Everyone knows I am against it but as you know this is not a dicatatorship. I'll explain why I think the current system is best.
Current System: 4 private federations for the Sharks, Calamari, Guppies and Kevin and one public forum for everyone.
I don't know about the other federations but ours is very active. We have tons of posts every week these are our stats.
Established: 6/6/2010
Type: Regional
Language: English (UK)
Members: 10
Threads: 34
Posts: 4072
Plan defeat for the Sharks, Guppies and Kevin. Talk about everything related to BB.
So within our federation we can have stickies, add and remove people (I only just removed ezylife, City Celtics, Aussie Hammers and Xerxes at the start of this season). Within your federation you can say whatever you want and discuss things with your teammates. You can keep things secret and reveal the details of your team without them being leaked (unless you have one of two people in your federation who have proved to be "tricky" in the past).
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.
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.
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.
The Tea Cup made their league top secret, were ultra serious and inflexible. How well did that work out for them?
What started out as just two bunches of friends just wanting to play some games with each other has grown (although the East was fairly close to what we had in our first season) into undoubtably the premier PL in Australia with teams like Wombats, Black Label, Bogans and Pancakes battling it out each week. If we retreated into our cells like monks with a vow of silence we would lose all of that.
What would be the advantage of turning this into a federation? We can delete posts. So? What do we really want to delete? I think almost everyone here is reasonable and the main thread is just for general discussion anyway so if it fills up with rubbish occasionally so what. Just tab to the end and read the last page. We can shut people out. So? Who? Even Fanny has been respectful for ages and if things are really bad there is always a forum ban (which Fanny knows well having had several) and Dire can delete anything that is really offensive. 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.
Anyone can start a Federation and call it the Fishbowl if they want. I can't stop them and Koop probably doesn't want to. However this is my plea, not my command, I ask that you don't and that you support the current structure.