stevegrant

Also worth bearing in mind that while many sites are free at the point of use, someone somewhere is paying for the site to be hosted. Whether that's on a network like the old Rivals sites, where Rivals pays all the costs and distributes a portion of the advertising revenue into the pockets of the individual site editors, or an independent site who just happens to have an admin who's happy to cover the cost themselves. While I'd love to fall into the latter category, I've not made my millions yet, so for now it'll have to wait.

I'm not entirely convinced, and I'm also fairly mindful that I don't want to exclude people who have registered on the site. I've no problem making the main board only visible to people who are logged in, so that prevents those who aren't registered at all from hogging any of the bandwidth, but I'd like to analyse the ratio of paid/non-paid members there are on matchdays before making that sort of call. After all, the £5 subscription was always intended for those who wanted the full bells and whistles, rather than simply being able to use the forum at peak times. The logistics for that sort of thing would be an absolute ballache as well, at the moment it would need either Baj or I to be online shortly before and after every game to make the permissions changes so only paid members could use the main board. I could write a script to do it, but I need to be certain that it's actually going to benefit everyone. That doesn't necessarily solve the problem either, as non-paid members might think they might as well just create their own match thread on one of the other boards, while there's potentially nobody around to put a stop to it.

So why are you still here, when all you do is ****ing whinge? For those of you who actually have sensible comments to make, see my post on the main board for what's happening in the next week or two.

Correct. That remains the case. Feel free to download the accounts from Companies House, they're very easy to acquire. Neither Baj or I have taken a penny out, despite the countless hours we put in running this place. In fact, we both still pay the fiver subscription fee like everyone else. SaintsWeb Ltd is a limited company. It does not have "members". That would be a club or society, which SaintsWeb is not. As I said above, you can obtain the figures from Companies House if you're really that bothered. So much wrong with that statement. There are shares, 100 of them in fact. I own 50 of them, Baj owns the other 50. All limited companies are limited by guarantee, what that basically means is that unless we are criminally negligent, the directors can't be held personally liable for any debts accrued by the company if the company were unable to pay them. Profits can be distributed to shareholders in the form of a dividend. However, as you will see from the accounts if you can be arsed to actually look for them (hint: http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk), no dividend has ever been paid, and there are no plans to do so either. See above. SaintsWeb isn't a members club or trust where everyone gets a vote. Now I've got those rather odd questions/statements out of the way, what is happening right now (and has been for the past two months) is that we have a brand new server which the company I work for has bought. The spec for this server is light years ahead of anything we've had previously, and I'll also be able to hand over the technical maintenance of the hardware to our sysadmin geek here, who knows a hell of a lot more about server management than I do. I've managed to negotiate a rate which I feel is good value for money (as a guide, for the same price with big-name hosting companies, we'd get about a quarter of the server power) and gives us space in what is probably the UK's most powerful data centre in central London, which should improve the data speeds we get. The rate we'll be paying is a fair bit more than we're currently paying, but the advertising revenue has increased sufficiently in the last six months for me to justify the extra spending. I'm not 100% sure on the timescales for actually getting this server up and running, it's possible that it might be installed at the data centre by the end of the week, but we won't be migrating everything until next week at the earliest. I'll keep you posted. If any of that sounds particularly scatty, then sorry, but to be honest I'm a bit fed up of the same old people whinging (and you know exactly who you are) when they don't seem willing or able to put forward any actual solutions themselves.

There's an app called TuneIn Radio available for Blackberry (probably also on Android/iPhone) where you can stream radio broadcasts. Whether Solent has the rights to broadcast Saints games or not, I'm not entirely sure, but I was able to get their cricket commentaries through it.

Under the Direct Debit scheme, if you can prove to your bank that you have not authorised a payment, they can cancel and reclaim the money on your behalf. Perform would then be charged a penalty fee for the privilege. Did they send an email confirmation that the subscription had been cancelled? If so, take copies of that and any other correspondence with them to your bank and they'll be able to sort it.

No, cup games weren't included initially - we led at HT against Man United last season and lost - so it's 26 now. Another stat that I spotted yesterday, we've dropped just 5 points from the last available 51 in league games!

From what I remember of it, it was absolutely impossible to not **** money down the drain Pompey-style.

I would be amazed if Benjani turned down an offer from Blackburn. He's been training with Stockport, FFS, and was prepared to sign a short-term deal with them just so he was keeping himself in the shop window. They don't have a pot to **** in either (but, unlike Pompey, don't try to pretend otherwise), so he wouldn't have been offered much. I expect he's probably "only" on about £5k a week basic with large performance-related bonuses. The sort of signing they should have been making a year ago...

Oh, and also, I wouldn't necessarily take what a club spokesman says as gospel, whether that's our own one or another club's. They'll generally try to keep everything hush-hush right up until the very last moment, so I wouldn't expect to hear anything other than denials coming from Turf Moor.

I'd heard that the club had booked a slot for a medical at the General today, but I don't know whether that's because a deal has already been done for someone or just on the off-chance that something gets agreed in time.

Akinbiyi in that game

The key word there is "could". The one and only criticism I could possibly muster from yesterday, where we were a joy to watch for the most part, is that the game should have been dead and buried long before they had that late rally.

Looked pretty horrible, no complaints or excuse for it really. That said, the situation could have been avoided had the referee clamped down on some pretty hefty and late tackles (from players on both sides) in the minute or two leading up to the red card. The ref let everything go which seemed to indicate that anything was fair game at that stage. Had it been nipped in the bud earlier, I'm pretty sure Chaplow wouldn't have felt the need to leave his mark on McEveley there.

One addition, Jeffrey Imudia is playing for Dave Hockaday's Forest Green Rovers side tonight in the BSP. I think they've recently gone full-time so he'll still count as a pro.

If you've got a network railcard, you can get a discounted fare as far as Manningtree for £19.85, and the rest of the journey is £5.40.

Being at one end of the country doesn't help, I'd say, especially in terms of travel costs. In order to get anywhere north of the M4, you realistically have to go via London (the CrossCountry trains from Bournemouth to Manchester seemed to always be horrendously expensive even on advance bookings), which is a ballache as you then have to add at least another 2 hours to your journey.

Should be an interesting game. Barnsley apparently had a decent pre-season, have made some astute signings, and got a decent result at Forest on the opening day, but then had a disastrous home defeat to Morecambe on Tuesday night. Keith Hill has a 100% record against us, so hopefully we can rectify that. I wouldn't be too disappointed with a draw, but we've looked good so far this season (it makes a pleasant change for us to start the season well) so a win's certainly not out of the question.

He had a horrific injury during his time in Scotland, so it's possible that the injury has reduced his mobility. At the highest level, that's a key requirement.

And what's stopping the new guys doing the same? It's perfectly logical to do, doesn't really take a great deal of effort and will improve their efficiency immeasurably.

The contract will be costing The Betting Room a fortune (comfortably into five figures), so they'll need to recoup that money through getting enough punters betting with them. Also, where they're such a small company, they'll probably have to recruit temporary staff for matchdays due to the number of booths they have to operate, whereas Ladbrokes used to just use their shop staff as they've got more resources available to them.

Could you detail exactly what you've tried to do so I can try to replicate it?

6,541 is the attendance, including 348 Torquay fans

Directly linked to the other trial, I guess.