Long before social media changed the way we follow and consume sport, there was another form of online communication that altered the way football fans follow their club.

It's a platform of communication that lives on today, and is arguably healthier than ever.

We speak of the football fansite – the unofficial websites and forums that allow supporters to unite over their common passion.

Collingwood has been fortunate to boast several of the finest unofficial web communities in the land, some of which have acted, often unknowingly, as pioneers of their kind.

It’s only right that our club has the biggest, oldest and most storied fansites in the game. It just makes sense.

We take it for granted now, but these websites provide the sense of community that cannot be experienced elsewhere. Except, perhaps, at the MCG or Victoria Park (it’s little wonder that Nick’s Collingwood Page’s live scoreboard chat is known as the virtual outer).

Supporters from the streets surrounding Victoria Park in Melbourne can be vigorously debating the merits of team selection with their equivalents on the other side of the world at any hour of the day.

With this in mind, it’s only fitting that the oldest fansite of them all, Nick’s Collingwood Page, was founded by a Tasmanian based family.

Nick’s is just one of a cluster of sites to have sprung up across the past two decades to give balance to the debate, without the ties of officialdom, and to provide fans of all ages and minds a place to gather and share the Collingwood experience.

Extreme Black ‘n White continues to hold a cult-like status among the online throng.

The BigFooty Magpies have grown at a rapid rate and would now comfortably hold their own as a stand alone website.

Sites and forums such as The Collingwood Rant, Buckley Surfers and the Lulie Street Dash helped supporters separate fact from fiction for much of the first decade of the 2000s and were homes to columns that carried weight long before blogging became popular.

And who could forget From The Outer, a website and forum that flashed across the online galaxy like a shooting star before disappearing ahead of the 2003 season?

As collingwoodfc.com.au celebrates its 20th anniversary, we will present the stories of two pioneers of the online world who left a mark on the Collingwood story in a way no one – not even the men themselves – could have predicted when they began to experiment with this strange thing known as the Internet…