Welcome Everyone! Please Read This If You Haven't Already. Especially If You Are Involved With PTV :-) Thank-You And Have A Great Time Here.
The whole story about Orient message boards, and the current trouble with PTV explained from the majority of Orient supporter's perspectives.
This Unofficial Leyton Orient site has been running since September 1999 and was created after Leyton Orient's Official site OriNet had already established an online community almost unheard of amongst football clubs of it's size.
The message board on OriNet was the centre of the online community of fans from all over the country, and indeed the world. People from just around the corner to the ground, to all the way to Australia would regularly log in and chat to new people they could easliy meet as well as catching up with old friends that would always log in to the board several times a day, such was it's popularity.

The message board changed many times from server to server, provider to provider if there was a problem of any sort. This was often caused in the early days by the steady increase in traffic as the message board became the new internet home to more and more Orient fans, as well as fans of opposing teams who made too many friends on the board to leave behind.
Eventually, the administrator of the board found a service worthy of the large amount of traffic that visited the board every hour of every day. It was comfortable to use, reliable, fast, everyone liked the look and feel of it and everyone was happy. The board never got replaced after that as over 80% of the traffic to OriNet was going straight to the message board, resulting in OriNet being ranked within the top 20 most visited Official club websites out of all of those in the Football League as we as the Premiership.

For a third division team undergoing a supposed dip in their fortunes according to their history, this was nothing short of phenomenal. This changed though, with the conjuncture of PTV. PTV, to their credit have created a good website to replace the old design and the news and features on the new OriNet is absolutely top notch. It is a great service.
The trouble lies with the old message board being taken down and replaced with one that was chosen for reasons that none of the supporters on the board seemed to know about. The message board administrator was initially allowed to keep the old board on www.leytonorient.net instead, which he did as no-one bar the rare exception liked the new board at all. Everyone stayed on the old board and continued to thrive socially.

Many other unofficial sites had message boards too. Mine didn't. I resisted the idea as I believed (like the majority did too), that it would be far beneficial to the Orient online community if everyone all conversed in a common medium. But as the old board was finally laid to rest before it's time, I decided along with approximately 99% of the users of the old board that I couldn't stand using the new board that PTV insisted we used.
Some users began to use the new board occassionaly, but mostly to complain about how much they hated it so much. It feels, looks and runs much worse than the old one and as a result it has killed the conversation that once thrived on it. Many people stopped posting altogether.
I couldn't bear to use it as much as the old one, and I didn't fancy losing the friends that I had made and since met up with before, at and after Orient games, home and away. So I found this board, which was as close to the old message board on OriNet as I could possibly find and afford out of my own pocket.

This board dosn't provide internet hits for OriNet, PTV, or any of their sponsors. I would have used the idea used by OriNet's message board administrator of using a frameset with the official site in it, but that is not allowed - hence why the old board on www.leytonorient.net was taken down. I wouldn't have gained anything from this other than knowing that I am supporting my club even more financially than I already do.
But it is my hope that with all the other letters of protest that my fellow supporters are sending in, that PTV will listen and let us use the old board again on OriNet so that everything will be how it used to - when it wasn't broken and no-one tried to fix it. If that happens and everyone can happily use it as before instead of coming on here, then I will happily take this board down and stop it from rivalling the official site's board.

Last thing. If anyone from PTV reads this and would like to answer any questions that supporters have i.e: why do we have to use the new board and not the new one? Then I will happily post their messages on here, unedited, to give PTV a fair and equal chance to defend themselves and address the issue from their perspective.

Any queries will be replied to at: thepope@orientexpressnet.co.uk Thank you very much for reading and Up The O's!