It's a big hats on to
Burnley FC's alleged PR department, which has scaled new heights of incompetence. When
they moved their old site address of www.clarets.co.uk
onto a new server, it seems they forgot about the approximately 700 people who had
registered with the Clarets ISP. All these accounts were lost when the domain was
transferred. This meant that all sites with anything.clarets.co.uk addresses disappeared
and anyone using the Clarets dial up service to connect to the internet lost their
connection. Among domains that were lost were those of supporters clubs which do such a
good job in supporting Burnley FC - such as cisa.clarets.co.uk, southwest.clarets.co.uk,
accrington.clarets.co.uk - and our recently advertised address of london.clarets.co.uk.
What an almighty cock-up from a department which is becoming famous as fly in the ointment
of Burnley.
Surely the least we could expect was a grovelling apology? Alas,
the best we got from the official site - oh, you know the address - was mealy mouthed to
say the least. They simply suggest people move their sites to new addresses, sign up with
new ISPs, and promise to publicise the new site addresses. Good of them. What an absolute
PR own goal from the club this is. Some of the Clarets internet users were businesses,
using the connection and site space for business purposes. Surely these are exactly the
people the club has been keen to attract? Indeed, people were, a year or two ago,
encouraged to sign up to the clarets ISP. Supporters clubs, such as ourselves, recommended
that its members sign up and distributed information to our members. I seem to remember
the club saying at the time that their intention was to create an online community of
Burnley supporters. Now, it seems, someone at the club simply forgot they'd ever done
this, and pulled the plug. That person should have been walking out of the office with a
cardboard box yesterday - but I don't suppose they will be.
Congratulations to the alleged PR department in managing to
alienate the supporters clubs which do so very much to get people supporting Burnley and
thus increase attendance at matches and put money in the club's pockets. Of course, the
club are happy to use the supporters' clubs when it suits them - CISA received Christmas
raffle tickets to sell on the club's behalf on the same day that they lost their site.
Still, I suppose the club doesn't need friends when things are going so well.
Oddly enough, the loss of the CISA site, and the consequent loss of
the detailed reviews of past games against coming opponents, seems, through some internet
version of the butterfly effect, to have caused the absence of the 'stat pack' feature on
the next game from the official site. Odd, that.
Doubtless the club will continue to take the view that the only
Burnley site you need is the official one. Trying to monopolise the internet is like
trying to stop the rain, as they'd know if they'd been involved in the internet for more
than five minutes. But, given the incompetence outlined above, given their site's recent
offer of tickets for the West Brom game to take place 'at Loftus Road' (on the wrong
date), given that the Crewe match report said Andy Cooke's 39th minute goal was scored
'mid way though the first half' and given that the new 'champions' features are
insultingly brief, it seems clear to me that we still need a network of good, strong,
committed and independent Burnley sites providing honest, unmediated, original content. So
we'll keep going. Probably some day at Burnley someone will forget they've got an official
site and wipe that out too.
