Sydney Swans on Yahoo!Groups

This entry was posted by Laura on Friday, 8 January, 2010 at

As mentioned in my previous post, Yahoo!Groups has a spam problem.  Open membership groups get a lot of spammers joining.  Capatchas do not seem to stop spammers from joining.  Absentee owners, often from groups founded five to ten years ago, mean that these spammers are free to spam with out any consequences.   Public archives are a great incentive for spammers to do this as others archive those posts and provide additional links for them.  Yahoo!Groups is thus a bit more problematic, demographic information wise, than blogger (where spammers don’t fill in that info), bebo, LiveJournal and Facebook.  It just doesn’t feel worthwhile to make the effort to get it.

That said, I still want to look at Yahoo!Groups and their history in Australia’s sports fandom.  The first team I am looking at is the Sydney Swans.  There are fourteen groups listed in Yahoo!Groups Sydney Swans category.  Of these, six are actually dedicated to the Sydney Swans.  These are rainbow_swans, sydneyswansfc, redandwhiteonline, sydneyswanscentral, judeboltonandthesydneyswans, and swanniesfansunited.

All the Sydney Swans mailing lists were created in a window between October 1998 and October 2003, with one created in both those months and the other four created in 2001.  (In 2000, Yahoo!Groups acquired egroups and by 2001, they had migrated those mailing lists over.  In 2001, Yahoo!Groups had also lifted the ban on adult mailing lists.  Neither of these events likely explains the 2001 surge in group creation.  Other factors such as general internet connectivity and ease of creation of mailing lists on Yahoo!Groups compared to other tools like majordomo probably do a much better job at explaining this surge.)

All of these mailing lists  are currently pretty dead, with the exception of occasional spam posting.   I looked at each list to determine when spam content started and legitimate posting ended.  The total posting volume for these lists was then gathered and the following chart was created:

Mailing list volume in 2009 was a result of activity that was taking place on rainbow_swans, a mailing list for GLBT fans of the team.  Volume across all lists peaked in September 2005, the month that the team won their last Grand Final.  This activity all took place on rainbow_swans.  The month after their victory, volume dropped from 49 to 10 but there was activity on three lists.  The second major peak was in August 2006.  This was a month before the team appeared in the Grand Final, which they lost.  The volume was ten less than the previous year and, again, all took place on one list.  September, when they actually played in the finals, volume was significantly less at 26 total posts.

Overall, activity levels for the team’s fans on Yahoo!Groups tends to correlate with the team’s overall performance and when they are playing games during the season.

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  • http://geopoliticallyincorrect.blogspot.com/ Adelaide Dupont

    Rainbow_Swans seems particularly interesting.

    And I see that it's a list for the fans.

    On sydneyswansfc charlottehatherleysbridegroom did all the match reports. A lot of this activity was late 2001 and early 2002.

    It would be good to compare different writers on the same games at that time.

    The legitimate posting stopped in 2005 with sydneyswansfc.

    sydneyswanscentral started with El_Canguro. And there were milestones like the leaving of Lockett.

    swanniesfansunited had some interesting personal talk, along with “sales and wants” of footy cards from 1984-1987. (Possibly the Scanlan gum cards). By 2006 it had become overrun with spam.

    redandwhiteonline is a newsletter. I do not know whether it has the same content as the print newsletter.

    I didn't see any material about Adam Goodes and the Brownlow Medal, which happened in 2006.

  • http://www.fanhistory.com LauraH

    At the moment, I'm not looking so much at content. I'm just looking for when the spam kicked it up and legitimate content dropped off. I just am not Australian so I don't necessarily know enough to do a deeper analysis of other things. (Hopefully, I can learn enough about it as I go along to be better able to contextualize events.)

    Rainbow_Swans was interesting to see, especially that it was still active as GLBT fans in the US have traditionally been marginalized or ignored. (Sports is viewed as the domain of heterosexual maleness. Gay and bisexual players threaten that. Added to that, in some leagues in the US like the NFL, the ownership is VERY, VERY conservative and support conservative politicians. It just doesn't get talked about as much because to do so would be to politicize sports in a way that could hurt their bottom lines.) I'm not sure how much that differs in Australia.

    Are the people involved in these ones that you recognize? As being influential in Australia's online sports fandom?

  • http://geopoliticallyincorrect.blogspot.com/ Adelaide Dupont

    No, not really. Not for the Sydney Swans, anyway.

    I may recognise some for many Victorian clubs (for example: Collingwood, Essendon, Richmond, Hawthorn) and for the West Coast Eagles, as well as possibly the Brisbane Lions and Adelaide Crows.

    Sydney has often been portrayed as a very GLBT-friendly city, especially because of the Mardi Gras and other events. (You may well have read about the Sydney Swans float which was established some years ago).

    The AFL has tried to be inclusive in regard to female fans, who often represent 40%-50% of the support base (who actually goes to the games). There are female commentators and umpires in the elite level.

    (If you had been following 2008-09, you would have heard of Kelli Underwood, who was the first female commentator on Channel Ten. Also, there is Sam Lane, who appears on several shows, like After the Game).

    Geoffrey Edelsten, who used to own the Swans in the 1980s, is often considered camp.

    The current CEO of the Swans is Myles Baron-Hay.

    Some Presidents from other clubs, on the other hand, can be very macho, for example, John Elliott from the Carlton Blues, who was also there from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

    And there are several players who have come out as gay/bisexual or have that appeal. We call them 'gay icons'.

    The current CEO, Andrew Demetriou, is talking a lot of talk about inclusivity at all levels of the game.

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