I get a lot of e-mail from people who are finding U's Net for the first time, especially from long-distance fans who can't get to many games and miss the local news. Sometimes they are people who have moved to another part of Great Britain with their employment, while others are now living and working abroad. Their ranks have recently been swelled by students who are either returning to their colleges and universities, or starting afresh and often discovering the Internet for the first time.

Apart from getting the latest news, they tell me they appreciate the views of the four or five supporters who regularly supply match reports and give a fans' eye view of the afternoon. Of course the match reports are also popular with the fans who watch home games but don't travel to the distant away games. To those of you who write those reports - and you know who you are - thank you from all long-distance U's!

Apart from the Moosenet mailing list, which is a separate entity from the web site and has been running for many years, the U's Net message board is another popular means of exchanging views. I know from the web site statistics that many more people read the messages every day than actually write something, and the board is another useful way of keeping up to date with informal gossip as well as asking for specific information.

For example, requests for directions to an away ground or for train or bus schedules often receive an answer within an hour from another helpful fan. Sometimes CUFC-related items are offered for sale or exchange and I recently bought a selection of programmes going back to 1971 this way. This week a former school friend of defender Martin McNeil left a message asking how he was getting on, and he received some very positive replies. During the summer two girls from Merseyside who had met two members of last year's youth team on holiday left a message reminding them to write!

There is usually plenty of banter between fans of other clubs, who will find the message board for their next opponents and leave wild predictions about the score, and then either return to gloat or never return again - depending on the outcome of the match. After last week's derby there were many predictions made on the U's Net message board and the posh.net equivalent, and unfortunately most of them were from POSH fans who were of course proved right. Users of the web site had to endure the same sort of merciless gloating that I am sure many of you had to face last week, but at least we got our revenge this weekend when we could 'commiserate' with them over a last minute goal at Wrexham!

Funnily enough there weren't many POSH fans using our message board this Monday!