Once upon a time a Queen's Park programme editor received a phone call from the Club asking him to phone someone who represented a company who were trying to create an internet football network comprising unofficial sites of all the UK's senior league sides. That company was called Rivals, and with the Club Secretary's permission, the programme editor signed up to join Rivals as they allowed him the opportunity to write frank "as he saw it" match reports without the constraints of the SFA-enforced "never criticise match officials or other member clubs" policy which applied (and still does) to official publications.

Other major benefits for the editor, apart from being paid for this by Rivals, were that he required little by way of website knowledge as templates were already created for him to use and that his new site could also have an message board which would be the first opportunity for Q.P. supporters to interact on-line.

All good things must come to an end however, and not long after the infamous "night of the long quills" which ultimately forced the resignation of the programme editor as the powers of darkness moved in, Rivals' parent company was taken over and a cost-cutting exercise saw the abandonment of the previous UK wide coverage philosophy so that only the major clubs would continue to have active sites. Given that the vast majority of lower league site managers were enthusiasts who ran their sites as a hobby, and for whom the small additional income was merely a bonus, Rivals were offered their continued services for free, but the corporation were not for turning and the sites of the smaller clubs were closed, as were most of their rugby league and cricket sites too..

Several site managers who knew how to set up their own stand-alone sites went ahead and did so, whilst one enterprising individual who had run the Montrose site took it upon himself to try to re-create the original Rivals ethos and set up a new Network by "borrowing" their templates. Many of the former Rivals site managers "signed-up" on an unpaid basis, and the new SportNetwork sites were born.

Over the last few years, the new network has grown into a significant organisation, as witnessed by the amount of advertising income now being generated by the site managers. Recently, due to a combination of work-related reasons and change in personal circumstances, the Queen's Park Spiders site manager announced that he would need to take a sabbatical when it came to writing match reports this season, and he invited others to take over that role if they wanted to do so. He was not concerned by the lack of responses, as over the last few years several other unofficial QP sites had been created, and they were fulfilling the need for accurate and independent match reports.

Thus the Queen's Park Spiders site manager saw a new chapter evolving before him whereby the new mainstay of his site would be its excellent Message Board, and where he would now have more time at his disposal to finally upload the several hundreds of player and match photos that he had going all the way back to the early 1970's.

However, once more the powers of darkness were plotting against him (albeit from a different source this time), as he was told that if he couldn't do match reports for the site then he would need to write "stories" instead, otherwise the site owners would close down the Message Board by "deactivating" it.

This gave the site manager something of a dilemma. He didn't want to deny fellow QP supporters the opportunity to continue to participate in the Message Board, but nor did he want to be placed in the position whereby he was having to manufacture or invent stories simply to appease the powers of darkness.

But children, then something wonderful happened. Whether by coincidence, fate, design or simply just down to luck, it was announced that the good fairy (allegedly!) at the excellent qpfc.com was starting a message board of her own, thereby allowing the Queen's Park Spiders site manager to defeat the evil powers of darkness.

And the moral of this story.............when you have people working hard to maintain good internet sites from which you ultimately benefit, don't become so caught up in your own importance that you forget that it's the little people who helped get you there.

THE END

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