The
Archetypal Official Forum User
16/11/02 | by Alex Walker
The
Internet is wonderful. You will have realised this by now as
without it you could not have stumbled upon this marvellous
website and would not have started reading this article, which,
although you don’t know it yet, will develop into something
quite enjoyable and entertaining. I hope.
However, bringing the delights of LTLF to your screen is not the
only the only way the net can benefit your life, oh no. You can
also use it to interact with people, without actually having to
interact with anyone. Like the railways, the Internet is a device
for making the world smaller (it also bares the unfortunate
resemblance to the railways of being over-priced, slow,
unreliable, and rarely of any use when you most need it). A small
world for small minds perhaps.
Which brings me nicely onto the subject of today’s lecture.
The Nottingham Forest ‘Official’ website is apparently
the most visited out of all the 72 Nationwide league clubs’.
Good for them. Part of the reason for this, is the ever-popular
‘fans forum’. Like most Internet forums you can post
your views and others can reply to them, thus creating the
perfect platform for the sharing and gathering of opinions in a
medium that lends itself to collected and considered thought; the
beauty of the written word.
At least, that was the plan. The Official Forum on the Forest
website is in fact a graffiti wall for adolescents to scribble
their ill-advised feelings at ill-advised times. Of course, not
all users are adolescents vagrants, but most are.
Before I go any further, I would like to point out that I’m
not singling out any particular individuals in this study, merely
observing the herd as a whole, thus avoiding any lawsuits for
defamation.
I post on the forum as ‘Big Gay Al’. This name has its
roots on another forum - the Forest Fire message boards.
The trouble with those boards is that they are filled with angry
away fans who have nothing better to do than hurl abuse at anyone
they can find. One day I was (quite wrongly) accused of being
homosexual. Like the good Christian I should be, I turned the
other cheek. My sexuality was called into question again (by
people who had never even met me, let alone ventured as far as to
discover my sexual preferences, I hasten to add) so I decided to
roll with it.
I registered on the Official Forum in the summer in search of
something to fill my football-less days, fully knowing that my
handle was likely to provoke the odd reaction. In fact, by
choosing this eye-catching pseudonym, I would be easily able to
find out which posters were not worth engaging in discussion
with. Replies such as ‘Dear poofter....’ and ‘To
the shirt-lifter....’ gave me a fairly good idea that the
author wouldn’t know reasoned argument if it came up behind
him and drove a chisel into his thick skull.
Anyway, back to business. While it may be hypocritical, I am now
going to try and create ‘the Archetypal Official Forum
User’ and if it all goes horribly wrong and I offend
everyone I possibly could then I can always go and hide on the
much more respectable TalkBack board. Besides, most of the people
I will be lampooning will probably not know what
‘archetypal’ means so wouldn’t have even bothered
reading past the headline. That’s the kind of people
we’re dealing with here ladies and gentlemen - it could be a
long and painful ride.
To start off with, let’s establish who our user is. They are
male. The only female who regularly uses the board is Hannah
Dexter of Forza Forest fame. Her postings are largely
seen as a joke and she only has to lay a finger on her keyboard
before the abusive replies fly in. She has achieved this by
posting rubbish on numerous occasions, formerly on the subject of
David Platt, more recently frequent travel enquiries.
Any other female on the board is immediately ‘chatted
up’ by the male users of the forum who are struggling with
the concept of ‘girls’ and are desperate for some
recognition from the opposite sex. Our user is 15/16. Our user is
battling with the toils of puberty and losing. However, our user
has developed the unfortunate trait of being a miserable, old
git. Not physically old (too much achne and hideous facial hair
for that mistake to be made), but mentally old. And miserable.
Very miserable.
Any excuse for moan, any excuse to create bad spirits and our
user is happy. Like Harry Enfield’s ‘Old Gits’, or
more in tune with our user's viewing habits, Sesame Street’s
Oscar the Grouch, our user likes nothing better than feeling
crap.
Striker failed to take a chance? Great!
Three more points dropped? Excellent!
Club announces huge debts? Fantastic!
If, God forbid, Forest should ever win a game, the most positive
messages from our user are usually counter-balanced against any
unessesery praise with “it was a lucky result but we’ll
get found out soon” or “one win doesn’t make a
season - don’t get too carried away just yet” or
"should we really be pleased about beating Grimsby?”
However, this doesn’t happen very often so they are usually
gratified with the constant stream of bad news. And they are most
happy when they’ve got someone to campaign against.
“Sack the manager!” they cry from the roof-tops.
“Out with the board!” they bellow in the town centres.
“Sell the players!” they announce to the streets.
Of course, anyone looking from the outside would think this very
silly behaviour. Surely it does the club no good to be sacking
people left, right and centre every time something goes wrong?
Doesn’t it make better sense to have a bit of consistency
instead of chopping and changing all the time?
But those views are from the naive. The ones who haven’t had
the big realisation; the ultimate epiphany: everyone at
Nottingham Forest currently is rubbish, but everyone anywhere
else is good.... excellent in fact!
David Johnson was superb at Ipswich, any fan will tell you. But
he is shit now he is at Forest. Always has been, always will be.
Dougie Freedman was a waster in his time at the City Ground, but
we sure as hell would have him back to save us now.
Our poster often puts this knowledge into action, suggesting that
the club sell off their crap strikers and buy some lad who was
‘really good on Championship Manager for me, scored 34 goals
in the first season’.
Our poster is also a master financier. He previously stated that
someone who knows someone who knows someone inside the club had
told him the current debts stand at around £15m. However he has
somehow devised a way for Forest to clear this debt and launch a
£5m bid for the guy who was ‘really good on Championship
Manager for me, scored 34 goals in the first season’.
Unfortunately, it is only on very rare occasions that our user
actually divulges the details of the masterplan to the other
forum members, but who are we to question his wisdom?
Our user believes that everyone in the ground should sing and
‘get behind the lads’, but “I don’t sing
myself because no-one around me does”. Our forum user sits
in the Trent End, but spends the game gazing down to the A Block
wishing he was there instead.
Our forum user enjoys a good rumour. He knows TeamTalk
and the Nottingham Evening Post to be such reliable and
trustworthy publications that anything given the merest allusion
in their print must be cold fact and the appropriate people
should be sacked as a result.
Our forum user is well acquainted with ‘drivel’. Drivel
is not only what comes out of his mouth, but it is the name of
the secondary board on the Forest website. All Forest related
material is kept on the ‘main’ board, but anything
unrelated is moved to the ironically titled ‘drivel’
board at the discretion of the various moderators (who our user
dislikes immensely as they wont let him use lots of fucking swear
words in his fucking messages). If a post is moved to
‘drivel’, the thread normally goes dead and any kudos
our poster would have got for having started a popular discussion
will vanish.
Thus, he will complain loudly that the forum is going down-hill
because no-one is allowed to speak their mind anymore and that he
is being picked on (coz ‘e is black, innit). When informed
by another user that as long as he keeps it relevant and
doesn’t abuse other forum members then he can speak his mind
as much as he likes, he replies by telling said other forum user
to “shut up”.
For an encore he will abuse Hannah Dexter for a while, also
telling her to “shut up” (either that or he will
occasionally try and be nice to her in a desperate hope of
getting a date after his previous failures to do such), simply
because she is the only person below him in ‘food
chain’ of scoring forum points by default.
In order to appease the moderators, he returns to posting
‘sack ........’ messages and generally bringing down
everyone else who has the misfortune to pass by the official
forum that day.
So there you have it. A profile of ‘the Archetypal Official
Forum User’ of which MI5 would be proud to keep secret.
I’m not sure what purpose it will serve, or if indeed any.
That shall be seen. However, it has been a lot cheaper to make
than Walking With Beasts, and on the whole, much more
terrifying and disturbing.
Beware the Official Forum - wild animals lurk there!
by Alex Walker
P.S. If you are a user on the Official Forum and you have been
offended by this article, then my e-mail address can be found
elsewhere on the site so you can tell me to “shut up”.