If you take a moment to look at some of the bigger football club forums currently on the internet today you’ll notice one growing trend that has become somewhat of a nuisance in recent years. That nuisance is of course known to many as the “dreaded diatribe.”
These 800-1,500 word (and sometimes longer) posts regarding everything from club finances to player debates have turned many football forums into places where fans come to write their own football novel. Instead of making a quick point and letting everyone else chime-in on the discussion, these long posts end up turning fans off from the topic and away from future comments from said poster. In the end, short and sweet usual works best when trying to get your point across to someone.
The short and sweet idea is definitely part of Goalpostr.com’s mantra. The website’s main goal is to bring football fans together from all over the world to a site that’s built on making astute and insightful comments regarding your favourite club (or any other club for that matter). You are the pundit, and everything you say on the site can — and will — be seen by your peers.
The site very clean and easy to use. Once you’ve signed up for an account (which took me all of about 2 minutes) you can head straight for the homepage. Goalpostr.com currently has club pages for every Premier and Scottish Premier League club, as well as club pages for the Championship, League One, Two and the Conference.
Once you’ve found your respective club page you’ll then want to figure out something to say. Unlike most sites, Goalpostr.com has a 500 character limit — so make your words count! If you want to talk about the loss over the weekend and the shoddy play at the back, you’d then type up a brief analysis and post your thoughts.
From there other fans of your club and members of Goalpostr.com will be able to view your post. If they like what you have to say they may leave you “respect”. More respect equals…more respect! Like most things in life, you want the respect of your peers. The only way to do that is to make a comment that users may find insightful or interesting.
The site then takes the amount of respect your post gets, plus other factors to come up with a level of “interestingness” that shows the most interesting posts of the day for each club on the site. You can then view the most interesting post for your club over the last 24 hours, 7 days or 1 month.
Here’s how Goalpostr.com describes the interestingness factor:
It’s a calculation we use to work out what are the most interesting posts on Goalpostr at any given time. We include the number of times a post has been respected, the number of friends you have and the amount of time since the post was made, and other variables. We try to keep things fresh, so we will change the algorithm we use from time to time. If we need to make a major change, we’ll try to involve the community in our thinking.
There idea of using an interestingness factor should lead to two things: shorter posts and more insightful comments. The shorter posts should then lead to more in-depth discussions. At least that’s Goalpostr.com is hoping for.
Another big plus behind the interestingness factor is that it allows you to take a quick glance at what members deem to be the best posts of the day. Forget having to wade through post after post on a regular football message board to find a good debate or insight comment.
The site claims they’re in the process of making some new upgrades over the next couple of months, but at the moment those upgrades aren’t as important as finding more users for the site. The more users they have going forward, the better the posts and variety.
Based on my time spent on the site, I found Goalpostr.com to be a refreshing site. I’ve already recommended it to some of my mates and would be more than happy to suggest the site for you as well.
Add Sportslens to your Google News Feed!
