Richmond Tigers 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 Richmond Tigers community. The Richmond Tigers directory on Yahoo!Groups has fifteen mailing lists. Of these, ten are actually about the Richmond Tigers. The lists are tiger_fury, sydrfc, tiger-talk, rfceyeofthetiger, RFC_Tigers, RFC-Tigers, rfctigerlovers, go_tigs87, feralrfc, and richmondtigers. Of these, one has no posts (rfctigerlovers), one has one post (tiger_fury), four have ten or fewer posts (rfceyeofthetiger, RFC_Tigers,go_tigs87, richmondtigers), one has 20 posts (sydrfc), one has 4,874 posts (RFC-Tigers) and one has 92,687 (tiger-talk) as of the end of 2009. If tiger-talk is not included, the average total membership to these groups is 22. tiger-talk has 477 members and allows anyone to join but new members are moderated. This keeps out the worst of the spam. The half of the lists were created in 2003. Two were created in 1999 and 2000. One list was created in 2005. Unlike the Swans, Bombers, Dockers and Bulldogs, this particular Yahoo!Groups population had some very active lists where the total volume on the list surpassed the total activity for all other groups. Adding the legitimate posting volume together across all lists, the following chart was created:
To be honest, the posting patterns here are closer to what I expected to find for most teams: Big spikes during the season with and overall decline in activity as the population shifted away from Yahoo!Groups to other services. That the minimal activity for other teams appeared to coincide with a team’s overall performance was rather surprising.
If I get the chance/have the time to go through and add data for team specific mailing lists not in the right subcategory, I may have to revisit some of the data I already posted to see if things change and more patterns like this one emerge.