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.