This site's immediate future

[Scottish]

In 1984, after seven years away, Jack Charlton returned as Middlesbrough manager on a short-term caretaker basis. I mention that only because it allows me to compare myself to Big Jack for the first and probably last time. For those of you who know me there's no need for introductions or anything other than for me to say hello and hope you have all been well since last we 'met.'

For those of you who don't, a brief introduction. My name is David Ross and I started scottishleague.net in 2001, added the forum in 2005 and ran it until 2015 when I handed over to Alan who in turn passed it on to Andy. Like Jack Charlton* I've agreed to return as a 'caretaker' - though in this instance after EIGHT years away.

It's not my intention to be a full-time admin or to keep the site running indefinitely and my position is essentially the same as outlined back in 2015 which you can see further down these announcements under IMPORTANT NOTICE - FUTURE OF THIS SITE. I'm happy to hand over to anyone willing and ready to take on the role.

The main reason I'm back is to ensure the wealth of material posted in the forum over almost twenty years isn't lost. Archive.org has saved this site 309 times between March 2001 until June this year. Many people think - mistakenly - this means everything is saved and viewable via the Wayback Machine. I can testify from personal experience that is not the case and if this site were to cease to function tomorrow there is much that would be lost forever. The idea that nothing is truly lost online is sadly inaccurate. There's a lot that's been archived but it's far from everything.

So what I'm suggesting to users is save what you can while you can. And don't use Chrome as your browser. As far as I can tell Chrome has no option to save pages as PDFs. Safari allows you to export pages as a PDF and Opera has a straightforward save page as PDF option. It's time-consuming I know. I saved a few hundred pages this morning and it took a couple of hours. I've no idea how many pages there are in total. There are over 4,700 topics, each of which is at least one page and some topics run to twenty pages or more. Of course it may be there are only a few select topics you wish to save or you want to download the whole site. It's entirely up to you.

As this has always been a member-led forum and regular users will have spent many hours posting and responding I've no desire to see it turn into a free-for-all. This is YOUR content. These are YOUR posts and replies. This is YOUR forum. Of course everyone is free to distribute material as they see fit but I see no reason why all and sundry should be able to plunder YOUR content without YOUR permission.

To that end I've disabled the facility (at least temporarily) for non-users to access any of the regular forums. From now on only registered users will be able to see, comment or save any of the regular forum content. This particular forum has been created in order for users to see the site is still active. Without it you'd still be able to log in but you'd see a message saying there are no forums and that might act as a deterrent to logging in

I won't end by saying it's good to be back (though oddly enough it does feel a bit that way) as while I've no problem with Jack Charlton I draw the line at comparisons with Gary Glitter.


* No offence intended guys but in this scenario Alan is John Neal and Andy becomes Malcolm Allison

[Scottish]

This site will be closing shortly and is not accepting any new registrations. Registered users can for the time being log in as normal but will be unable to make any new posts or respond to existing ones.

Site Admin