is this forum Football or Chitchat?

mostly football with a bit of chit chat which is great imvho

The number of posters is now so low, if someone doesn't post for a couple of days they're organising search parties.

i am not surprised you think its great dragon as you are one of the convertors.......

Is this thread football or chit chat

indeed winja  whats your view.

if there is a view that it shd be football only i will desist from posting other threads

i dont understand why threads like cycling or motor sports are not taken over the new chitchat as they are hardly used.....i have no problem with a chit chat thread just seems the football thread is losing an identity....

should have said forums.......

Politics have taken the brunt of chit chat tbf

i tried to get chit chat going on the basketball forum sometime ago. needless to say it didnt work.

it does on this forum but i totally understand if there is a view thatbit shd be just football.

to me it just adds to theinterest of the forum

Chit Chatting about football

.... and other things

Did the old football crowd a) die off, b) go skint or c) get ****-whipped?

All three ..... C... then B... and finally A

The racing forum and this one are about only ones left with traffic, hence the more general chat topics appear here and there.

spot on stu

Saturday the only day the football forum see's any action. Virtual ghost town

There wasn't even a thread recently for a Man City Premier League game.

yet there was one concerning kate bush's ears and the quality of breakfasts in cafes......

i could not resist that set-up.....i am not a member of the forum police let anyone post what they want

Sums it up perfectly though, winja.

i thought the days of trawling on the forum were over

Trawling?

catching the fish in the net

Football forum should be all about football topics and football chat

Racing forum should be all about racing topics and racing chat

Rugby forum should be all about rugby topics and rugby chat

..... etc etc.

It`s not exactly Rocket Science.

All the Sports forums have been ruined by politics and other rubbish.

I remember when I considered the football forum a den for Neanderthals.. I sometimes look at the horse racing forum and feel the same..

Indoor athletics is a no no, then lol

The issue is similar to being in a bookies - yes, we're all there for the betting and the sport, but would the chat be limited only to that, probably not. If you wanted to chat about other stuff like what had been on tele or some other rubbish we'd chat about it.

Obviously most posts should be about the sport and betting, but not much problem with a few chats about other stuff people want to chat about.

Football forum should be all about football topics and football chat

Racing forum should be all about racing topics and racing chat

Rugby forum should be all about rugby topics and rugby chat

..... etc etc.

It`s not exactly Rocket Science.

All the Sports forums have been ruined by politics and other rubbish.


The other rubbish is the only thing preventing Betfair closing this forum down through lack of activity

Rugby forum should be all about rugby topics and rugby chat

If you pan down the first page of the Rugby forum for 100 posts, you manage to hit June 2021

And the rugby forum isn't even the least used of the subforums on here!

The problem is people have become used to posting on one particular forum such as football or horseracing and decide to post everything on there. I am guity of that myself but we really shouldn't be talking politics etc on a sports forum.

100% agree that politics and heavy news should be self censored off sports pages, but don't mind the trivia stuff. I have a so called mate who infests my phone with his odious politics to the extent that outrage is his default setting. I've red carded him numerous times and he's starting to get the message. This forum is a parallel universe.

it's honestly a big who cares, even 10+ years ago all the forums had off topic conversation, it really doesn't matter, just skip over it if you don't want to read it, it would be different if there were an avalanche of off topic threads but there's not, it's just sporadic so it's no big deal, this forum barely gets any traffic anymore so it's strange to see people complaining about it. I am very surprised Betfair haven't used this opportunity for low usage to close it altogether, betting companies do not like forums like this especially on their own platforms, Betfair only ever had one like ****, because they were an exchange, before they sold out.

betd@q, can't believe that's still censored

The football forum used to work like this:

- load up on a team at 2.5
- get a crony to put up a thread asking why said team are 2.5
- jump in with a tidbit of team news aka a ramp
- unload at 2.3

Someone posted on horse racing forum a little while back that, according to survey data BF collected, from the active users of the exchange I think it was about 3% reported being regular readers or posters on the forums.

So, you are right Die Linke to point out that it is probably now a historical fact that anyone could heavily influence a market by posting here.

What's left is some limited discussion, and some random posts OT.

I'd like to know the percentage of Betfair punters who are even aware of these forums.

Personally I can't see a thread influencing a price that much. I've seen many a thread with opinions on it that doesn't appear to have an impact on the price. Don't bet on horses so perhaps that is different, but hardly a blip on here.

Those stats seem completely wrong to me, Stu. Are you sure it didn’t say 3% had a winning account? Let’s go massively over the top with the amount of forum users there are and call it 1000. That would equate to 33000 Betfair customers. That figure must be substantially higher than that.

Kenbo - can't remember the exact poster, but it was posted on racing a little while ago, while we were discussing the forum on there. Pretty sure it was about 3% of the active users who said they were regular forum users, I know it was certainly a very small %

Not really hard to believe - if you look at some random points how many are 'viewing' the forum it's often very low these days. There must be far more actually using the exchange at the same time though with markets trading liquidity often.

Plus, 'viewing' doesn't even mean they are engaging in the forum, they could just open it and forget it.

Basically, a large majority of exchange players ignore the forum pretty much.

There’s about 4 million Betfair customers. That would equate to about 120000 regular posters/readers at 3%. It’s obviously nowhere near that. One in a thousand would be 4000 forum users and we know that figure is far too high.

Guess it also depends on definition of regular users and/or readers too...

I think we're basically agreeing that forum vs exchange use is extremely low, as a comparison.

Yeah. Tragically low. Possibly one in ten thousand users post on the forum. A shame.

Does anyone think this is due to the Post Office check or whatever it was they put in place that you had to do before you were allowed to post on the forum?
Does this still exist/happen?
I can see that it would put people off straight away as they would say 'if that's what I've got to do they can stuff it'...

I used to post on here for years, then they brought in some identity check thingy which I had to do to continue so I reluctantly did it.
Fairly sure it involved going to the post office with a code from betfair...
Nearly didn't bother myself so I can easily see how new customers won't join if it's still the case now.

the bottom line is profit, are Betfair making as much profit today as they were during the forum's hey day?

I always though when the forums were much more active, betfair itself were seeing much more custom, don't know if the two are correlated?

Didn’t have to do anything like that when I joined, Mad.

madhatter04 Mar 24 21:31Joined: 30 Jan 03 | Topic/replies: 7,521
I used to post on here for years, then they brought in some identity check thingy which I had to do to continue so I reluctantly did it.
Fairly sure it involved going to the post office with a code from betfair...
Nearly didn't bother myself so I can easily see how new customers won't join if it's still the case now




Never heard of any of this before in my 22 years on here.

OK boys, I have found my receipt for the above in an old wallet.

It was called a 'Betfair Funding Check', which is supposedly to check against fraud, making sure that you are who you say you are.
Maybe someone tried to access my account and betfair therefore needed to ensure who I was?

So it was probably just that I was temporarily banned from the forum until I had confirmed my identity to betfair.
I definitely remember not being able to post until the check had been done.

This involved taking personal documention to the lady in my local village Post Office with a password that betfair gave me to give to her to enter back to them to confirm who I was!

It is dated 11th Nov 2008, well over five and a half years after i joined.

Time passes and a certain amount of confusion creeps in...

You joined approximately 6/7 weeks after me madhatter. I vaguely recall a check (bill/passport etc) to verify my account after a while, but don't recall having to go to the post office to do this. I'm pretty certain it was via email or similar.

Thanks Aspro...maybe I'm not quite as mad as my name suggests (or supporting Luton Town would infer!).

Wasn't that the old system they called KYC? Know your customer?

In hindsight, a long distant ancestor of the current AC rubbish...

The 4 million betfair customers (1 million active) is from 2013, will be way lower now. Look at the liquidity on the EPL.

That would still equate to 30000 regular forum users at 3%. Where are they?