Essendon Football Club will closely monitor its Bombertalk chat forum after receiving complaints from some supporters over the nature of some material being posted on the site. The offensive material has been removed as soon as club officials have been made aware of it. However, the club will step up its own monitoring of the chat forum as a result of the complaints. Essendon chief executive Peter Jackson said the Essendon website wasn't alone with all other AFL club website with chat forums experiencing similar problems at some time.

"Late last week we had 1075 messages posted and only three contained offensive material. While it is disappointing that there is any offensive material at all, the problem isn't widespread. We have a small number of people who want to put these messages up and we have to find ways to monitor these messages more closely," Jackson said.

"Simply shutting down our Bombertalk forum won't solve the problem. There are hundreds of other message boards like ours relating to AFL football and these people who choose to abuse them will eventually find their way to those. Rather than ruin what is a very popular section of our site for others by closing it down, we are looking at ways of keeping this offensive material off the site.

"We already have an offensive word removal program in place and two users have been banned because they have continually posted offensive messages. We also remove any offensive material as soon as we are made aware of it. Logisitcally it is impossible for us to check every message before it comes onto the site.

"We will continue to look at this problem and how it can be better policed but I beleive the 98% of users who legitimately want to use the forum deserve to be able to do so."