New Ownership - Please make suggestions.

Hi all,

Apologies for the downtime yesterday. I’ve recently taken over the website and was in the middle of moving it to a new hosting provider. I’m still working on upgrading the site to make it more user-friendly and modern.If you’ve got any suggestions for the website or ideas on how to improve the community, feel free to drop them here.

Massive thanks to all the moderators and members who’ve helped grow this welcoming footy community.I’m keen to chat more and get to know the community once I’ve had a chance to sort out all the admin and boring stuff.Appreciate your patience.

P.S. I’ve turned the annoying ads off (I think).

Well done new admin for turning the advertisements off. They were quite annoying!

Welcome to Ozfooty as the new owner. I’m the previous owner who sold it to the guy you bought it off. I’m also Ozfooty admin and been activating new members, filtering out the spammers and bots. If you see my username you can email me and I’ll fill you in on a couple of problems. I tried emailing you but it came back undeliverable.

Nice to meet you, thanks for creating some a great community. Fixing the email is on my list of things to do this week.

I tried emailing your hotmail address outside of this forum it was undeliverable. But ever since the last time I updated the forum template private messaging doesn’t work. If you try to activate it the whole site shuts down and I had to ask the host to reset it.

Gave up emailing support. Protecting this site from spam and bots was also a big priority. Can explain more if you send me an email you can find under my username.

Thanks for the new ownership updates and work you are doing.

One suggestion I have is to clean up the topic threads a bit, there are some that have not had posts for literally years and I think a cull is needed to clean up the site.

Also can we get personal message option back?

Ads have been a PITA.
Welcome and good luck with your new venture.
A great site that has been around for a long long time.
hard part, it seems is actually getting members involved in responding to posts.
Some great posters and some good banter.Just need more to be involved.
I am not sure if the ability to talk privately with other members is availbale .But would be good.

As Bazza said, there’s a lot of unused threads. Perhaps you could bundle a lot of them up into just a few.

Such as? I had a broader view to attract a bigger audience. Hopefully the new owner knows how to use Google word search and other ways to attract participants in other sports and activities.

Another very annoying thing I couldn’t get the forum template to fix after the last update a few years ago was the quote function. It’s very annoying. If I am using my laptop or iPad it’s not a problem but my smartphone it’s very difficult

After quoting someone’s post to reply to it you need to click on the bottom red line under the quoted post. On a laptop or iPad it’s easy but on a smartphone you have to click on that red line rapidly to place the cursor outside the quoted text. A very tricky thing to do.

If you could fix that it would be great.

I have just had a quick browse through the list of topics on the site.Some have not had a response or post for over 5years.
Obviously , not needed.
But I find, and also did in a previous life here, find it very hard to get people here to respond to posts.
A lot seem reluctent to respond to post in regards to the AFL, Very few make comment on others posts unless it is about their team.
I am an unashamed South Fremantle supporter and a full on Fremantle follower, have been since day one.
I agree that the number of titles need to be culled, that will make it easier.
Also the number of alleged posters, is a problem.
Sites like this do not survive unless there are participants.
As I said before, I have had a past life here, and now exactly the same people are keeping the site going. I see very few new posters here.
To all the lurkers, come on, show us that you care about the site, regardless of who is running it. The site is a nothing thing with out posters commenting.
Frustration now been let out.
I hope the new owner see the problems and has luck in improving the site and the number of participants.
A response please Admin.

Well said Anchorman. ??

I gotta laugh at the amount of people saying cull some of the categories. Is that much of a problem for you to simply bypass them? Most of the quiet categories are at the bottom end of the forum anyway. Talk about first world problems in the extreme. Or most likely coming from past trouble makers.

If there is a cull of categories you end up with too many topics clogging up General and The Bar. I have moved many topics to where they belong.

I open up to Recent Topics and that’s all I ever look at. I wouldn’t even know what other topics there are.

Maybe reach out to previous regular posters who haven’t contributed for a while and also a number who got banned for having a different opinion to a previous owner/admin. We’ve lost a lot of good contributors

Definitely agree that lots of Topics that are seldomly or never contributed to could be either compressed or removed.

Lol showing the new owner how ungrateful you are to previous owners who kept the site alive for everyone’s benefit isn’t a wise tactic.

It has been set up similar to Big Footy with a wide variety of categories and other sports and life interests and those categories have regular traffic and activity on that site. Ozfooty needs traffic and probably modernising with some social media links to help drive new traffic and a new audience instead of those living in a bubble as evidenced here pushing for categories that aren’t being utilised to be culled.

Just out of curiosity DD, are you the new owner?

Needs a long long overdue tidy up..

The Bar Break and General News, wtf is the difference, no body sticks to it, cut it back to General News and Breaking.

AFL
Adelaide nothing for nearly 8 years,LMAO.. several others 3, 4 and 5 years,

You only need AFL - Dockers and Eagles and then a Thread for other teams.

Soccer, a total mess - even funnier most teams have not had single post EVER, , tidy that up A League and then Glory.
Have an EPL and an International - ditch the rest.
Basketball, one folder needed only.
Motorsport the same Cars and Bikes in one.
Racing the same Racing and Pacing(SFA Interest) one only needed.

[quote=“Bazza post=242061 userid=872”]Needs a long long overdue tidy up..

The Bar Break and General News, wtf is the difference, no body sticks to it, cut it back to General News and Breaking.

AFL
Adelaide nothing for nearly 8 years,LMAO.. several others 3, 4 and 5 years,

You only need AFL - Dockers and Eagles and then a Thread for other teams.

Soccer, a total mess - even funnier most teams have not had single post EVER, , tidy that up A League and then Glory.
Have an EPL and an International - ditch the rest.
Basketball, one folder needed only.
Motorsport the same Cars and Bikes in one.
Racing the same Racing and Pacing(SFA Interest) one only needed.
[/quote]

You’ve got a narrow minded view that West Australians are the only target audience. One recently returning member under a new alias always complains about lack of AFL interest, well your answer is cut it back to just Eagles and Dockers. That’s what the original author did with “the rest” clumped all together.

If you want to attract AFL enthusiasts you need a separate thread for each club. The new owner might want to make Ozfooty AFL focussed and the WAFL section might be relegated under AFL. Who knows but the new owner needs to get a decent return on his or her investment and that will require google ads lads and a bigger audience.

If the new owner wants to attract soccer, horse racing and motor purists, then I’m sure they would appreciate separate categories. I agree the ammo section could be trimmed.

[quote=“DD post=242058 userid=1749”]Lol showing the new owner how ungrateful you are to previous owners who kept the site alive for everyone’s benefit isn’t a wise tactic.

It has been set up similar to Big Footy with a wide variety of categories and other sports and life interests and those categories have regular traffic and activity on that site. Ozfooty needs traffic and probably modernising with some social media links to help drive new traffic and a new audience instead of those living in a bubble as evidenced here pushing for categories that aren’t being utilised to be culled.
[/quote]

You can’t help yourself can you DD…just proves my point. The new owner has asked for feedback and you have to interject when you don’t like the feedback.

If it needs more traffic then having an over opinionated admin/owner with a history of deleting posts, suspending or banning members for having a different opinion and voice was only ever going to decrease traffic. All while the same owner/admin suffered verbal diarrhea on nearly every topic and could say whatever they wanted.

This wasn’t welcoming to lots of new members and drove lots of others away.

Doesn’t take much effort to see how many regular posters haven’t posted for a few years.