He’s right we are witnessing the end of an era. He ran a great site but the craic is gone, all the best An fear Rua.

Was a great forum but was ruined by a small number of trolls and the usual shite stirrers in recent years! Saying that it with will be sadly missed. Many of the posters had a great insight in Gaelic games.

sorry to see this site go. Thanks An Fear Rua for all the news and insight over the past 12 years

I kinda see the difference between when a site starts up and a year or so after when the anonymous names start turning up and antagonising the forum. Early adopters are by and large decent people, but once a site gets popular, all multitude of people turn up either to push their worldview, have a rant, or deliberately try to “get a rise” out regular & new posters.

You see it on every comment section on every forum on the web. the prevalence of it is only controlled by the moderators & website proprietors

I can understand what he means about earning revenue from the site, saying he never made more than €10,000 a year. I run a few sites one which is global, with american traffic I get an average ad click every 9 page views, for my Irish traffic I get an ad click about every 100 page views.

The wider problem of the demise of online anonymity is exacerbated not so much by the presence of open identity forums but the rampant rise in usage of the internet.

When you go from 16 million users, to whom using some sort of handle was almost required, to 2 billion users in about 15 years then the understanding of self policing and responsibility vanishes.

If users can’t be responsible and self policing then they have to be made to be responsible and be policed and policing costs money. Small online fora can survive this without much expenditure, larger ones can’t unless people grow up.

On a wider scale this means that rather than bringing people together the Internet stratifies people, blowing some of the earlier ideals of the Web right out of the water.

A major pity that AFR is gone. Goes to show, the trolls always win. What began with informed, diverse discussion, was recently ending in acrimonious and often nonsensical arguments, much of it legally dubious. Good luck to Liam in his future ventures. Goes to show, the web is a dangerous platform, especially when people can post the most bizarre stuff anonymously. Some of the stuff in relation to the Limerick hurling scene was really out of order.

As a regular reader and extremely rare poster I’m sorry to see this go. However, so many threads descended rapidly into name-calling. Any upcoming Limerick or Clare hurlers in particular should be glad to see it go – the amount of abuse directed at young amateur sportsmen was unreal at times. Real pity as there was some decent debate there too if you could find it. Some enjoyable random non-GAA stuff too – such as this thread about Limousin cattle

http://www.anfearrua.ie/topic.aspx?id=436611

We were part of a very large site in the south east that was as big and had to shut down about 3 years ago for the same reason (Liam was a member).

To be honest, groups on Facebook kind of took over. Not worth the legal risk

It’s a pity the site has closed, I hope that an archive of the posts exists somewhere, there was a lot of funny stuff there. The trolls had begun to dominate on AFR of late, but the site itself was somewhat responsible for this, moderation wasn’t always consistent, lots of multiple aliases on the site, where trolls were banned they could re-register and post again in minutes.

Good marketing Opportunity for Paddypower now. They should step in and save it :)

Informed discussions ending in non sensical argumentative debates , I’m pretty sure I see that happening somewhere else lately , now where was it again…..

I think people should have to register with real name , photo and identity for online activity and when they are giving opinions , no matter how off the wall , they at least shouldnt be anonymous but I know that’s just personal opinion and not gonna happen any time soon.

I agree completely with his reasoning. Small online publishers are directly in competition with anybody who sets up a group on Facebook or other social media site on the same interest. They can tap into a huge membership whereas we have to struggle for every eyeball. Advertising / sponsorship for niche sites in practically impossible to find. I’ve been running Archiseek.com since 1996 and I reckon I’ve probably been approached half a dozen times in those years by a potential advertisers, and I’m proactive in trying to find them. In the same period, I’ve had lots of contact from lawyers about comments on the forums. It’s the main reason we turned off P45.net – it was costing money.

If I didn’t love it, I would have pulled the plug a decade ago.

Have to say the comments on Journal are a total dose lately. Almost like youtube. Seems a lot more relxed in the score section but still

Odd decision to just close it. With over 10,000 members he could have sold the site, it would be worth 5 to 10 grand at least.

Upgrade the site, improve the design and you could have a nice little earner for someone.

Bit of a whinger. The problem is the legal culture here. We need a free speech bit in constitution.