Friends and rugby supporters,

It would have flown by me totally, if I was not reminded by our friend, BrumbiesBoy, that Rugby-Talk.com celebrates it’s 6th Birthday today!

Dang, time has flown by fast!

6 Years old… ready for the BIG WORLD. I think this calls for celebrations and jubilation of epic proportions!

Let me put it bluntly, a heap of work and countless hours have gone into making Rugby-Talk.com what it is, there is simply no way around that. From time to time one wonders whether the effort is worthwhile, then there are the sudden real pleasurable occasions, like last night’s conversation where we went back in time about the start of TV in South Africa in 1976, or like a really busy Live Game discussion on match days, or when we see a fabulous rugby match and all take pleasure in the way our Sport is executed.

I have always followed through on things in life and Rugby-Talk.com is no different, may it continue forever…

We’ll continue enjoying Rugby Union as our Sport and here’s hoping that Rugby-Talk.com continues to grow from strenght to strenght and continues to make a valuable contribution to rugby!

Let me give you a little insight into where Rugby-Talk.com comes from and where it stands today…

Rugby-Talk.com started as a break-away from another rugby discussion web site, when myself and some friends were extremely unhappy about the degeneration of commenting on this other web site. We were not satisfied about the racial slurring, personal attacks and the total disinterest of that site’s management in curbing and arresting this trend. Needless to say, that site has since vanished from the interwebs.

Our initial goal of creating a more friendly rugby discussion environment meant that we set out with firm resolve to set a standard and good measure of control, according to the initial values we were striving for and those values have not changed. Even when it meant I had to shout at times and make myself unpopular, it was done AND it will continue to be done!

We will not be swayed to relax our stance, control and changing the successful formula of this web site, it is absolutely non-negotiable!

A pure hobby and friendly discussion amongst likeminded friends at Rugby-Talk.com exploded very rapidly into the beast we know today.

Notably Rugby-Talk.com was my first attempt ever at designing a web site and to say the least it was very experimental at first, using existing platforms and existing design themes and growing as demands increased. We encountered new things, spam had to be curbed, security had to be beefed up, more functionality had to be implimented and we had to move to bigger web hosting packages and features, due to the steadily growing traffic and growing demands on web host CPU resources.

Today Rugby-Talk.com has it’s own design elements, some of our own exclusively written Plugins and it runs on arguably the world’s best evolving platform, WordPress, and it is hosted at one of the world’s leading hosting environments.

Of course someone had to and today still has to carry the costs and hosting of this web interface and this beast is exclusively funded by only one person, myself.

This a labour of love for the sport we all love and because of the community it has managed to build.

Rugby-Talk.com currently stands on 12 973 rugby or related articles (all still easily accessible) PLUS a further 248 web pages and we have generated over 15.9 Million Page Impressions, since 31 October 2009 (we started counting statistics only a few months after inception of the web site).

As of this moment 417 683 comments have been made on the website by a miriad of commentors. Commentors come and go, that is the natural order of things. This site is read by a vast audience, active commentors only being the tip of the tip of the ice berg.

Our audience consists of approximately 83% readers and contributors inside South Africa, but with a healthy contingent reading from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France & Europe, the USA, Canada and even from the remotest of Islands in the middle of nowhere. We steadily keep on growing as far as the audience and frequency of visits are concerned, often hitting 60 000 PLUS Unique Visitors per month and generating well in excess of 400 000 Page Impressions per month.

The ancillary value and opportunity this web site has given me is that it has led to me becoming quite a web designer and also designing web sites commercially to the public, making a pretty penny from it per month, in addition to my full-time day job as entrepeneur and businessman in the IT Industry and with a number of other pokers in the fire… all requiring my time at the same time.

I have made marvelous friends through rugby and here on this rugby discussion web site… friends I consider my real and lifetime friends and I subscribe to the fact that I count my real friends on two hands, with a finger or so spare. I value my real friends and I will go to war for them! You know who you are… I value you greatly!

In addition Rugby-Talk.com has given all of us the opportunity to meet a wealth of valuable acquaintances, contacts, rugby supporters and it soothes my need to be a very social and sociable person.

To everybody making up the community here on Rugby-Talk.com, all Authors, Commentors, Contributors, Readers… all the moepels & muppits out there, thank you very much and please keep coming back for more!

Regards,

Rudi Geldenhuys

(Webmonster)