About

As the 2005 AFL season crept closer, two small independent footy forums were trying to make a name for themselves. Both had a tight group of passionate members who loved nothing more than chatting about footy and kicking back having a laugh.

In late April, a merger was on the cards and with both forums combining, AFL Online was formed on 1st March 2005 with three original staff becoming foundation members.

Released to the public on 7th March 2005, the new forum featured a domain name and Invision Power Board software, housed on a free web server. This server later caused problems and the AFL Online founders quickly realized that you get what you pay for. The server housing the forum went down in September 2005 and a fair amount of data was lost. On October 7th 2005 the decision was made that web hosting needed to be purchased for AFL Online to continue.

Moving into 2006 AFL Online needed a fresh look and on January 24 the new forum skin was released to the public with mixed feedback. Just over 1 year since it was created AFL Online released it’s new homepage, featuring news, views and footy information. With this the current .com.au domain was purchased.

In May 2007 AFL Online finally hit the 1000 member mark, with the forum growing at an increasing rate and traffic pushing out the bandwidth quota.

Once again AFL Online needed a new look and on July 30th 2007 staff started the production of a new layout for the news based website. A clean and simple design was created around a functional back-end, to produce a professional and dynamic web application. The new, improved version of AFL Online was released on Wednesday 19th September 2007.

AFL Online has become one of the biggest AFL forums on the internet now with over 2000 members. Is has come a long way since its formation in 2005, running a successful tipping competition and presenting quality news articles to the public. Now powered by a full content management system the fifth version of AFL Online, again spawning a new look, was launched on Monday 30th June 2008.

On Monday 23rd March 2009 AFL Online was moved to an Australian based server to benefit our primarily Australian audience. The new server now provides a much faster service for our members and also keeps money in Australia by supporting Australian based companies.