PLEASE READ: NorwichTalk's Last Season

[Canaryboy]

Hi all,

I've decided I'm going to knock this forum on the head at the end of the current football season. That feels like a good time to do it, because it allows for the completion of another prediction league season. 

Its one of several projects I have which occasionally take an hour of my time, or costs me £20 a month etc, and recent family planning has made be reassess stuff and departmentalise activities into 'hobby' or 'business', and this definitely falls firmly within the former. (Nobody is pregnant, but the plan is for that to happen).

If I can ever steal a spare hour I suspect I'll be escaping the smell of dirty nappies and heading to a pub to see how many pints I can squeeze into 60 minutes. I don't actually really do anything to this forum ('Current Canaries' board is evidence of that) but the problem is the number of hours I'd need to put in to get it active again and clean stuff like that up.

Thought about a one board forum, where the index is the main page (so no subforums),but ultimately I probably do need to cut down on domain names and hosting accounts and consolidate into something more manageable. Of the projects I've decided to sack off, this was definitely the toughest call. 

Really sorry for anybody who is left 'internet homeless' as a result of this decision, although if the Pink'un really isn't an option then Not 606 looked half decent and semi-active the last time I looked? I wanted to give people as much notice as possible, instead of just abruptly shutting down one day. End of season makes the most sense (so we're looking at 31st May 2018). 

Really grateful to those who have pitched in with stuff. e.g. Morty with moderating, Splutcho and then Flashdown with the prediction league. We gave it a decent go early on and rattled the Pink'un for a few months, and our biggest achievement was probably getting them to make some sort of effort to make their own forum more user-friendly. I'll probably end up creating an account on there, assuming that not holding the keys to a rival forum means they no longer have any reason to ban me for 116 years for my first offence. Perhaps this closure means Pink'un members can use signatures again. 

Made a few mistakes early on, our huge and complicated rule list scared a few people off and gave us a reputation for being too strict on here. Although contrary to what a couple of well known Pink'un posters often claim and will probably claim again when they get wind of this thread, only one member ever had a proper ban and that was Waveney! The second longest ban was 10 days, after somebody sent me a long message calling me a c*nt about five times because Splutcho locked his forum thread.... 115 years and 355 days shorter than my ban for sharing a link to NorwichTalk on the Pink'un. 

I'm also the wrong type of person to run a forum, I realised his quite early on, at least 2 once regular members are no longer on here due to arguments with me. 

When the forum closes I'm happy to push the domain name to any member who thinks they could build something on it, e.g. a blog, or local new sites, or even a forum for the entire city of Norwich, or even a Norwich City forum on open source software (which would make it much cheaper, and we may be able to work out how to 'migrate' posts and accounts from Invision to a free alternative). I'll give Hogesar the first refusal on this freebie because he'd be an easy person to transfer a domain to. 

Cheers, 

Canaryboy / Admin / Owner of Norwich City's 4th most active messageboard  :lol:

 

[GJP]

It'll be a shame to lose the place.

I don't think I'm ready to forgive you just yet but perhaps in time...

 

[Canaryboy]

Mate if anybody wants to take it they can have it, the problem is I made the mistake of using 'cloud software' where you pay to license the software on a monthly basis + for hosting. 

What I should have done is just paid outright for a license for the software on day 1 and then stuck it up on my own hosting. The difference would have been approx £25 a month if I include domain renewal costs vs something like £4 a month if I'd just shoved it on my dedicated server to share space with my biggest website.

If I'd just purchased the software license and hosted it myself, I could have just handed over the keys to anybody who could have run it for about the same price as one pint of lager per month. 

Circa-£300 a year is a lot of money for a dead forum, about £15 per year per active user in fact, but if I'd done it the smart way then the ongoing costs would have been something more like circa £40 a year to a new owner. Massive f*ck up in hindsight, because if the costs were pennies and the software was all paid for then I could just offer to hand over the keys to anybody who wanted it. 

I'm not shuttering it for money, but time. Well it does sort of relate to money, but not directly.... because my missus makes more than me, and I work from home, I'm going to basically be going part-time and holding the baby for 2 years to save us a grand a month in childcare costs. So its more about simplifying my life, becoming more organised and cutting down my working hours and accepting that anything which could constitute a 'hobby' is going to be going out of the window for a few years  :lol:

 

[Canaryboy]

It'll be a shame to lose the place.

I don't think I'm ready to forgive you just yet but perhaps in time...

I'm really closing it because I don't want you to bump that thread where I claim Maddison is the new Beckham. 

 

[GJP]

I'm really only closing it because I don't want you to bump that thread where I claim Maddison is the new Beckham  :lol:

We'll always know.

 

[Fenway Frank]

I’m gutted, real shame as it is a great forum for sensible discussion. I dont know how you need so much time “planning “ a pregnancy, I only needed a couple of minutes once a week ??????

 

[Canaryboy]

Well we've just accepted an offer on our house, and had an offer accepted on a new one, and obviously choosing a house at the age of 31/32 (her/me) is going to involve a lot of talk about how long the walk is to a primary school, catchment areas, local parks, etc. Our new house is more than twice the price of the one we are selling, so then we start talking about childcare costs etc when working out if we can pay the mortgage, etc. So yeah.... we've definitely been big on the planning. 

Basically I currently spend x amount of hours doing stuff and in the future will only have y number of hours, because of z, with z being the baby (hopefully).

I'd rather forward plan like this and give everybody 6 months notice, instead of finding out the missus is pregnant and start shutting stuff down the next week in a panic. 

A Norwich forum dies, but hopefully a Norwich fan will be born. A bit worried about that though as we're moving to a town where people either like rugby or Leeds United, and I can't stand either. Obviously I'd rather have an egg-chaser than a Leeds fans, what a complete disgrace that would be to the memory of 4 generations of Norwich City supporters who came before me  :lol:

 

[GJP]

 A bit worried about that though as we're moving to a town where people either like rugby or Leeds United, and I can't stand either. 

Should have planned that a bit better tbf.

 

[Canaryboy]

Should have planned that a bit better tbf.

My current next door neighbour's son has Barnsley FC tattooed on his forehead, its a minefield anywhere north of Sutton Bridge. 

 

[morty]

Its a shame, but fair enough, given your circumstances.

Forum numbers are down pretty much everywhere, theres a thread on the pinkun about Richard Balls' article that has attracted just over 3000 views after 4 days. To put that into perspective there was a thread about me a few months ago that attracted twice that  . The pinkun is a lot quieter (though no one wants to admit it) and I just think the forum format is slowly dying a death, the pinkun relies on about 20 regular posters (I don't include my mate Eddies Ray's fund thread as I view that as a completely separate entity to the rest of the forum) and then about another 10 moaning minnies that only show up when we lose. They are lucky in the fact that their core of posters seem to have a lot of free time on their hands.

We actually get some pretty decent read figures, its a pity more of them didn't post though. I look forward to a thread crowing about this on the pinkun, although they all deny reading this forum of course 

I won't be bothering with other forums, plenty of fun to be had on twitter 

 

[Canaryboy]

Plus about 2000 of those views are probably the same 25 posters checking every response. 

Forums are dying for a variety of reasons, unfortunately, even some pretty damn famous ones. Rise of facebook groups + mobile surfing main reason. Also, anything ad supported is becoming harder due to adblocker extensions (not that this has been a major concern for me as I never built it for that reason, I think ad revenue has covered expenses in 1 month out of 44 so far.... the first one  :lol: )

This place will actually have been going for 4 full seasons by the time it is closed, believe it or not. 

Anyway, we're still here for 6 months.... just thought I'd rather let everybody know where we stand well ahead of time, instead of popping up with the "we're closing next week" thing, or even worse people just turning up and finding it dead, which happens far too often online.

This site was launched just before a season started, so felt right to close it at the end of a season. 

I may give twitter another go when this place is has had its funeral, claim to fame last time was being blocked by George Galloway although from what I understand that's quite common. 

 

[GJP]

Suppose I may have to try the Twitter thing too. 

 

[Fenway Frank]

I’ve had a quick look at not606 and will probably register with them, not until we’ve all finished on here though

 

[hogesar]

Unfortunate but understandable. PM me Canaryboy, might be able to get it sorted. I unfortunately don't have time but might be a good project for one of my apprentices to get to grips with!

 

[Canaryboy]

Unfortunate but understandable. PM me Canaryboy, might be able to get it sorted. I unfortunately don't have time but might be a good project for one of my apprentices to get to grips with!

After Christmas Hogesar I will do a little bit of research into whether I can migrate posts + accounts from Invision's cloud offering to something open source. If I can do that then it is quite possible that I could hand over keys to a forum which will cost pretty much nothing to run. I really should have just used open source in the first place. 

I've not got the time to look into that just yet though! 

Will PM you after xmas about it. 

 

[hogesar]

Mate, I can probably write something to do it if theres nothing publicly available. Does the data for the forum posts use an SQL back-end? If so I can definitely write something that'll do it.

But yeah, drop me a line after xmas

 

[Canaryboy]

I need to check that.

You could probably bring a few users back just by sending out an email saying "under new ownership" in all fairness  :lol:

Twitter account hasn't tweeted for years either. 

If we can get this place on open source and running for pennies then you could stick 'a *your company* website' in the footer with a link to your businesses website. Presumably most visitors are Norfolk based, so a bit of free advertising. I do actually have analytics installed so could see how many visitors are local (haven't checked that for years either!).

Admin neglect basically 

 

[OldRobert]

Firstly my apologies for being absent lately.  Short spell under the medics having a nasty removed from my head (probably explains a lot).  All ok now.

Very sorry to read this although I can understand Canaryboy's dilemna.  Imo this is the only board where you don't get abuse etc. so I will be sorry to see it go.  Still as has been said there are 6 months to go, better make the most of it.

 

[morty]

Firstly my apologies for being absent lately.  Short spell under the medics having a nasty removed from my head (probably explains a lot).  All ok now.

Very sorry to read this although I can understand Canaryboy's dilemna.  Imo this is the only board where you don't get abuse etc. so I will be sorry to see it go.  Still as has been said there are 6 months to go, better make the most of it.

Glad to hear you're on the mend Bob.

 

[GJP]

  Imo this is the only board where you don't get abuse etc. 

Morty is mean and nasty to me sometimes.