I, your site editor, have been away at the World Cup over the past week and returned late Thursday night. Unfortunately, in my absence the right information was not relayed to the posters which caused footymad to ban users who persistently tried to post the fixtures on the message board.
One poster, the ex-site editor, was right when he pointed out the following:
"In order to list the fixtures on the site in list form as you will see on say the official site, you have to pay a license to a company called football dataco, which is a rididolous sum that amounts to hundreds/thousands of pounds, Football Dataco actively go round on sites such as this one and will try to take legal action as the fixtures, as hard as it is to believe, are actually are protected by copyright."
The price of this license is so ridiculous that it is out of many companies range and that is why only a few sites can afford to print the fixtures.
Anyone that uses a site such as ITFM and prints fixtures on the messageboard is severely putting the site at risk of legal action from Football Dataco as we do not hold this license.
Likewise, printing a link to another site intentionally to give information about fixtures can result in the same action.
This information should have been related to you before the fixtures came out and essentially I must take responsibility for not reminding deputies that this must be done. I would like to issue an apology to the two very valuable ITFM posters that were on the recieving end of this mix-up and implore them to come back and continue to make ITFM, in my opinion, the leading community to discuss Ipswich Town. This site has a very good reputation and it would be such a shame to lose the community that has created this reputation.
Both posters will be unblocked and the ITFM team hope they will return and continue to make the messageboard such an interesting and friendly place to post.
Once again I apologise that the right information did not come through in my absence and I accept full responsibility for yesterdays events. FootyMad was just doing it's job in protecting the network from legal action.
I hope that sixto_peralta, ITFC_IJL, Kano, Spike_Kabba and others can accept this apology and return as invaluable members of the ITFM messageboard community.
I appreciate your action in setting up ITFM2 but I can promise you that changes to way the site is updated and run are underway, with an extension to the team in place and the old site banner will be replaced in time for the new season, lets hope 2006/2007 is a good one for Ipswich Town.
kind regards,
Russell Claydon
Site Editor