Somebody told me there was a thread on Talking Horses about the demise of FF, and although it's a few weeks later, curiosity finally got the better of me, and I decided to take a look.
The first thing I noticed is that he should have said that there is a long thread on Talking Horses, and that much of the first page or two was about the demise of FF, :lol:but to be fair, even that is far more than we probably deserve.
The fact is, and rather embarrassingly to be honest, that we haven't quite yet ridden off into the sunset.
Our costs for the next two years should we choose to continue, will be close to £200, and for a forum in FF's situation, that is about £199 too much.
This sum of money is due in about two weeks time, and if we cannot get that sum dramatically reduced, then the forum we have now will certainly go, there's no doubt about it.
Of course the things I found most interesting on this thread were the views of people who have said they will be sad to see us go, and those who have a view on where we went wrong.
To those sad to see us go, thanks I appreciate that, and to those who have a view on where we went wrong, I know where you are coming from, I have known we have been heading for the exit door for years, but stopping that is very difficult.
I was most amused by the description of the "extreme right wing views" of some of our members, aimed mainly at me no doubt. I would counter that by saying that anyone who finds that to be the case, probably has very extreme left wing views, and is totally intolerant of people who have a different opinion, but probably the less said about that the better.
There are a large number of reasons that FF has died on its arse, and I'm probably responsible for quite a few of them, but by no means all of them.
We had a period of time where we had a number of members who it seemed, couldn't make a post unless they were slagging somebody else off. It seemed to me that they were the type of people who could start a fight in an empty room, and when you're faced with this situation, and you have them all sending you private messages blaming everyone else and demanding that this person be banned and that person be banned, that rather ferks up the atmosphere of the whole forum. The follow on from that is that a number of people decide to leave, and we certainly lost one of our long term and best members because he was sick to death of all the squabbling.
There are so many other reasons, the fact that we had done just about every racing subject to death a hundred times, and that we all knew most of everything we wanted to know about each other, and the fact that I didn't have a bloody clue who would win the 3.00 at Great Leighs, and neither did anyone else on the forum, they didn't know and they didn't really care it seems.
You can't force people to discuss races that they have little or no interest in, so we ended up with people who only wanted, or were only prepared to talk about the weather, politics, or the price of a loaf of bread.
We had, and still have a number of people who log in regularly, but who post once every pancake day.
I see someone has said that the forum was often closed to non members, I've had various people tell me that we should force people to log in, and that we shouldn't force people to log in, and the decision to do that at various times, was one I made. But sometimes you might see that you've had 50 guests and 4 members looking in, and I've wanted to know just who is looking in, just to make sure I wasn't ferking talking to myself.
You also can't post if you're not logged in, and it was supposed to be a forum after all, not a newspaper, so that's why I did that.
Anyway, what was almost the final straw for me, was when I saw we had not had a single post of any description, on any subject for four days.
That had never happened on FF before, and I guarantee it's never happened on here. On seeing that, I more or less gave up and started using Facebook a lot more.
That in turn led to people noticing that I had given up, and we also had the extortionate bill for the forum coming up, so it was decided that enough was enough.
We decided to close on March 1st, but then knowing that we didn't absolutely have to close for about ten weeks, we decided to stay around for the Cheltenham festival.
The Cheltenham festival revived my enthusiasm a bit, and at the same time, I realised that trying to switch to Facebook was a complete non starter, a total waste of space.
So here we are, we're still just about going, and we'll almost certainly see Aintree through, after that it's anybody's guess as to what will happen.
.
