Essendon Bombers on Yahoo!Groups
This post is part of a series looking at the AFL fandom on Yahoo!Groups. It focuses on providing general historical information about these groups: When they were founded and activity levels. For a critique of the problems on Yahoo!Groups in getting demographic information, read Sydney Swans on Yahoo!Groups and The AFL on Yahoo!Groups.
This post is about the Yahoo!Group’s Essendon Bombers community.The Essendon Bombers directory on Yahoo!Groups has twenty-one mailing lists. Of these, fifteen are actually about the Essendon Bombers. The lists are ultimateessendonbombersclub, bombersrule, essendonsofficialyah00club, marksessendonfansroom, essendonunknownandforgotten, bombers4eva, gobombers, thewindyhillbombers, bombersofficialyah00club, the-bombers, babybombers, essendonbombers, ihopeessendonchoke, thebomberfanclub, and essendon. Of these, three have never had any real activity (essendonunknownandforgotten, bombersofficial, and the-bombers), two have had one post (essendonsofficialyah00club, essendon) and six others have had fewer than ten posts (bombersrule, marksessendonfansroom, gobombers, thewindyhillbombers, ihopeessendonchoke, thebomberfanclub). Two were created in 1999, eight were created in 2000, four were created in 2001 and one was created in 2007.
I added real posting from the lists together and created the following chart:
This community was active between June 1999 and October 2002. After that, the community basically died off with almost no posting. This period between 1999 and 2001 was one where the team had performed rather well. In 2000, the team won 20 games in a row. After that, the team did not perform as well. Compared to the other teams looked at, this pattern is a bit weird because of the drop off after 2002. The total volume, both in terms of total mailing lists and total posts, is also different. It makes that drop off all the more fascinating. The drop off in activity may possibly relate to other factors, such as the small size of the community on LiveJournal clones that were most active in the period immediately as this community went inactive. It will be interesting to compare the community creation dates on bebo and LiveJournal, to see if the population may have shifted towards those sites.