Pie and Bovril

Pie and Bovril is an online Scottish Football Community, better known for its forum content, with over 16,000 contributors.
History
The site was established by David McDonald (known as Div) in competition with other similar websites in 1998. The name of the site follows the customary food and drink fans consume at football matches in Scotland: a scotch pie and a cup of hot Bovril.
Initially set-up as a forum for discussion about Scottish Football, the community has expanded to frequent discussion about religion, politics and technology. Experts in particular fields frequently provide invaluable advice to lesser educated posters.
Notability
The website's owner, David McDonald, has been featured on the BBC Radio Scotland programme Off the Ball. Several notable figures such as sports journalist and St Johnstone fan, Stuart Cosgrove, are known to post on the site.
Sportscene Results' weekly online piece frequently makes reference to posts made by Pie and Bovril posters. The radio show Your Call with Jim Traynor has also featured messages and calls from well known forum members. One such example includes the call from forum veteran "Swampy" urging Greenock Morton to call time on David Irons' tenure as manager. Irons left the Club soon after.
The political discourse on the Pie and Bovril "General Nonsense" forum is expansive, and has even been acknowledged on issues of importance in Scottish politics. BBC Newsnight's online critique referred to one poster's opinions in the wake of the Lockerbie Bomber's release.
Controversy
Pie and Bovril has been involved in a number of controversies, including legal threats from third parties. One of the more notable instances included a thread which shared common words with an outdoor aquatics company, who specialised in Hot Tubs. The thread became so popular that the Hot Tub enterprise's website no longer appeared at the top of Google's searchlist. P&B was threatened with action for what the company argued was commercial sabbotage. This was eventually resolved without court action.
The forum, like many others, has problems with discipline. Whilst regarded by its members as more liberal than others, repeated problems have existed with banned posters signing up with new accounts and flaming the board. The result of this was the temporary banning of Gmail accounts being used to verify new users in the middle of 2009.
Having largely funded itself through donations of contributors for several years, Pie and Bovril began to employ the use of advertisements on the P&B forums to assist funding. Problems have existed with poorly written third party advert scripts, causing some posters' web browsers to crash, although these issues are usually solved relatively swiftly. An opt out of these adverts was made available in 2007 when the new status of "Platinum Membership" was created, where this and other benefits were made available for an annual fee of £10. This has proved controversial with the perception of a "two-tier" posting hierarchy claimed to have been established by the site operators. It is notable, however, that some of the longest serving members remain "Gold" Members.

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