I'm looking into starting a new sub-forum for Schalke in "Germany: Clubs." Currently, Bayern Munich, Borussia Moenchengladbach, Borussia Dortmund, Werder Bremen, and VfB Stuttgart are the only German teams with their own forums. Currently, Schalke fans use a single thread format for discusion. The current thread is on track to reach just shy of 800 posts in the calender year (about 15 posts per week on average). I'll be posting a link to this forum request thread in the current yearly Schalke thread.
I second the request. The single thread gets traffic comparable to some of the sub-forums each season.
I'm not a Schalke fan but I like the people in the Schalke thread and would definitely visit a sub-forum frequently. So let's do this.
I am a Schalke fan and I would like it very much if the second biggest club in Germany had it's own sub forum. I think we are quite able to fill it with live.
dark knight - looks comparable to Stuttgart and Borussia considering the two Schalke threads over the last 2 season have over 1300 posts.
In addition to the 5 Schalke fans that have posted here, there's TheHoustonHoyaFan, Eckball, Schalkoholic, Hideaway. All have contributed to the thread at some point over the last season, although some of them more sparingly than others. Also should mention that there are other Schalke fans on the site that don't post in the thread, as well as fans from the US and Canada who signed up on BS looking for a place to talk Schalke and were perhaps a bit disappointed we didn't have our own forum. There really aren't many places online where Egnlish speakers can discuss the team with any regularity.
Well we had 9-10 regular contributors that were fans of the team last year. A few of them haven't visited in a while. I'm not sure where they went, but I'd hope/assume they'll be back when the season starts up again. Both the Schalke and 1860 Munich threads have more fans and get more traffic than the Stuttgart forum, from what I can see anyway.
I've bumped into a few on FFA over the years as well. Not sure if they are still posting. I think this is one of those forums where "if you build it, they will come."
Because the Germany board had the most lively and intersting discussions back when it had no sub-forums at all (except the Bayern board, which has always been kind of seperate without all that much overlap in regular posters). Then we wanted the NSR board, and all was well still. However - then people wanted a NT board, club forums /Lautern and Lverkusen boards were later killed because of the lack of traffic). The result is that the main board is kinda dead now, there's very few discussion left about German soccer/leagues in general. The club forums are mostly sed by the same 3 or 4 posters each, and have no more traffic than back in the day when discussions about specific clubs only happened in one thread per club. No one else reads them, and the threads on clubs without a board are hidden away too and hardly used by anyone anymore. We used to have general transfer threads, and individiual threads on leagues, where fans of different teams were actually talking to each other. Not to mention the threads on German football culture (like the one on the decline of proper nicknames in German soccer and other classics). These days the board is dead - by my count there have been 5 threads on the general board created in the last 18 months that attracted more than 30 posts (two of them prediction game threads).
You're either going to limit general German based discussion with team-specific forums, or limit team-specific talk without team-specific forums. You can't have your cake and eat it to. Most of us generally want to discuss the teams we follow. Having team-specific forums facilitates this discussion. As long as there are enough contributors, I don't see the problem.
I don't think causing a decrease in posts in the Germany general forum is a good reason to deny Schalke 04 fans their own subforum.
The original idea was to limit team specific talk anyway. I don't want to bore people with the history of the BS Germany forum, but subforums were originally introduced against the vote of the vast majority of the forum regulars. Almost all of the old regulars have retired or almost retired from the board now anyway. This board actually used to be the best forum on German soccer out there (including those in German!). But it's not as if I actually believe getting rid of subforums now would get the forum back to what it used to be. That ship has sailed now anyway - since the forum is dead as it is the decision on the Schalke forum won't matter either way.