IT was not the celebratory message with which Wanderers wanted to kickstart their Twitter account on Tuesday morning, instead a notification that Saturday’s game at Crawley – now a must-win – is on the TV.

Since Friday at 3pm, near enough the entire footballing fraternity engaged in a boycott of all social media in solidarity with victims of online abuse.

On ending the blackout, Wanderers posted the following message, in line with clubs up and down the land.

“Football and sport has shown we are ready to take voluntary and proactive action in the face of online abuse and hate. We invite social media companies to respond to our requests and will engage with them as we seek urgent change to the status quo.”

The timing of the blackout did, at one stage, look rather inconvenient for Bolton, who had hoped to cement automatic promotion with the right result against Exeter City on Saturday. Had things worked out differently, their first posts after the embargo would surely have been of joyous scenes inside the dressing room.

Instead, the option not to scroll through phones and laptops on a desperately disappointing weekend potentially came as a Godsend.

What point football made with the blackout, if indeed any was made at all, is a matter of wide debate.

For most, the act of doing ‘something’ as opposed to ‘nothing’ was enough. For others, the fact online life continued relatively seamlessly made the protest’s effectiveness all rather vanilla.

But regardless of which side of the argument you back, the fact a debate is now being had among the leading organisations in the game can only really be a positive thing.

It is now incumbent upon those organisations and clubs to push forward and make sure that this gesture is not looked back on as a PR exercise.

Those who are responsible for the worst abuse online should be held accountable – but at the very least these people should be banned from accessing clubs’ online content.

Individuals are often coerced into ‘blocking’ offensive accounts yet huge corporate entities – Wanderers included – too rarely take such drastic action.

Surely this is the sort of proactive step that can at least let individuals know that online abuse is not acceptable in any way, shape or form?

Newspapers also have a duty of responsibility. Online comment sections should exist to allow free debate on the content of stories but too often descend into the same sort of name-calling which is being discouraged on the mainstream social media platforms.

Having taken a worthy stand it is now the responsibility of all the organisations involved to look at their own online world, to be proactive, and to see how it can be better managed.