North Melbourne Kangaroos on Yahoo!Groups
This post continues to look at the historical activity level of AFL fans on Yahoo!Groups. This time, the focus is on the North Melbourne Kangaroos.
If you look at the North Melbourne Kangaroos category on Yahoo!Groups, you will find ten groups. Of these, six of these are actually dedicated to the team. They are northmelbournekangaroos, themightyrooboys, nmfc, mightyrooboys, northkangaroosclub and thenorthmelbournefc. With the exception of themightyrooboys which was created in 1999, all the lists were created in 2000. The average total membership membership is 24. The lists all have open membership and have an ongoing spam problem.
I looked at the lists to determine when these lists had legitimate posting, added up the monthly totals across all six lists and generated the following chart:
The community was at its most active when it started. There were two small season drops during the off season with the community all but disappearing after the 2002 campaign. This some what resembles the pattern for the Essendon Bombers, though that community had more overall activity and a more extreme drop off in posting. It looks like this particular service was never embraced by fans of the team as one of their early means of communicating.
In order to find out legitimate posting periods for nmfc, I had to join the list. The list has 35 members at the moment. On topic posts to the list ended in January 2002. Spam posting started in August 2004. I decided to get membership demographics for the list since membership gave me access to a member list. Of the 35 members, only one listed their age or gender (57, female) and no one listed their location. (She joined during a period of legitimate posting.) Of the 35 members, thirteen or 37% joined during the period of legitimate posting. Four members or 11% joined in the period where there was no posting. Eighteen members or 51% joined during the period of only spam posting. That’s a big problem for any sort of attempts to revive the list. It is also a big problem for Yahoo!Groups and could explain why people who love mailing lists eschew their service. It also makes it hard to legitimately get demographic data off the service, unless the assumption is made that all people joining after the period of spam content are actually spammers and their demographic data can be ignored.