While most of the above is true, it does beg the question why other club’s forums seem to flourish with their football related threads.
I usually have a peek at forums of clubs we are playing, before and after, and there is a decent amount of discussion/waffle/bollocks on football.
Maybe there’s only so many times you can say so and so is shite/head like a 50p piece/where’s the money gone.
And the reason this forum is mostly frequented by oldies is that the young these days can’t read or write!
Although I agree with most of what you say I think you are wrong about other clubs forums. As I am sure you know I visit other clubs forums regularly to see whats going on at our rivals locally/divisionally/historically. Very few even mention upcoming fixtures or if they do they are often no more than 2 or 3 posts in length.
With very very few exceptions other teams in our league talk little about football and many have no posts for days on end about anything, even pre game/post game although most do a matchday page where most of the post game quotes I take are from.
In our division the only clubs that have forums similar or more active than the TEF are probably only Coventry, Exeter, Luton, Mansfield and Chesterfield. A few clubs like Morecambe, Yeovil, Accrington, Crawley, Crewe, Stevenage have barely 1 or 2 posts a week if any!
I think thats more to do with the level we are at, the higher the leagues the more posts, interest, football related thread there are, pretty much commensurate to the level they are at.
As for interest I know its been covered a lot in the past and will be many times again...a LOT of fans lost a lot of interest after Preston at Wembley, I totally lost any interest for a year or 2, some have started returning a bit now but its going to be hard to win those fans back and playing how we did under Flitcroft was never going to do that.
As I hit about 35 I lost interest in football, Swindon, England the lot, that was around 2000 when the club was at a low point and the football dished up every week was pretty shit too. I went several years looking for results but not really being interested in watching games even when on live TV.
I moved away from Swindon in 2001 and slowly started getting my interest back after a few years but I needed that break to reassess how I was a supporter, it is wierd that as I have moved further away physically from the club that I have got back into STFC again.
We have had and will have lots of up seasons and down seasons but in the main in my 43 years or so of following the Town we have been pretty average/shit and only in about 7 or 8 of those seasons have I actually really enjoyed watching us and in about 7 or 8 of them I have utterly hated or totally ignored due to lack of interest.
Over the last 17 years since I moved away I have seen Swindon in person probably no more than 40 times in total, having to rely upon listening to inane chatter on the radio about players socks or hairstyles because the football is so shit there is nothing to commentate upon, and then when a goal is scored not knowing which team has eve scored it until about a minute afterwards. That has not helped things and actually disintegrates the listener from what is really happening.
I have been much more rejuvenated this season with iFollow. Being able to watch games from my computers day trips to Holland have brought me closer to STFC again, even through the thick and thin the good and the appalling I feel I am part of it again rather than seeing highlights and hearsay about games and how others see things, often very differenty that I see it, but thats football, its all about opinions but only about reasoned opinions not like the FB group which is only about slagging off Power/the club/the fans etc.
I actually find the TEF in the main pretty tolerant of opinions and very few are shouted down and most are pretty reasoned...long may it continue.