Where has it gone .. Now rumour has it .

Someone will be sueing them again....

Probably something to do with the Grimsby board.

What happened on the grimsby board like?

The Grimsby board will be in big trouble over this issue.

Well it lasted a few years longer than I thought it was going to........

"I knew nothing about this whatsoever and am as shocked as you. The first I knew is when I got an e mail at 10am this morning saying that Rivals has ceased trading. "

source: Darlo Uncovered editor Scott Thornberry

darlowpete is on suicide watch.

Is it a fishy tale?

Cod knows...

Dont keep CARPing on.

I can't say I'm not surprised, the formatting on that message board after they revamped it a while back was absolute rubbish.

I don't think this would have happened if they'd revamped it the way they did.

Whatever will docpace do for kicks now?
Is it a legal thing or just financial?

I'm gutted about that.

No, hang on, no I'm fucking not.

Thats bad news for you guys! This means that I will remain here for EVER as I cant go back 'home' now.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

And you Allezzzzzzzzzzzzzz ? Jeez and they call me boring .

no one has ever called you boring Sussex, a dick, tosser, wanker and various other descriptions but never boring

Lets me magnanimous for a moment;

Back in the day when ITN was pretty much the only board, it was the dogs gonads. Ran by our very own PTBAP, it was simply the only board worth looking at. Admittedly the look was old fashioned but it worked and after all, we are talking about what? 10 years ago? Newellgate killed it I'm afraid. Nevertheless, take a well deserved bow Mr Williams.

NB: Despite his allegiences, Scott Thornberry has done a great job over the years too.

Why thank you kind sir.

I'm not ashamed to say that the move to Rivals was on the whole due to the money on offer. It was a well funded company who paid silly amounts to its editors in the early days, but when the bubble burst and the money ran out, today was inevitable, it's been a wounded animal for many a year. When I switched to Vital they had a refreshing attitude to their editors and a level of communication rivals could only dream of, but unfortunately they launched in a then saturated market and where doomed to be just another football network.

I jumped ship after ten years of writing previews, reports and news stories, there's only some much webmastering a man can take before a well earned rest is required. Do I miss it? Not fooking likely, I get to enjoy watching football again now. I do miss the payslips I received in 2001/2002 though

From what used to get talked about on Sport Network's Admin boards, this day has been coming for a long long time. A lot of the people on there were ones that Rivals had essentially binned because they were concentrating on football, and specifically on the main divisions which meant that sites that actually attracted a lot of visitors (Broomhill Stomp - Airdire and Only team in the Bible - Queen of the South for example) were dumped. Even then it was a financial thing as much as anything - and the tales that then started being told from those who still had contacts made it look worse and worse. I think I'm right in saying that after Rivals got bought out (Chrysalis?) they got rid of most of the techies, and then got themselves into all sorts of bother when they moved the servers and couldn't get them back up.

The redesign that saw the end of the old-style boards simply wasn't good enough - there were too many alternatives in terms of boards that were obviously better, some site owners jumped ship as well, and they had lost their position which had essentially been based on finding the best independent sites and getting them to join what was probably the first true network.

Having said that, I suspect NewsNow also had a big impact. Part of the Rivals "offering" was that it was a network, making it easy to find a site to go and slag off enemies, future opponents, ask fans about the latest player you'd signed from them etc. With NewsNow, who needs a network - just look at the feed for a particular club and follow a couple of likely-looking links.

Essentially the problem is the same one as on a lot of stuff at the moment - how do you make it pay. Advertising revenues are dropping, people won't pay for the content, so unless you find someone who us prepared to run a network like Rivals as a loss leader (which is what Sport Network was effectively - a huge ad for the web design and host that created it) you have to have costs cut to the bone...

The Rivals MB I enjoyed most was the divisional board.
As for Pools-specific boards, there was only really Rivals and the official site to choose from, and the latter was a non-starter because Headlander lived there, apart from which it never really moved on from the 56K modem days, so Rivals was pretty much a given. I'm talking purely about the MBs, not the editorial content. So RIP and welcome to the 21st century.

Hang on. Sussex has just made a post without a random comment on weight or noses.

Strange days indeed...

Pools Rivals was great. They used to have a new story on the front page at least once a year.

To be fair Kev did a great job for most of it, but around the time of Newellgate it all began to go rather pear shaped and with the other factors in play (such as them stopping paying site owners enough to make it worthwhile maybe working part time, Kev's own life moving on) it wasn't the same after.

At the time I was running Pools Online pretty much single handed (only articles from Spender in the last season really) and I know how much time it can take up running a site like that. I was in a job at the time that I could do standing on my head in little time, giving me loads of time to do stuff for the site but even then there were also some pretty late nights getting stuff ready etc and that was without doing a match report on every game. There comes a point where you're doing all of this, realise you're not getting paid for it, and have to decide whether you want a life or whether you want to keep doing the site.

It can often be more aggro than fun when people are quick to criticise and slow to praise; toe rags are prone to copy and paste your content and claim it as their own (A Luton site once copied and pasted the entire six part club history I did and claimed it as their own in an article about us, and you think Blue Stripes is bad...); you have to check through posts on the message board in case there's something that might lead to legal action (not just the stuff about Newell, but for example someone posting the fixtures up - and it's been known for Prediction Leagues with more than 3 games in advance to get the FL Heavy Mob down on them); you don't enjoy matches so much because you're scribbling notes down; it often costs you money and almost never makes it - in 4 years running Pools Online the only thing I got from it was a free ticket to a match courtesy of the one and only Paul Mullen. The wonder is that anyone does it at all!

Trie, they were always beating the Mail.

The first part I read as a genuine post before getting blasted by the follow-up.