Heavy on what's going wrong, light on what to do to fix it but it's hard to argue that everything is OK in the English game at the moment.

4 hours ago, windymiller7 said:

I think after the first post we're wondering whether you're 'H' or not before committing! 😉😁

Well spotted, I hoped somebody would 😉

I'm surprised there hasn't been more comeback on this and some of the things said tbh, I was totally expecting some grief for what I said about Armstrong!

I'm definately in the minority among Rovers fans when it comes to the possession football Mowbray has tried to play, certainly amongst the other panelists. When it worked is was great to watch, some of the balls through the lines for Armstrong to run on to came from extended periods, individual runs through the gaps created and diagonal balls out to the wing. We struggled to adapt when that didn't work, and we couldn't make it click often enough.

The response to @Herbie6590's question about the pitch should have been "Both teams play on the same pitch" 😉 I missed a chance there.

On 05/03/2021 at 17:13, Gav said:

Afternoon Mods,

The adverts on the site seem to have gone bonkers over the last 48hrs, click the forum link, immediate advert you need to read/click before access.

I understand the need to support the site, but is this the new normal?

Thanks

We haven't changed anything regarding adverts, if anything's changed then it's at Google's end.

I don't have an iPhone so I'm not able to recreate the problem ... can anyone else have a go and see if it's a general thing?

25 minutes ago, Stuart said:

It would be interesting to know how many BRFCS users have bought anything by using the ads.

I don't have the stats specifically for brfcs, but industry wide the click through rate for all and types is only 1.91% (sounds tiny, but that's 1.91% of 30 billion impressions). For some sites .45% is considered good.

The quality of the ads you are shown depends on what they know about you, so if you're like me and use ad/tracking blockers then the stuff you get shown is pretty much random. (Facebook was convinced for weeks that I needed a mini digger) even then though, your ads your shown might not be very accurate.

I think I'll watch Sheffield Wednesday/Derby instead should be a much more interesting game.

On 18/04/2021 at 20:03, Gav said:

I drove into Sheffield earlier today and driving past Hillsborough park I see 2 lads wearing the Blue and White halves loud and proud. I have to admit I've seen Rover shirts here before, could be the same lads.

This site has turned into a cauldron of misery, but when you drive into 3rd city and see Rover shirts, everything in the world is great again, lets face it, we could be Wednesday 😟

 

There's quite a few of us here in Sheffield. When I first moved here I went to join the local pub team and I met a fellow Rovers fan playing for them already. Next season when they started a 2nd team, 2 more people turned up in Rovers shirts. During my first week at work a guy wandered across the car part in the kit ...

I've always put it down to the universities, the city attracts people from all over the place.

3 minutes ago, AllRoverAsia said:

Just what's needed, the Boro Old Boys Network.

Other managers can't win when commenting on their opponents, most of them would make a comment like this & perhaps undeservedly get stick from the fans, others *cough*Paul Cook*cough* make negative or gloating comments and they quite rightly get grief.

I think most managers treat reactions to comments in the press with the same amount of attention that they give the reactions on message boards like this 🙂

The data is probably still there but the feature was never kept up to date and was broken so it was removed at some point.

Definitely one for the backlog of there are no privacy issues.

3 hours ago, Gav said:

Can I ask, have you renewed your security certificates gents? 

I’ve seen ads in the past swamping user access due to expired certification. 

Apologies for sticking my nose in.

We renewed the certs on Saturday, I missed the entire first half doing it 😞

These new ads are nothing to do with that though, they're something Google is pushing.

I've been looking at this since we noticed it the other week and it's entirely normal for an advertising network to switch up the way they display adverts, it happens all the time. It's also entirely normal for these changes to roll out gradually, which is why you see them on some sites, not others. There's a whole industry of people who look at the effect of changes to websites. My current client for example is a well know ecommerce site & they measure the effect of each change they make to checkout and if they see a negative effect they it gets removed. Imagine the amount of money involved for Google if they see a 0.1% downturn in ad clicks because of a change ... anyway, I digress.

In terms of what the ads pay for, it's not the content, or the techies either for that matter, it's the server we host on, the software the site uses, the bandwidth the site uses, the storage the site uses the list goes on, and it's not free.

Should be sorted now @bazza 👍

Hey Bazza.

Just been taking a look at this and I think it would be better if we changed it back to have the title of the thread in there for SEO.

What about the BRFCS bit, is that important for you or would it be ok at the end so titles would look like "Some very exciting thread on BRFCS.com" The images show which tabs are BRFCS

and ... we're back.

If anyone's really interested in what's been going on, send me a DM and I'll spell it out in glorious nerdy detail.

Right then! The final bit of server maintenance (for now) is happening today, the site will be down for a bit while it's makes its way over to it's final destination. There's been a couple of hiccups, but the only one I think you've all spotted was the missing "Like" icon ... if only all IT upgrades went as smoothly!

See you all soon!

If you're reading this then the server migration has finished and (almost) everything went well. Some of the images are AWOL, but they'll be back when they see fit, and the front page still needs a bit of TLC, but by doing this upgrade we've opened up a whole range of possibilities so rather than just do what we had before, we'll leave it as is and just make it better. Forum threads & indexes look much better right from kick off though!

I still say 2nd place is do-able, we've not had our best team out for ages, we've played 2 sub-par games and got all 6 points from them and yesterday's draw was exactly wheat we needed after having to replace our whole back 4, reminded me of the WBA away game a few seasons ago.

Had to delay the upgrade, we found a couple of things in testing and they just need fixing before we go any further.

I played in the same team as Gareth Ainsworth, does that count?

I'm a level 2 FA coach as well though, and that changed the way I watch football, helps you understand some of the decisions managers make that might not be obvious.

16 minutes ago, Norbert Rassragr said:

It would be like football manager when you sign out of contract 37 year olds who you remember used to play for West Ham 10 years ago.

No no, Andy Carrol went to Newcastle, not Bolton.

Carlisle manager Steven Presley thinks they should both go bust, by overspending they have in one sense "cheated".

This absolutely breaks my heart, non-footballing staff at Bolton havn't been paid and are so desperate that a local charity has set up a food bank specifically for them. In a time when football knows almost limitless resources this is disgusting. The players have the PFA as a safety net, but the rest of the staff don't have anything to fall back on.

I'm sure they'd appreciate any support available from up the M61 ...