We Went Looking for Old Richmond Stories. How Did We End Up Rediscovering the History of RTSSG Itself?
RTSSG Iceberg 003 — A living investigation
Opened: 14 October 2026
Status: Investigating
Current position: The Gold archives contain valuable first-hand material, but the material must be compared with existing Wix investigations, checked against other evidence and interpreted in its original time. Our archival search has unexpectedly uncovered a second history: how RTSSG itself changed.
What were we looking for when we opened the Gold Mine?
The job sounded simple. RTSSG had years of writing, research, photographs and old Facebook material stored away in Dropbox. Some of it had already found a home on the website. Some of it had not. We needed to open the folders, recover the subjects, and decide what deserved a place in the modern RTSSG library.
But the moment P.A. described the job as squeezing the sponge, the apparent simplicity disappeared. An archive is not a row of new articles waiting to be copied and pasted. It may contain an unfinished argument, a duplicate of something already published, a personal memory that changes the meaning of a public event, or an assertion that turns out to be wrong when checked against the original evidence.
And there was a further complication. RTSSG itself had changed over fifteen years. The early words were written for an early audience, often in an entirely different setting and with a different purpose. It would be unfair to read an old statement as though it were written by the RTSSG of October 2026.
So the initial question was not, How many articles can we get out of Dropbox?
It was, What is actually in this archive that Richmond supporters cannot already find—and how do we bring it into RTSSG without losing what made it valuable?
We expected to recover Richmond stories. We did not expect to find ourselves investigating the history of RTSSG's own thinking.
Why couldn't we just turn every old document into a new feature?
That was one of the first boundaries P.A. imposed.
He did not want us marching through a folder, taking a title from each document, and manufacturing a new article without looking at the website first. His instruction was to go into Wix, find whether the subject already had an investigation, then make a decision. Should an existing article be rewritten? Should two overlapping pieces be consolidated? Was there a distinct unanswered question that justified something new? Or was the old document best kept as evidence with no new publication at all?
This was not an administrative nicety. It was a direct challenge to the way a rushed archive project can create the appearance of progress while making a website harder to use.
If RTSSG already had a substantial Neville Crowe investigation, a short old Crowe biography could not automatically become another general overview. If Roy Wright already had a major Members feature and a separate personal account by his son Paul, those voices were not raw material to be blended into an anonymous retelling. Family authorship mattered. So did the distinction between a documented football career and an account told by someone who had lived close to the man.
The Gold Mine suddenly became an exercise in judgment. A discovered file was not the end of the work. It was the beginning of the decision.
That sounded slower than simply producing more material. But the alternative would have created more confusion for readers and less confidence in RTSSG's own archive.
What did the first collisions with existing Wix articles teach us?
The early extraction register was full of examples.
Alice Wills offered a clear case. An existing Wix article was approximately 2,080 words, while an expanded Gold-archive working draft ran to about 5,365 words. The question we considered was how Alice Wills helped build the supporter network Richmond needed when its survival was on the line. The proper action was not automatically to create a second Alice Wills page. It was to strengthen the existing investigation, provided the new evidence stood up to scrutiny.
The register recorded that rewrite as a draft saved for examination, not as proof of a published replacement. That distinction mattered, especially as later work moved rapidly across other folders. A document being present in Dropbox, a draft being completed, a Wix page being changed, and a public story being verified are four different events.
Charlie Pannam produced a more difficult lesson. An older archive note gave one birthplace. A Collingwood biographical account gave another. We could have selected whichever answer suited the better story and carried on writing. Instead the discrepancy was recorded as an unresolved source conflict.
Here was the Gold Mine doing exactly what P.A. wanted it to do. It stopped being a content factory and became a verification problem. What could we actually prove? Which piece of evidence came closer to the original record? Did the old claim belong in a modern article without qualification?
Bill Lang's remarkable overlap between early Richmond football and heavyweight boxing opened another research avenue. Allan Cooke had multiple existing Wix entries that might need consolidation. George Rudolph already appeared in different kinds of stories. In each case the question was not whether the old file was interesting. It was what it added to what RTSSG had already established.
And as we moved further into the material, we discovered that this single test—before creating a new article, find the existing one—could alter almost every decision we made.
Why did the numbers become a problem rather than a celebration?
The scale was extraordinary enough to make anyone impatient.
An early stocktake identified 175 items in the Writing area and more than 9,800 files in A.I. Gold, most of them images. Those were inventory counts within a particular scope at a particular moment, not a claim that thousands of documents had been read, understood or approved for publication.
That qualification was essential. One check of the 175 Writing files had only a handful genuinely reviewed. Hundreds or thousands of files in a directory do not mean hundreds or thousands of recoverable investigations. A picture can be important historical evidence, reusable artwork, or nothing more than an old design experiment. A Word file can contain original reporting, a copied article, an advertisement or a note to oneself. A title alone cannot tell us which it is.
Some production streams also reported substantial numbers of completed historical pieces. But the register contained unfinished items alongside them, and there were specific cases where a draft, an edited record and a published public companion did not yet share the same verified state.
We had to stop treating those numbers as one interchangeable tally.
A source inventoried is not a source analysed. A source analysed is not a question verified. A question verified is not necessarily a feature written. A feature written is not necessarily a Wix page published and checked for the reader.
This was an awkward but useful realisation. Counting the sponge before squeezing it told us the size of the job, not the amount of value extracted.
A different standard began to emerge. We needed a register that could explain not just where a file was, but what decision had been made about it, why, against which existing Wix article, and what had actually happened afterwards.
If that sounded more demanding, it was. That was the point.
When did the archive stop being just a football archive?
It happened when some of the most revealing documents turned out not to be about individual players at all.
Among the old files was a piece headed RTSSG In the beginning. P.A. had written about Richmond's 2014 predicament and the hostility that accompanied it. In his account, the team had slumped to three wins and ten losses and he had become deeply frustrated with the way Richmond supporters treated one another online.
He wanted somewhere that supporters could be passionate without turning every disagreement into abuse. The original purpose was not to establish a publishing library of long-form investigations. It was to find and bring together Richmond people who wanted to share their football life without being driven away by personal attacks.
That document preserved his own perspective. It told us what he remembered wanting and why he believed it mattered.
Then an obvious question emerged. Was this merely an old explanation of a Facebook group, or was it part of the history of how RTSSG became the organisation whose archive we were now opening?
P.A. insisted that 2014 was pivotal. And the more we looked, the harder that insistence was to dismiss as nostalgic scene-setting.
We began to see two separate changes woven through the same season. Richmond itself lurched through one of its strangest modern campaigns, collapsing to 3–10 before winning nine consecutive matches to reach the finals. Meanwhile, in the supporter world around those results, P.A. was reconsidering what kind of Richmond conversation he wanted to be part of.
We had to be careful not to make one a proven cause of the other. The club's recovery did not by itself create RTSSG. Nor does a later account of a difficult season prove exactly how every part of the group evolved. But the contemporaneous football setting gave the personal evidence real meaning.
There was now an independently worthwhile historical investigation inside the Gold Mine: Why did 2014 change the way P.A. followed Richmond publicly?
That was not simply another paragraph to drop into a generic history of RTSSG. It could support its own firsthand investigation, placed where that voice belonged.
Did the old files agree about when RTSSG began?
Not completely, and that is why history needs a clock.
Several older retrospective documents describe 2014 as the beginning of the Facebook group or of the organisation we recognise as RTSSG. Yet our wider records include an earlier group photograph dated 25 July 2011, and later discussion describes 2014 as a pivotal relaunch or change of identity.
We should not smooth over that distinction by choosing the tidiest founding date.
A first group photograph, a Facebook group's formal start, a public relaunch, and the moment P.A. adopted a particular editorial mission could all be different events. The archive needs to establish which is which and when they happened. Until that provenance is settled, the responsible account is that 2014 marked a pivotal stage described in P.A.'s own retrospectives—not that every element of RTSSG sprang from nowhere on one precisely established day.
This is what a living investigation is for. We can show readers that our source material contains an apparent tension, explain why it matters, and return when the original records make the sequence clearer.
Getting the date right is not pedantry. It determines whether we are telling the history of an organisation or compressing several stages of that history into a convenient legend.
Why did Tommy Hafey's farewell become part of the discovery?
Another memory P.A. brought into the excavation concerned Tommy Hafey.
Hafey died on Monday 12 May 2014. Richmond's next match, against Melbourne on Saturday 17 May, became an occasion of deep emotion at the MCG. The club honoured him and his family in a pre-match tribute. Four premiership cups from the teams he coached were part of the occasion. Richmond then lost by seventeen points.
Those facts can be recovered from club records and contemporary match reporting. But they do not tell the whole story of what the day meant to a supporter who was there in spirit and expectation, carrying his own sense of what the team owed a Richmond immortal.
P.A.'s recollection was sharper than an ordinary match summary. He remembered believing there was one thing left to do for Tommy: go out and beat Melbourne. He remembered the gathering sense that the day had been built for it, and the sickening disappointment when it did not happen.
What would a normal retrospective have done? It might have added the match result to a season review and moved on.
Our Gold Mine approach asked something different. What was that day like in Richmond's lived memory? How did it sit inside the feeling of crisis that later accompanied the 3–10 record? What did supporters believe a club ought to do when a figure like Hafey was farewelled?
An important correction appeared here too. The Hafey tribute was in May, before Richmond reached its eventual 3–10 position after thirteen games. It would be historically wrong to tell the story as though the club was already 3–10 on the day it lost to Melbourne. Two significant episodes belonged to the same season, but they did not occur at the same moment.
Once the chronology was respected, the material became more powerful rather than less. It showed how a difficult football year could contain distinct moments of grief, disappointment, renewal and supporter decision-making.
That is what first-person archives can reveal when they are checked instead of simply repeated.
What did the 2017 documents reveal that wasn't in a ladder table?
The next unexpected turn came from a different year.
In RTSSG In the beginning, P.A. described what happened when a difficult ticketing situation for Richmond's 2017 match at Kardinia Park led him to invite supporters to watch together instead. A gathering at the Sporting Globe in Richmond developed from that idea. More people wanted to come than he had anticipated. They watched the Geelong defeat together, and they returned for another away match.
That later match was Richmond's thumping of Fremantle in Perth, a 104-point victory. But the score was not the point of the archived recollection.
P.A.'s account described the real surprise as the people themselves: supporters of different ages and backgrounds discovering that they could build relationships beyond messages and comments on a screen.
That was a second genuine question about the organisation's development. If 2014 was about creating a different online environment, had 2017 shown that the idea could become something more tangible?
The archive contains P.A.'s interpretation of that moment, including his feeling that a bridge had been crossed between online interaction and meeting in person. It also recalls subsequent gatherings around Dustin Martin's Brownlow Medal, the 2017 premiership celebrations and other Richmond events.
Not every attendance figure or recollection can be independently established from that document alone. We should say that when necessary. Nevertheless, the account is valuable as firsthand evidence of what the organiser thought had changed.
And it complicated a simple story of RTSSG beginning as a Facebook group and later becoming a website. There had been other meaningful turns along the way.
The Gold Mine wasn't handing us a single neat corporate history. It was showing us several changes of purpose that deserved to be understood in their own contexts.
Was old RTSSG Gold the same publication as RTSSG today?
Absolutely not, and P.A. was determined that we should not pretend otherwise.
One of the recurring disagreements in our archive work concerned the distinction between the community-oriented RTSSG of earlier years and the research publication being built today. Old documents talked about group administration, friendships, a safe environment, gatherings, membership and plans for new online platforms. They spoke in the voice of the organisation at that time.
But by October 2026 P.A. was clear that RTSSG's principal public role was not to make everyone behave in the Facebook comments. He wanted the authority of a serious Richmond information library: investigate, verify, preserve and explain.
He offered a memorable contrast. We were no longer acting like a teacher trying to keep everyone playing nicely in the sandpit. We were building the librarian's place.
That did not mean the original values had suddenly become false or embarrassing. It meant past mission statements were historical evidence, not instructions to keep publishing the same explanation forever.
This was a genuine misstep we had to correct. An archive project can become obsessed with the organisation's own story: why it changed, what it stands for, why people should join. P.A. rejected that drift. The transformation was already made. He did not want the old advertising and community material repackaged again and again as though the membership proposition itself were the most important Richmond story.
Instead the material had to earn its place. A document about original group rules might be useful when investigating the founding principles of RTSSG. A story about Tommy Hafey's memorial would be valuable because of the match and the lived Richmond meaning, not because it allowed us to insert another boast about our organisation.
That was an essential change in the decision rule. Historical material was no longer allowed to dictate today's editorial voice merely because it sat in the Gold folder.
Why didn't we simply throw away the old advertising and rules?
Because they answer historical questions even when they are not suitable as modern editorial copy.
An old account of Facebook moderation tells us what problem P.A. believed he was solving. A platform announcement tells us what he expected the new website to make possible at that moment. Those expectations can later be compared with what actually happened. A gathering announcement or a photograph might place a person, venue or event in time. A series of old group comments might reveal the strength and division of supporter opinion, if we can legitimately access and quote them.
All those things have documentary value. None automatically becomes a new Members feature.
We encountered the same issue with images. A.I. Gold contained thousands of them. P.A. had used photographs, visual metaphors and illustrations to express ideas long before Roary was available. He urged us to examine the thought behind the image rather than treating it as a decoration or a template for another generic picture.
A historical photograph can substantiate a date or an occasion if its origin is known. A metaphorical image can reveal how the organisation once expressed a question. Neither should be mistaken for proof of an unrelated football claim.
That changed the job again. We needed to preserve the archive's different kinds of evidence while separating them from the kinds of published investigation each could support.
What was the hardest thing about deciding a file's future?
Saying not yet.
The temptation in an enormous archive is to reward every discovery with a new headline. The harder skill is leaving material alone when it does not add enough.
The Roy Wright example brought that principle into focus. A family-authored account cannot be flattened into an anonymous generic feature. The Neville Crowe material risked duplication because several Wix investigations already covered significant parts of his life and Richmond role. The Charlie Pannam birthplace discrepancy made a decisive biographical assertion unsafe until checked further. Alice Wills needed editorial verification before an existing page could responsibly be replaced by a longer version.
Each example called for a different action. Preserve. Compare. Consolidate. Rewrite. Research further. Or decline to publish anything new.
The archive was becoming more useful precisely when we stopped promising to turn every item into a story.
P.A. also wanted like material brought together rather than scattered through hundreds of folders and categories. That requirement intersected with our separate work reorganising player investigations under clear categories: club immortals, Brownlow medallists, Stars of Tigerland and individual players.
A recovered file about a footballer could therefore affect two tasks at once. It might strengthen an existing investigation and help us find the right permanent home for it. That was worthwhile, but we needed to resist treating a category move as though it meant new historical evidence had been discovered.
The work had to be recorded accurately. What did we find? What did it add? What did we change? And could a member actually find and read the improved result?
How can readers distinguish a discovery from a promise?
By seeing the work and the status of the work.
We can name an archival document that has been recovered. We can say whether its claims have been checked. We can identify an existing Wix article that covers the same subject. We can say when a new draft has been prepared. And we can say when something genuinely has been published and linked.
What we must not do is announce that an entire Gold folder has been converted merely because its contents were inventoried. We must not claim that thousands of images have been reviewed because their filenames were retrieved. We must not allow the label Completed — Published to Wix on a Dropbox folder to substitute for a direct check of the actual published pages.
Those rules are not glamorous, but they answer the fundamental question. Why should a supporter trust an archive story?
Because it should be possible to distinguish the original evidence from the interpretation, and both from the decision to publish.
There is also a consequence for an AI-driven world. When an article is an unsupported duplication or an old piece of copied material, making it available to a search engine does not magically turn it into independent knowledge. An attributable firsthand memory, carefully contextualised against a documented match or a surviving photograph, can contribute something much more distinctive.
That is a reason to do the painstaking work, but it is not a claim that any particular AI service has already cited or recommended the recovered material. Search visibility and attribution must be measured separately.
What has the Gold Mine actually changed for RTSSG Members?
The practical benefit is not the size of Dropbox. It is the prospect of a library in which an old subject has a clear, maintained, evidence-led investigation and a reader is not forced to choose among near-identical pieces written at different times.
Some archival recoveries have already informed feature production in separate parts of our historical program. Others remain drafts or unresolved source enquiries. We have to keep those states distinct, because a reader cannot benefit from a piece merely because we have discussed writing it.
The more durable benefit lies in a method. We search the archive, find the corresponding Wix article, test what the original source adds, research the gaps, preserve authorship and timing, then decide whether the reader needs a rewritten investigation or a genuinely new one.
The Members piece gives the deep examination of its chosen Richmond question. RTSSG Public gives a doorway to it. This Gold Mine Iceberg gives readers the ongoing account of how our historical discoveries are being found, checked and judged.
That separation protects all three. We do not replace a substantial history of Tommy Hafey with a diary about Dropbox. We do not give away a complete Members investigation in a public project log. And we do not turn a genuine research struggle into advertising copy pretending the answer was easy.
What are we still unable to establish?
There are several honest unfinished tasks.
First, the full inventory has to be classified by actual content, not just counted. We need to know how much of the Writing archive contains independent original material, how much duplicates existing Wix investigations, and how much is promotional or operational history.
Second, we need a definitive, reconciled account of the different RTSSG beginnings and relaunches. The 2011 photograph and P.A.'s repeated description of 2014 as pivotal should be read together, not turned into a false choice.
Third, we need to establish provenance for the personal-history material we use. P.A.'s account of the Sporting Globe gatherings is a valuable firsthand lead. Contemporary posts, event records or photographs could make the historical sequence more exact. Other people's memories and comments need appropriate context and permission before they appear under their names.
Fourth, we must finish separating the actual publishing status of Gold Mine investigations from our writing and extraction registers. Claims of completion are only as good as the final check a reader can perform.
And fifth, we need the discipline to let an unexpected branch become its own investigation when the evidence demands one. The history of RTSSG's 2014 turning point, Tommy Hafey's 2014 farewell, the 2017 shift from online to real-world gatherings, and an unresolved historical player biography are not interchangeable subjects. If we combine them merely to produce a longer article, we lose what makes each question important.
This Iceberg is the account of discovering that distinction. Its separate investigations belong in the right Members categories.
What changed on 14 October 2026?
We reopened the Gold Mine material to decide whether there was an authentic third RTSSG Iceberg. Instead of inventing a promotional story about having thousands of files, we examined a genuine extraction register and P.A.'s own archived writing.
That review established three things. The first was that the Wix-first comparison rule had prevented several obvious duplicates. The second was that primary and secondary sources were already in tension in some player stories, so the work remained genuinely investigative. The third was that the archive held a historical account of RTSSG's own development which could not responsibly be treated as if all its stages happened at once.
We also checked the public football chronology around the 2014 season. Tommy Hafey's funeral-week tribute match was on 17 May, while Richmond reached 3–10 later in the year. The nine-match comeback then followed. This matters because an evocative recollection can still contain—or invite—a misleading sequence if the surrounding dates are not tested.
The current position is therefore more demanding, and more promising, than when the Gold Mine was just a large set of old folders.
We are not hunting for the largest possible number of republished pieces. We are trying to discover the historical value that survives scrutiny and give it the right permanent home.
We went into Dropbox looking for Richmond stories. We found, among many other things, the history of why RTSSG exists, why it changed, and why the way we handle its evidence now matters.
There is much more still to examine.
And until we know what is in those old files, what has already been published, and what the original evidence can actually bear, this Iceberg remains open.
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