site at http://aussiesportsforum.com/

Man I was out of it last night worst flu ever lol. Started reminiscing again ahhhh good times.

Hey guys, just had a look round at all the old forums, trying to see if anything was active. Been posting a bit on reddit (agsports), and reading some of bigfooty and league unlimited without actually posting much. Mainly, I think what was so great about stick sports was that there was a good mixture of serious analysis and just fucking around, with a good, medium-sized community. I think that's what's missing on most forums now. Anyway, if anyone is gonna start something up again, I'll be more than happy to go along with it. I figure enough of us would be in contact enough to get ~30 of the old crew back.

ag6858 wrote:

Hey guys, just had a look round at all the old forums, trying to see if anything was active. Been posting a bit on reddit (agsports), and reading some of bigfooty and league unlimited without actually posting much. Mainly, I think what was so great about stick sports was that there was a good mixture of serious analysis and just fucking around, with a good, medium-sized community. I think that's what's missing on most forums now. Anyway, if anyone is gonna start something up again, I'll be more than happy to go along with it. I figure enough of us would be in contact enough to get ~30 of the old crew back.

got my site going, needs members and i'm always open to ideas

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. I'm still alive.

King_Rizzy wrote:

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. I'm still alive.

Rizzy! How's it going?

Decided to go ahead and make one, just to see if it works. I'll try and get in contact with as many of the old group as possible, but if anyone else can, it would be much appreciated.
This is the url: http://sticksports.freeforums.org/index.php

you could have just joined mine and help me build it

kingkingston wrote:

you could have just joined mine and help me build it

I figure it would be better to have something that is distinctly 'Stick Sports', as it would be more attractive than a generic forum.

ag6858 wrote:

kingkingston wrote:

you could have just joined mine and help me build it

I figure it would be better to have something that is distinctly 'Stick Sports', as it would be more attractive than a generic forum.

well if you change your mind, you know where i am

Rizzle my bizzle fo shizzle.

I came across the 'Stick Sports Forum' Twitter profile accidentally and I thought I'd take a look on here hoping it'd be full of new posts, not quite... good to see there is still some sort of activity going on though. Crazy how long ago it was Stick Sports was active and how much has happened since then. I could be leaving home soon, I've started driving and more importantly Liverpool are actually quite good now. Doesn't feel like too long ago I was managing SoccerKangas in Rizzy's FM threads and having long discussions in the football threads. Real shame the old forum had to close, it was great to be able to go there and just talk about whatever, whenever. I didn't think about it at the time but it probably helped me a lot with writing, grammar etc. as well being one of the younger members at the time. I'm not on any forums now but it'd be nice if SS was still about, just to visit every now and again, but it doesn't look like it'll be making a comeback sadly.

Ah well, if this is to be my last post on here I suppose 101 posts is an appropriate point for me to bow out on.

*bows out*

smr101 wrote:

I came across the 'Stick Sports Forum' Twitter profile accidentally and I thought I'd take a look on here hoping it'd be full of new posts, not quite... good to see there is still some sort of activity going on though. Crazy how long ago it was Stick Sports was active and how much has happened since then. I could be leaving home soon, I've started driving and more importantly Liverpool are actually quite good now. Doesn't feel like too long ago I was managing SoccerKangas in Rizzy's FM threads and having long discussions in the football threads. Real shame the old forum had to close, it was great to be able to go there and just talk about whatever, whenever. I didn't think about it at the time but it probably helped me a lot with writing, grammar etc. as well being one of the younger members at the time. I'm not on any forums now but it'd be nice if SS was still about, just to visit every now and again, but it doesn't look like it'll be making a comeback sadly.

Ah well, if this is to be my last post on here I suppose 101 posts is an appropriate point for me to bow out on.

*bows out*

Yeah I'd been trying to get something together but it seems like people are happy to move on. Bit of a shame, but then again I guess 2-3 years is a long time and people have progressed into a new stages of life, with SS not being a particularly high priority for most of us. I do kind of miss being able to say what I really think without it being broadcast to my entire facebook friends list.

We did have the unofficial forum which worked quite well for a while. But, the issue with these things is that without the official link to SS we were never going to get a similar flow of members. The advantage we always had was that when a member left, another member would join, and therefore we always had about 60 active members on the forum who would post on a regular basis.

At a guess, I'd say each year we'd be losing 20 or so members, and getting in roughly 20. So as soon as people started leaving the unofficial forum and others weren't coming in the place would get less active. We managed to do pretty well til about april, but then we were in a group of about 25. As soon as a place starts losing activity, people start checking it less often, and everything spirals into nothing. The decision was made by ridah, after consultation with myself, that we'd simply close it down.

No doubt really that if SS was to start back up I'd rejoin. I spend too much time doing nothing, with nothing to fill up that time. Alas, the chances of that happening are slim. I know choob had suggested a reddit thread, and I remember somebody else suggested a facebook group, but chances are too much time has passed.

I always thought it was strange not only that SS closed the forum down, but that they wouldn't even put a link to the unofficial forum on the site. It's their site and they can do whatever they want but putting a small link somewhere didn't seem too unreasonable... Did they ever give a reason for that?

smr101 wrote:

I always thought it was strange not only that SS closed the forum down, but that they wouldn't even put a link to the unofficial forum on the site. It's their site and they can do whatever they want but putting a small link somewhere didn't seem too unreasonable... Did they ever give a reason for that?

From what I remember, Mute initially offered a fair bit of help with the unofficial forum and offered to put a link up, but for some reason that never eventuated. What is even more interesting now, is that Mute's rugby league site, http://www.zerotackle.com/ added forums. Because of that, I'm thinking that it's not completely out of the question that if a group of us got together, Mute may even be open to bringing back SS forums.

ag6858 wrote:

smr101 wrote:

I always thought it was strange not only that SS closed the forum down, but that they wouldn't even put a link to the unofficial forum on the site. It's their site and they can do whatever they want but putting a small link somewhere didn't seem too unreasonable... Did they ever give a reason for that?

From what I remember, Mute initially offered a fair bit of help with the unofficial forum and offered to put a link up, but for some reason that never eventuated. What is even more interesting now, is that Mute's rugby league site, http://www.zerotackle.com/ added forums. Because of that, I'm thinking that it's not completely out of the question that if a group of us got together, Mute may even be open to bringing back SS forums.

Are you on that forum? If you could ask Mute about bringing back the old forums we'd be able to get a group back for it.

I can join it, but I'm not sure that will be the best way to go about it. Plus you'd probably need a more 'respected' member to do it, like one of the former mods.

If SS ever decides to bring the forum back, I'll be one of the first on it. Wouldn't be investing anywhere near the amount of time on it, but unlike most places it actually offered a breadth of discussion rather than being orientated around a single sport. Unfortunately I think that ship has sailed.

If I recall correctly the reasons given to me for shutting down the forum were that too many queries were being directed through there as opposed to through the official SS channels. In addition to that, the way social interaction works has very much changed over the past few years. When I joined up it wasn't out of the ordinary to have something like a forum in order to generate interest and run things like competitions essentially in house. Now that we have Facebook and Twitter, it's really easy for SS to engage with thousands of people directly, and due to the way these websites work they can expand their customer base by thousands simply by people liking and retweeting content they put up. Essentially, as a company they had outgrown any use they had for the forum. Additionally, the forum took up considerable server space, and didn't bring in an awful lot of ad revenue to make it worthwhile to keep going even just out of kindness.

The size of the forum was never intended to get that big either. It was only meant to be for support originally, but grew pretty quickly due to circumstance. Things like the LSA and the FCL were added because people wanted them and Mute et al were happy to oblige.

We did put a couple of arguments towards mute at the time in fairness, who it must be said did see the merits of the community and wanted to keep it going in some form. For one, the forum was self policing. Between myself, Rizzy, Glinn, Shauny, Jawsey and the others, we were more than capable of running the forum without any input from any of the admins. We'd probably have needed a couple of extra privileges to be able to do things like adding forums, but those are small things. We also told them that it was a valuable resource for any people coming in seeking help. Obviously there were large issues that none of us could sort out, but there are little issues that people have that most of the senior members would know how to deal with. Therefore there'd have been considerably fewer issues for the admins to deal with. We suggested a referral system, where we'd act as a conduit to move major issues along, but that was dismissed because it would potentially take to long and they'd still have to monitor the forum.

If any of you want to throw the question out there, you'd have my full backing. However, Zero Tackle is not the place to do so. A few pestering emails are probably more likely to get some form of reasonable response. However, I'm not sure whether I'm willing to put in the effort to lead something like this at the moment.