Hello and welcome to the new home of www.bristolcitynet.co.uk, which many of you will know better as ‘The Bristol City Net Centre’ first set up and published for many years by Rob Fernandes.

The decision to move from Rivals, along with a large group of fanzine editors from up and down the country, was first spoken about in early January 2007, following Sky’s acquisition of the Rivals network in November 2006.

Editors of many of the sites had become increasingly disenchanted with Sky for reasons that should probably be left in private. But as I’m sure many of you noticed outwardly, the format on Rivals had become increasingly dated, the software was tired and the time was right to move on - not only for us, but for many of the editors of the other sites too, who have switched over with us.

On this new network, clubfanzine.com, the editors of all the sites are reclaiming their independence. Indeed, many of the editors also publish their club’s paper fanzine, so we hope that, along with some excellent new additions to the team, we can bring you the best independent football club network on the internet, with quality editorial insight across the board. That is our aim, and we have all been working incredibly hard to achieve that goal and will continue to do so.

As with any change, there will be problems, glitches and things that need altering and improving. Any suggestions on those issues will be gratefully received, as we strive to bring you a site you enjoy not only reading, but participating in too.

We have a new forum, which will doubtless need tweaks as we go along, but which we believe is far superior to the Rivals message board, which was so clumsy to navigate.

To access all the features on the site, you will need to re-register on here, but all you need to enter is your name, your desired username and an email address which will be verified. All this can be accessed via the ‘Register’ button in the red menu on the left. Once that’s done, you can log in, again via the ‘Login’ button on the left, and you’re ready to go.

From my point of view, I am delighted to be taking over from Ian (Cheshire Red) as editor of The Bristol City Net Centre and hope that I can bring you a site that is independent, informative and occasionally amusing. Ian will still be very heavily involved (hard for someone his size to be anything else really) in clubfanzine.com and I am extremely grateful to him for all his hard work and help in getting this site up and running.

Please remember, this site is still in its very early days, and we know there will be issues that need addressing and we’ll do our very best to iron those out as we go on. But we would very much like you to join us as we set off on a new road in The Bristol City Net Centre’s history and hope it will be a site you visit again and again, and come to see as a place that is the number one independent site for Bristol City FC.

Come On, You REDS!

By Huw Griffiths (edson) - Editor of www.bristolcitynet.co.uk