Things You Never Knew...

Since I've been using the internet, I've been reading soccernet for all my football related news. Back then. it was simply www.soccernet.com, before the original guy sold out (not that I blame him!) to ESPN and it became soccernet.espn.com. Slowly I watched the site get more and more commercialized, adding more and more (mostly useless*) features. Sadly, I think I've read soccernet for the last time.

I don't mind the odd advertising banner on sites I read. But, guess what? For a while now, they've been running video advertisements, which AUTOMATICALLY PLAY as soon as they're loaded. AND THEY ARE )(#@*)(*@#)(%*)# IRRITATING. If you know my surfing habits, you will know I have a gazillion tabs open at once and I DO NOT appreciate random advertisements playing when I least expect it. No thank you.

Apparently there's this option on the soccernet front page that says to send feedback to some email. Guess what else? They do not respond! I sent a perfectly civil reasonably worded email (yes, I'm capable of that. We all are) writing about how invasive video advertising is, and what did I get for my efforts? The cold shoulder. Not even a simple 'thank you for your feedback, blah blah' but just silence.

So. I am now looking for a different website for all my soccer related news. www.chelseafc.co.uk is good, but it only gets me so far. Any reccomendations? Right now BBC is ok, but I don't like the site for some reason.

*One thing that really really irritated me a while back was the launch of the My ESPN or some cockamamie service requiring registration. You used to be able to set a cookie to tell them your preferred team so you could automatically see team-related news on the front page, but now they make you register to do that. Bahhhh. Not that I have anything against registering, but I don't see why I now have to register just to get the same thing I used to be able to get just by setting a cookie.

Edit - for all my issues, I've actually come to really like Soccernet's reporting style and all, so if someone can figure out how to stop flash movies (I think they're flash) from automatically playing, I'll be happy too. Although I've thought about it and it doesn't seem possible, since the technology is designed to be autoplay.