Federations are great and they work.
But for the league overall it is important to have a public face. When we started this league 4 seasons ago it was the former players from league IV.7 on one side (Me, Naker, PossumPete, Aussie Hammers, Xerxes, ezylife, ezyfrag and later Neeber all played in league IV.7) against the members of the XBB a Sydney based bunch of friends who play hoops in real life. So we decided to use these league IV.7 forums as our home. It was a great move.
The league can have a public face in the Australia forum. And there can be a link to the federation from there, and we can make it that anyone can join. We used the IV.7 forums as our home initially, but now there is simply far too many people (48 teams next season) and majority aren't from IV.7 so perhaps it is better to create a neutral federation.
Having them public means that we are a very open league. Anyone can say to anyone, "go and have a look, they look very passionate, maybe we should join." They can. If we were a private federation there is no way people like that can have a look. This also allows non-supporters to have a look and then hopefully a few will be convinced to become supporters and we can help the game we all love.
All supporters will still be able to look at the private league federation, the decision to move to a federation will only affect non-supporters. And to be honest, with 48 teams to play next season, I don't think we are going to be planning on adding that many more teams in the future. So the "public face" factor isn't really relevant as we won't be needing multiple new teams to be added every season. Once we have North, South, East and West are we really going to be expanding more than that? Seems unlikely.
Lets think about guys like Rad Ranga and Skyhook who drop in from time to time. Heck even Dire started by just dropping the occasional comment as he sifted through our mountains of crap (is 1/17 better than 0/6?). What about Fanny? I don't know if this is a positive or not but this still allows him to drop in, have a chat, maybe mend some bridges and get back in. maybe. Xerxes still pops in from time to time to protest the evils of the world.
Provided Rad Ranga and Skyhook are supporters they can still drop in from time to time. Anyone that is a supporter can still join the federation just as easily as finding these forums.
The Tea Cup made their league top secret, were ultra serious and inflexible. How well did that work out for them?
That isn't really valid for many reasons. Firstly, our federation won't be secret, it won't even have an application process. Someone just has to click apply and they are automatically in, very different to the Tea Cup. Also we aren't ultra serious or inflexible, we are just looking for a better way to organise MVP threads, MVP discussions, Game Day discussions, MVP Tallys, Links to all the team federations and links to all the private leagues (North, South, East, West).
Stickies? I think they would be great and I do ask Dire from time to time if we can but it is currently against the rules. Maybe we just need to petition to get the rules changed so we could have threads stickied and unstickied at the start and end of each season. Obviously we don't want to create work for anyone.
I agree deleting posts and shutting people out is not a good enough reason to turn it in to a federation. However, the ability to use Stickies is a good enough reason to move in my opinion. Petitioning to get the rules changed could take forever. Creating a federation takes 2 seconds.
I think if we can get a feel for what everyone wants then creating a federation might better serve the needs of the current members. Sure, the public face might suffer a little bit, but imagine how much better the forums would be for current members if everything was organised and easy to access, resulting in more posting.
Last edited by Naker Virus at 6/27/2011 5:27:36 PM