pap

Nah, only you, and only because you've made a big thing of your posh Cressington pad. Peasant

You got some good advice. You also got mildly ripped. I love how you use a bitter comment to point out a bitter comment! Good work, skip! Seriously, buy PC Pro and you are sorted.

Fk's sake, does no-one keep up with the news? Where's trousers when you need him? Farage issues open letter to the swivel-eyed loons in the Tory party in a Telegraph ad. http://politicalscrapbook.net/2013/05/welcoming-the-swivel-eyed-ukip-telegraph-ad-encourages-defections/

More classic Harry gold. Not me guv, it's the players, and if the club can't get rid during the summer, I'm not coming back. Cor blimey. Stone the crows, etc. http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/liverpool-1-0-qpr-harry-redknapp-1899666

He MUST return. Otherwise we'll all have to put up with this place being less interesting. Where are we with this, mods? 94% of the people who could be bothered to vote so far disagree with your decision.

I've threatened to walk a few times in my career. Sometimes you have to. The reaction really depends on how you present your grievance, how many other people have similar issues, and your perceived value to the org. You'll also get different mileage out of different people. In NC's case, the story did go public, which is unfortunate, but as you point out, everyone lined up behind him. I think he's done a very good job so far, with some qualification.

My job is in computing, yep. I spend ages online. I also spend a lot of time consoling people on their bad PC purchases. As amusing as it would be to see Bazza whack 500-600 on a rebadged pocket calculator, there's absolutely no need. Even for that dough, he should be able to pick up something much better than the machine he's looking at now. I bought two Dell Inspiron 17R special editions last December, both with full HD panel and dedicated gfx hardware. £700 each, direct from Dell - and a significantly better spec than the machine listed here.

You don't have to, Bazza - but I'd have expected better from a man who is so open about his relative wealth. Get a copy of PC Pro. Pick a 500-600 lappy from their A-list. Buy it. Really is that simple.

Small screen resolution, crappy GFX card which steals from main memory. I wouldn't go near it. My serious advice to anyone out there thinking of getting a laptop is spend some money on a copy of PC Pro. Their reviews are on the money, and you'll have a hard time getting ripped off following their advice. I'm surprised that Bazza "lives in more affluent part of Liverpool than pap" Sanchez is constraining himself to a £600 budget. I spent almost three times that on my machine, and I've got teenage kids leeching me dry

Don't forget to vote in the poll, er, yo.

A good season. Final league position is fair enough; we could have easily finished higher, but then I look at the nervy three points we picked up at Villa Park, and recognise we could have been deeper in the sh!t at the business end of the season. The big event of the season was obviously the NA sacking. At the end of the season, with ambitious financial plans announced, I think it's easier to understand the decision. Much to the chagrin of some of my honourable colleagues on here, who prefer the conservative approach of treading water in the Premier League (while dishing out the occasional bloody nose, ofc), it really does appear as if the club is aiming high, and that the talk of Champions League qualification is something that is being planned for. Whether that is achievable or not is another story, but it was clear that NC didn't think NA up to the next stage of the project. I'm generally positive about the playing squad, bordering on ecstatic in some areas. The emergence of players like Shaw and Ward-Prowse, along with SRL's continuing insistence that he'll score goals in whatever league he damn pleases, is almost Roy of the Rovers stuff, as is seeing all our League One survivors successfully ply their trade in the top flight. I was excited about Gaston, and still am. I felt at the time that his transfer was an important symbolic one; we'd beaten off Liverpool and other teams to sign him. During the protracted negotiations, every man and his dog would tell you that he was going to Spurs, or would end up at Liverpool, because we were Saints and that was that. He ended up signing for us, and although it was a surprise, I wonder whether it should have been. Fonte dropped down to League One, Cork came to the Championship from the Prem. We've been pulling this stuff for years, and I look forward to doing it again in the summer. Looking forward, we've now got a squad who have that coveted top-flight experience - only a year mind, but these boys have earned their stripes and their right to be here. I don't think we'll be plagued by the errors or lack of confidence that derailed the early part of the 2012-13 season. I also think we'll at least match our transfer business of last summer, and as shurlock says, start populating the system with personnel that fit it. I also agree with Bexy about the lack of cutting edge up front. While it's encouraging to see us get in the final third so much, we've been profligate at times. I didn't want us ending the season looking like lucky relegation chancers, or starting next season billed as relegation candidates. I listen to quite a few football podcasts; we're a well-regarded team recognised for playing good football - and that is after the NA sacking (most pundits ate their words over their NA-inspired outbursts). We've got respected Premier League managers saying nice things about us, plenty of column inches devoted to our exploits, and a potentially large investment in the playing squad to come. Some key additions to fit the system and we could be rather frightening next year.

More Abrams reportage; I'm just back from seeing Star Trek : Into Darkness. It's a good movie, but it is very much a movie, and I'm starting to wonder whether that's really the best thing for Trek at the moment. Until Abrams took the reins, Star Trek was rarely all out action; always had a little space to breathe and out of budgetary necessity, had a lot of dialogue. Problem with the movie format is that apart from your leads, you don't really get enough time with the cast to get more than some stock catchphrases, no doubt designed to remind you that you are still watching Star Trek. As a big dumb action movie, it works on every level. As Star Trek? I'm not so sure. This is an impressive spectacle, but Star Trek has a history of being smart and thought provoking which neither film has done a very good job of honouring.

I'm heading toward the final episodes in Fringe season three and am enjoying it quite a bit. My main issue with it is that at its heart, it's a police procedural, which just happens to deal with some really messed up stuff. Probably feel it more in the first season than any other, as for the most part, it really gets into gear in the second season, when you've got a much better idea of what it is. Abrams and co use a lot of the narrative tricks that they used in LOST. They refocus a lot, and jump around the various places they create for themselves. This means that you'll often have a cliffhanger episode which isn't resolved, or even addressed in the next episode. They've also got a neat habit of changing the title sequence to suit the location and/or time period they're covering, which is a very nice touch. I love the 80s chiptune titles. That said, the central conflicts are all quite compelling and Walter Bishop is one of the best characters on telly. Also, hats off to the casting department. I'm always impressed when a sci-fi show does mirror episodes. Unfailingly, they always manage to employ actors who look just like the originals. Uncanny.

Blimey. This episode has gone national. Talk about bad publicity

Current public opinion rendered in the form of Pacman. Your job is to vote until Pacman is unable to eat.

Yeah, let's do that and have 1,000 posts on is he/isn't he?

A very interesting point. You can get infracted on this site, but there's no way to build up any credit, as it were. So basically, you can amuse the SaintsWeb general public countless times and not have that count. Step through the delicate tripwire of moderator sensibilities 10 times, and you are gone forever! I've only been infracted the once, and that was for continuing to argue with Bazza about whether he was dune or not. It was deserved, but it's ultimately a problem that was born in the moderation culture of this site. I don't think dune should have been perma-banned in the first place, but as soon as that happened, it was likely that there would be some poster identity question in the future. We've had loads of these little episodes, all completely unnecessary. I've often looked at some of the posts where I've had a barney with people. In some cases, the context is right there in the thread. In others, stuff that is said on a thread is often "afters" from a previous encounter. Someone coming into the site might look at one of these more venomous missives and say "ha, pap - what a c**t". In the early days of my posting here, one of the reasons I used to respond to trolls so much was because I felt someone had to challenge it, and I'm sure others nibble at trollbait for the same reason. These days, having spent far too much time on here, I'm a lot more aware of who is posting what and why, and generally respond to a lot less of it ( someone will pick up the torch, they always do ). Thing is, it has taken quite a bit of effort to stay on the ball. F**k knows how people less sad than I manage. The evolution of this site as a networking platform has stalled, or headed in the wrong direction. The Facebook connect button serves only to be ignored for me, while the Groups section - a bloody good idea, has lain utterly dormant for over a year. As Facebook itself and the number of "^ this" posts shows, sometimes all a poster wants to do is express approval for another post. We don't even have that here. If Cortese's plans are even half as realistic as his lofty ambitions, this site is going to see a lot more traffic. I expect it already does due to our Premiership status. Anything high-volume on the Internet is self-moderated and reputation-based. Time to start looking at this, because this place is getting a reputation for bad moderation decisions.

It's nothing quite so dirty, bletch. Think of it as a dormant super-team, ready to save the world at a moment's notice, just like the Avengers or the Justice League.

How come the poll results are hidden? I'd like to know who voted no apart from St Chalet

Hands are ten to one in favour of bringing him back right now.

Ah, the big UKIP hit campaign continues. This will be of particular interest to trousers, as the story pertains to trousers. Women's trousers to be precise. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/10064185/Ukip-donor-says-women-in-trousers-are-hostile-and-unmarried-mothers-need-a-smack.html Btw, bloke in the article seems like a repellent bugger, but interesting to see the guilt-by-association thing so early.

Seriously, Bats - don't waste time telling us how new you are around here. We can all see that from your join date. Cut to the chase and tell us about the new Batsubmarine.

The best motivation for a diet is being called a fat c*nt shortly before said diet. I speak from experience.

So offensive that the post was deleted and the poster was banned. But apparently not offensive enough to reprint to justify a moderator's decision. Ironically, St Chalet's contribution is the first post you'll find on SaintsWeb to carry this heinous insult. So, best poster banned, and yet the offensive content reprinted anyway. I have to ask. Could this actually have been moderated any worse?

Thanks to saintbletch for a much more reasonable assessment of the situation than I can muster under these circumstances, and would second his call for a discussion on how you're going to moderate stuff in the future. This is a paid service, and no arse licking, the best Saints forum for me personally, but as a 38 year old bloke, seeing one of the best posters disappear because he's tripped your very arbitrary standards of moderation has made my experience poorer. I genuinely wonder who it is the mods think they are serving. We're all big boys and girls, we've all heard worse, and as bletch points out, if it was so bad, why reprint it verbatim. I too welcome saintbletch back to the site. Not only does he belong to my largely unspecified inner circle ( he is not yet aware of this ) but he also manages to ask questions that are both difficult and reasonable all at the same time. Do give the post the respect it deserves, ta.