Take with a grain of salt this...
But has the forum ever considered incorporating Twitter and/or Facebook?
I know there has been talk of keeping things lean and I know and appreciate the Vlad has heaps on his plate and not enough time, but (especially Twitter) it could seriously increase the number of reader/members of this site with integration of these tools, because use of good hashtags can result in a lot of free advertising. Also following the players, a few of the prominent sporting identities etc can result in them following back and retweeting forums that are discussed here.
There are SMF mods for integration of both, but also this could be started with setting up the initial Twitter and Facebook pages and manually posting links and tags back to club. The Twitter mod at the moment is a
'share this" style mod, there was a full integration but they removed support for it.
So a simple start might be..
Kerridge has joined us, so we start a thread that welcomes him (where are they this year actually?)
and a tweet goes out along the lines of...
@CartlonSC sends @Skerridge29 a warm welcome for joining @CarltonFC. Come join in the conversation here (add tinyurl) #AFLTrade #CarltonFC
Anyway, not trying to rock boats here, not too concerned if they can't be done yet.
Here are the mods
Facebook Mod: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=365503.0
Twitter Mod
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=365503.0
That twitter mod is actually a "tweet this", "like this (facebook)" or +1 (Google +) mod that all users can use to tweet a topic as well.
Anyway just some suggestions trying to drive a bit more traffic