4 hours ago, Denzel Zanzibar said:

It's funny you should say that, because we already have one here. Look, here. Click me. Click me now!

For what it's worth, something hopefully helpful. It's very common in forums that have eternal threads to close the thread after a certain point and start a new version. Usually after around 1000 pages. At that point, the old thread is so long that it can cause problems and tends to put off new readers.

Doing what has already happened and closing a transfer window thread a couple of weeks after the window closes and replacing it with a new thread for the new window makes perfect sense to me. You can add a pinned post to the top and use it to introduce the thread and keep track of confirmed transfers and loans. Odds are that each thread will end up over 1000 pages so it will have a natural, healthy lifespan.

The worst of all worlds is if you close a thread but don't open a new one. That just leads to an endless spiral of complaining about the forum rather than talking about football, just like this.

Forums have "desire paths" just like parks. A desire path is when you build a path across a park but people take a more direct route over the grass instead. There are certain things users on a forum desire to talk about and if the forum doesn't provide it they either don't engage (leading to a dead forum) or talk about in different threads which can lead to conflict and confusion. 

15 minutes ago, Bruce said:

For what it's worth, something hopefully helpful. It's very common in forums that have eternal threads to close the thread after a certain point and start a new version. Usually after around 1000 pages. At that point, the old thread is so long that it can cause problems and tends to put off new readers.

Doing what has already happened and closing a transfer window thread a couple of weeks after the window closes and replacing it with a new thread for the new window makes perfect sense to me. You can add a pinned post to the top and use it to introduce the thread and keep track of confirmed transfers and loans. Odds are that each thread will end up over 1000 pages so it will have a natural, healthy lifespan.

The worst of all worlds is if you close a thread but don't open a new one. That just leads to an endless spiral of complaining about the forum rather than talking about football, just like this.

Forums have "desire paths" just like parks. A desire path is when you build a path across a park but people take a more direct route over the grass instead. There are certain things users on a forum desire to talk about and if the forum doesn't provide it they either don't engage (leading to a dead forum) or talk about in different threads which can lead to conflict and confusion. 

Spot on 🙂

I'd like a transfers forum, why keep it all to one thread when we can have loads of threads! you could easily have at least one for every deal. 

in the forum could also have a transfers chat topic (and concise topics as well ) , then for every link/deal you can have one topic each players buy/sale - you can continue to rename topics as things progress, so people could see straight away if something had changed

it would make catching up after a few days out on the transfer news like 100x easier and quicker.

as you could skip to the end of a players topic to see where the deal is at,

where current if you have 100+ pages on the transfer thread, you might not want to skip any in case you miss something - which normally results in the usual post from someone who's read 4 days worth of chatter only to work out nothing happened 

Edited September 8, 2025Sep 8 by Rob

Would a sensible compromise be that this one dies whenever the January one starts? 

Then no single thread drags on forever, but there's always somewhere for people to chat transfers if they want. 

43 minutes ago, SouthernSmoggie said:

Would a sensible compromise be that this one dies whenever the January one starts? 

Then no single thread drags on forever, but there's always somewhere for people to chat transfers if they want. 

You mean, kinda like what's happened this time?