Western Bulldogs 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 posts looks at the Western Bulldogs. The Western Bulldogs directory on Yahoo!Groups have ten mailing lists. Of these, two are actually about the AFL team. They are westernbulldogsfootballclub and westernbulldogskennel. The first has 56 members, closed membership, an active moderator and is active. The second has ten members, open membership and has only had one message posted since its founding. Both lists were founded in 2000.
I took the monthly total posting volumes from both lists, added them together and created the following chart:
There were two major monthly peaks. One took place in November 2008 with 24 posts. The second major peak was in March 2001 with 16 posts. The November peak occurred a few months after the team finished the season as a preliminary finalist. The March 2001 peak was at the beginning of a season, after a season where the team had been an elimination finalist. In between these two peaks, with the exception of 2006, the team performed rather poorly. Performance here may be indicative of interest in discussing the team. Another possible cause for these patterns involves the administrator of the mailing list. As the admin needs to approve new members, it might be possible that from 2003 to 2007 the admin was not active in approving new members. There just isn’t enough data here to have a definitive conclusion.