Coffin Corner Volume 41 Number 3

[TodMaher]

I do agree with Joe Horrigan. Having everything on the PFRA website (including the Forum) locked up so no one can see it needs to change.

What is your plan to make up for the revenue shortfall that you would get with the dramatic drop in membership when everything is free? It has already been proven that if it was free, people would not join. That was proven many years ago when the linescores were first put into the MO section. There was a sharp increase in membership immediately. The reason is simple: why pay for it? You are getting it for free.

The biggest expense is printing and mailing The Coffin Corner. Just publish it on the website or as a download if you want to keep it for member's only. It shouldn't cost more than $20 per month to host the website. You could probably come up with that just through donations.

I haven't seen any increase in membership since the early days of PFRA. As far as I can tell its been stuck in the 200-300 range since the mid-1990s.

[Ken Crippen]

I do agree with Joe Horrigan. Having everything on the PFRA website (including the Forum) locked up so no one can see it needs to change.

What is your plan to make up for the revenue shortfall that you would get with the dramatic drop in membership when everything is free? It has already been proven that if it was free, people would not join. That was proven many years ago when the linescores were first put into the MO section. There was a sharp increase in membership immediately. The reason is simple: why pay for it? You are getting it for free.

The biggest expense is printing and mailing The Coffin Corner. Just publish it on the website or as a download if you want to keep it for member's only. It shouldn't cost more than $20 per month to host the website. You could probably come up with that just through donations.

I haven't seen any increase in membership since the early days of PFRA. As far as I can tell its been stuck in the 200-300 range since the mid-1990s.

Every time we bring up eliminating the publishing of CC (electronic only), we get huge pushback from the membership. They want a print copy.

As far as membership, we saw a 10% increase in membership within 24 hours of me putting items in Members only. We saw about a 20% increase after a week.

[TodMaher]

Oh, well. I'm just giving some suggestions.

[Ken Crippen]

Oh, well. I'm just giving some suggestions.

We absolutely welcome suggestions. As a board of directors, we evaluate the suggestions to see:
-Feasibility
-Cost
-Amount of effort needed for implementation (impact-effort matrix)
-Overall impact on the entire organization (benefits a small group or the membership as a whole, positive or negative impact and to whom) (second part of the impact-effort matrix)
-ROI (not just revenue, but number of new members that are sustaining members)


We cannot implement everything (limited resources) and some suggestions are conflicting. We do the best that we can to evaluate everything and do what we think is best for the organization. We cannot make everyone happy, but we try to make sure the organization moves in the right direction. If the membership disagrees, we will find out on election day and the new board members can take control.

[Reaser]

Something that's changed from a decade ago is google search results.

Used to search for something and more often than not there would be a PFRA (Coffin Corner) article about it and it would be the first or one of the first results on any search engine. After we moved sites those all became broken links, I believe. And I notice now when I randomly search for something I never really see anything PFRA/CC come up. Then I come directly here and find it.

e.g. if you google "Pro Football games with no Touchdowns" JWL's article should be one of the first results with a link to the article.

---

For the forums, just speaking from my personal experience. I found the PFRA when it was on the old, old site (maybe 3 sites ago?) when it was more message board than forum. Would read discussions there occasionally then forgot about it for a while and when I went back the PFRA had moved and searched and found the new forums and would read topics of interest but still didn't join (the forum or the PFRA) until later on. When I did have a question while signing up for the forum I figured might as well just join the PFRA altogether and did both (don't remember exact date, late 09/early 10). So the forums being free to view/no signup necessary was something that had me checking in for a few years before I finally joined. Surely there would be others that would be similar if they could view the forum without having to signup.

What we have had and have now is sort of an in-between. You have to sign-up for the forum to see it, but you don't have to be a member to sign-up for the forum. It's kind of the worst of both worlds in terms of possibly increasing membership.

Person A finds the PFRA and clicks on forum and can't see anything and a majority of people are lazy and just say screw it and click out and go talk about football elsewhere -- where they don't have to take the 10 seconds to sign-up.

Person B finds the PFRA and clicks on the forum and does create an account and logs in, and gets questions answered/research materials sent to them (because at least in the decade or so I've been here, other than a rare instance here or there, our group is extremely gracious when it comes to sharing what we've got) and essentially they don't need to be a PFRA member to get access to what they're looking for.

Regardless of your view on it / which side you'd choose, it really should be one or the other. Either open up the forums for freeview like it was until a couple years ago (which iirc was changed to having to sign-up/in specifically to keep one banned person from being able to view the forums) and when the curious find 'us' they're more willing to join. Or really lock it down and make it to where if someone wants to see the forums they have to be a member and make the forum part of the "MO" and the few that are really interested in history take the plunge and join to see what's going on behind closed doors.

[Ken Crippen]

Something that's changed from a decade ago is google search results.

Used to search for something and more often than not there would be a PFRA (Coffin Corner) article about it and it would be the first or one of the first results on any search engine. After we moved sites those all became broken links, I believe. And I notice now when I randomly search for something I never really see anything PFRA/CC come up. Then I come directly here and find it.

e.g. if you google "Pro Football games with no Touchdowns" JWL's article should be one of the first results with a link to the article.

---

For the forums, just speaking from my personal experience. I found the PFRA when it was on the old, old site (maybe 3 sites ago?) when it was more message board than forum. Would read discussions there occasionally then forgot about it for a while and when I went back the PFRA had moved and searched and found the new forums and would read topics of interest but still didn't join (the forum or the PFRA) until later on. When I did have a question while signing up for the forum I figured might as well just join the PFRA altogether and did both (don't remember exact date, late 09/early 10). So the forums being free to view/no signup necessary was something that had me checking in for a few years before I finally joined. Surely there would be others that would be similar if they could view the forum without having to signup.

What we have had and have now is sort of an in-between. You have to sign-up for the forum to see it, but you don't have to be a member to sign-up for the forum. It's kind of the worst of both worlds in terms of possibly increasing membership.

Person A finds the PFRA and clicks on forum and can't see anything and a majority of people are lazy and just say screw it and click out and go talk about football elsewhere -- where they don't have to take the 10 seconds to sign-up.

Person B finds the PFRA and clicks on the forum and does create an account and logs in, and gets questions answered/research materials sent to them (because at least in the decade or so I've been here, other than a rare instance here or there, our group is extremely gracious when it comes to sharing what we've got) and essentially they don't need to be a PFRA member to get access to what they're looking for.

Regardless of your view on it / which side you'd choose, it really should be one or the other. Either open up the forums for freeview like it was until a couple years ago (which iirc was changed to having to sign-up/in specifically to keep one banned person from being able to view the forums) and when the curious find 'us' they're more willing to join. Or really lock it down and make it to where if someone wants to see the forums they have to be a member and make the forum part of the "MO" and the few that are really interested in history take the plunge and join to see what's going on behind closed doors.

Guests now have read only access to the forum. I just made the change.

[Reaser]

Guests now have read only access to the forum. I just made the change.

Excellent.

[Ronfitch]

Guests now have read only access to the forum. I just made the change.

I will say it again ... we really need a "Like" button on this forum.

[Mark L. Ford]

Let me add that one of the problems that prompted going out of the read-only option was separating the true football fans from the robot-generated spammers, which increased dramatically since the start of the year, and at about the same rate as those robocalls for affordable health insurance we all get from bogus local phone numbers.

Going forward, I can say that any new registration that doesn't sound like a name, or that doesn't make a reference to the gridiron, or that doesn't post something football-related soon after registering -- is more likely to get deleted. We encourage you, of course, to let us know about any sales pitches or nonsense from newcomers, and we'll take care of it. Thank you, everyone, for your suggestions and comments today.

[Rupert Patrick]

Something that's changed from a decade ago is google search results.

Used to search for something and more often than not there would be a PFRA (Coffin Corner) article about it and it would be the first or one of the first results on any search engine. After we moved sites those all became broken links, I believe. And I notice now when I randomly search for something I never really see anything PFRA/CC come up. Then I come directly here and find it.

I just did a google search on "Rupert Patrick PFRA Super Bowl"; first time I ever google-searched myself. The first item that came up in the search results was the PFRA Coffin Corner 2000's archives, because I wrote a CC article in the 2000's. The second item that came up was the PFRA Coffin Corner 2010's archives, because I wrote a CC article in the 2010's. The third item that came up was the website of that nitwit (can I use that term without being flagged?) who had that conspiracy theory that every single Super Bowl was fixed (he was soon banned), and he created a website where he copied and pasted all of our posts from the PFRA forum onto his website. The PFRA 1966 Packers book shows up, John Turney's site turns up, another site that was somehow linked to PFRA, and then nothing. You would think any of the posts I have made about the Super Bowl over the past couple years would be there, but they're not. And the same could be said about all of the other people who post here.

The best thing we could possibly do to advertise the PFRA is to have the forum discussions show up in google results. If somebody is searching for information on, say, the 1956 Chicago Bears, in google, that recent thread we had about in the forum on the 1956 Bears-Lions game should definitely come up, there was a lot of great information in there. A person who sees that link and is directed to PFRA and reads thru the discussion and starts going thru what we have here, in my opinion, would likely join PFRA when they see the depth of information that is available just in the discussions in the forum, and also what is hidden behind the curtain, so to speak, in Members Only.