When I first got wind of rugby league discourse online in the nineties, it was through newsgroups. Here, you would post a new topic or respond by sending a message to the newsgroup address. It was very much like email, and most email clients back then had the facility to add newsgroups. This meant that in a time where you didn’t receive a great amount of actual email, you could get a shed load of newsgroup mail. 

Towards the end of the decade, message boards became a thing. These were proto-forums where you would use a web browser rather than email-like protocols to post and reply to topics. They ate into the newsgroups userbase, probably because they were easier to use and there was less message overwhelm.

In the early history of rugby league on the web, Salford were certainly among the more pioneering clubs, and they had an official message board. The problem the club no doubt soon experienced with it, as any forum or social media moderator will attest to, was that the discourse became quite unruly, quite quickly.

The time around the turn of the millennium was not a great one for the Salford fan – the promise of the mid-nineties melted rapidly as the 1998 season progressed, and message boards were the ideal Petrie dish for rumours to fester. In what was still somewhat of a Wild West environment, the vast majority of early web comment was posted pseudonymously. It was all quite negative – understandably so – and not the kind of thing a club needed on what was then, pre-social media, its sole online marketing channel.

When an interloper arrived in the form of The Scarlet Turkey fanzine’s messageboard, which was quite happy to have fewer boundaries, the club’s messageboard was withdrawn.

Again, around the turn of the millennium, as internet connections became faster and ISPs bundled in more and more data in allowances until unlimited became de rigueur, message board software became more sophisticated, and they morphed into what we now know as forums. 

League Express had their forums, which still exist today under TotalRL.com, and RLFANS.com had The Virtual Terrace and The Sin Bin. Back then, for me, the RLFANS forums were more interesting; spicier, if you will. Less likely the domain of those who ironed their underpants.

By this time, The Scarlet Turkey had joined Rivals.net, which was a collection of edtorial websites and club websites, with content written by the fans for the fans, with message boards. There was a strong network of rugby league websites on Rivals.net, which its big rival Football365, didn’t have.

The revenue models of these networks were essentially built on advertising revenue. That is expected advertising revenue, which was inflated in the early days of the web. So, when the so-called Dot.com bubble burst, there was a recalibration on the earning potential of these companies, resulting in (company) casualties and mergers. 

Looking back through my own mists of time is murky, forgive me, but Rivals.net would soon merge with Football365, and that company would later be picked up by Sky, and so on and so forth. But during the process of these mergers, the rugby league network of sites were jettisoned. 

RLFANS.com stepped in to give these sites and their forums a home. And for a few of them, even 25 years on, they are still where the life of online discussion for those club fanbases takes place. Not so for Salford, it has to be said.

The Turkey forum long outlasted the website and the printed fanzine by ten years or more. I signed off as moderator of the Turkey forum in 2015, but in truth I hadn’t been visiting RL forums like I regularly had done in the noughties for some time. Social media had lowered the barrier to setting up a discussion group, like say spinning up Facebook group, and the pseudonymous nature of forums was disappearing too, with more people seemingly happy to spread spurious rumours or troll under their own names.

In closing, RLFANS.COM wrote:

‘After twenty-five years of serving the rugby league community it is with great sadness that we are announcing the permanent closure of RLFANS.COM effective from the 28th February 2026.

‘Thank you all for your support over the years and your understanding at times of technical difficulty (of which there have been a few). Enjoy your rugby, and may the game go from strength to strength.’

I do feel sad that RLFANS.COM is shutting up shop, but I certainly understand them making that decision. The owners have spent a generation keeping the whole estate of websites and forums online, burdened with all the crap that goes with it. I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the ever-increasing number of AI scraping bots, and the costs they can incur on websites with lots of content, is a contributing nail in the coffin.

However, like newsgroups and message boards before them, online forums have largely had their day. Ceding to social media, messaging apps and larger subset interest conglomerates such as Reddit and Discord. They aren’t dead; I still go on the Devil Talk forum now and again. But it is now and again rather than a daily routine.