Forum and its future

[Neil]

I firmly believe that the forum should be moved away from the main site. Actually, Jackie makes many decent comments, but the subsequent “banter” often degenerates into personal comments and mild insults. This does no favours to the club, but equally, dilutes the relevance of comments. The forum has almost no constructive debate because nobody wants to upset the club’s management, and yet the fans have opinions and the forum is not representative of what you hear around the ground. A lot of what Jackie says is very true and relevant, but nobody listens. People should question the status quo in any walk of life. Separate the forum, set some rules and keep it away from the club.

[MichaelD]

Agree totally with your comments. Down here on the south coast, Lewes, Bognor Regis Town and Worthing, amongst others, all have 'unofficial' fan forums. The fact that they each have far more output than Hitchin's website suggests one or more fans needs to be prepared to devout a significant of time to the site.

[Piltdown]

Agree with the comments
There have been plenty of reasons given by people as to why there should be a change of management ,but not any decent argument why he should continue, it just ends up with the pro manager group slatng anyone who does not agree with them

[SimonP]

Some interesting points. On a very practical level, having been set up (I presume) by the club and managed (again, I presume) by a club volunteer, if people feel debate on the official forum is stifled by this there is nothing stopping them setting up an alternative forum for discussion if they are prepared to devote the time and confident there is demand for such a platform. My feeling is that debate is not stifled by the official nature of the forum . It reflects very deep sense of loyalty to some of the key individuals and whilst as a relative newbie to supporting the club I do not necessary feel that way, as a realist it seems to me that whilst we lack a sugar daddy (meant in a gender non specific way, in case there are any rich women who fancy ploughing money into the club) our management face a real battle to compete with our peers. That said you only have to look at our financial statements (available online through companies house) to see that most years he is putting in his own money to make up the shortfall between what we earn and what we spend. Whilst the debates on the forum clearly show some personal frictions underlying them I think there have been some pretty weak arguments flying around in critical camp specifically the FA Cup disappointment being the fault of the management (maybe coming after the heroics against Needham Market, the team struggled to lift themselves again, it happens) and that the club owes us the fans a duty to be more financially transparent (not sure why we would want to advertise that to other teams, agents who apparently operate at this level). On the latter point if I was running the club I would not be releasing more detailed financial information. I do not know the history of what I euphemistically described as personal frictions but it seems to me given recent disputes about the nature of the radio commentary and season ticket holders having money to burn those seeking to raise critical questions about the management and direction of the club would do well to communicate it in a way that does not needlessly antagonize fellow supporters.

[Peter_Barnes]

Good post, Simon.

[anthony.brown]

After realising that all comments on the forum can be viewed worldwide on search engines, I have become much more careful about what I say. Having said that, the recent World Mental Health Day reminded me of some of my posts in lockdown, which were very dark! Luckily everyone could see that many were having the same problems. So, I agree that we need a fresh start; whether that be in-house or independent I'll leave to the experts.

[DarrenW]

Also in agreement.

The forum being directly connected to the club does the club no favors at all.

The controversial posts will continue but at least it's completely out the clubs responsibility and becomes views taken are in no way connected to the club.

[MichaelD]

For anyone who is interested in seeing what an unofficial fans forum might look like:

https://lewesfc.proboards.com/thread/44 ... -road-ruin

Worth looking at even if it is only to read about one of the owners of Lewes FC putting in £600.000 per annum to reduce the losses made by the club. Lewes is supposedly a community owned club where 2000 'owners' pay a fee of £60 per year.

[Becca1980]

TapaTalk Groups, ProBoards and Create-A-Forum are free, I think for a small fee you can even use your own domain rather than one with tapatalk/proboards/createaforum in it, the advantage with those 3 is that they are 'hosted' which means they maintain the software and ensure it runs - the administrator just has to do the front end stuff like organising the forums etc.

If you start a new forum with your own hosting, the 'self hosted' route, which is how this forum is set up, you have to manage the software yourself, if you don't have any experience of phpBB, SMF or myBB which are all free, then you have to make sure you do regular back-ups in case something goes wrong, although in most cases things only seem go wrong when someone starts playing around adding things without trying it out on a separate test forum first.

Some clubs have gone down the Facebook Groups route but I personally prefer forums as with social media if you wanted to go back to a certain topic a month later you have a job to find it, on a forum it takes just a few taps.

I don't think there are many clubs who still have official forums like we do, they caused too much hassle at some clubs when posts got removed etc, off the top of my head I think Forest Green Rovers is the only pro club that still has an 'official' forum, I can't think of any others apart from us in this league.

Would an unofficial forum get more members and activity on it than this forum?
Or would it just be a way for members to make posts without having any self control because they know it's moderators don't have to ensure it's kept clean?

If it would get more members and activity it's worth going down that route, the self hosted route would allow you to have local business's pay a small fee to advertise on the forum, I don't mean intrusive ad's that slow things down, I mean neat and nicely done, the money generated from that could be used to cover hosting/domain costs or something like the forum sponsoring a player - a good way attract more fans to join the forum, using phpBB's group settings you could charge members a small yearly fee if they didn't want to see ad's - the advantage of that being they would have to log in for the ad's not to show which increases the chances of them actually making a post.

I didn't realise there were people out there who don't post because it's an official forum though, if you have a look at most non league club forums that still exist, not many of them seem very active these days, it's not just us, so I think if the unofficial route is taken - it won't be any more active unless people are willing to put the time and energy into making it successful.

[Cat Daisy]

There are plenty of unofficial non league fans forums - and most of them are about sacking the manager! Plenty of critics of Gavin Rose on the Dulwich forum for example but I don't know how much that discontent influenced his ultimate departure. Only that at least some club officials were aware of the disquiet.

This forum served a different purpose when it used to have the in-match updates back before the commentary team was a thing, and also used to publicise the weekly bulletin. So that was a "semi-official" purpose that no longer exists. Cut the forum loose but it will require a moderator or two. Although can you see where that is going?!

BTW the Lewes thing is depressing and is a reflection of the point Chris made about every club having to have paid employees etc and meet largely unnecessary rules and regulations. I am more and more convinced that "the pyramid" is actually a bad thing and is driving more and more clubs to pay money they don't have both on and off the field. (And the quality of product is often appalling at the levels above so be careful what you wish for about promotion .)