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Link: www.kerrydalestreet.co.uk

History

Well it all began one fateful day on the 31st of August 2004. After a hectic summer of transfer frenzy, the www.etims.net website was constantly going down due to the number of forum users accessing the site. The etims team could not afford to pay for an upgrade of the server in order to cope with the demand and made the decision to close the forum on what they hoped would be a temporary basis. The intention was to allow the etims team time to agree a way to finance the cost of a new server which could cope with both the forum and the original etims site. No agreement was ever reached which was acceptable to all members of the etims team.

Glen TimTim, famous for the Etims rumour mill, told the members of the site forum that the forum would be down for a duration of roughly four weeks leaving the members relatively homeless in the celtic forum world. Some chose to spend their time on www.thehuddleboard.com, while others opted to join UnrepentFenianBastard forum where Beachbhoy ( a member of this site ) made them feel more than welcome, and of course there was www.celtic-mad.co.uk /www.comeonthehoops.com which latterly became www.celticminded.com.

One member of Etims, Fitzpas, did not want to spend his days trawling the Huddleboard for the latest Celtic news and he was not the only one. After consulting various senior members of Etims, namely Daviebhoy and a few others he made a free forum named 'erefugees' ( Etims Refugees ) and later purchased the domain name of www.erefugees.tk courtesy of Savio. From then things went up and more and more ex-members of the Etims forum joined.

Sean O Finn and Big Bobo Balde became moderators with solo forum jobs going to Yamsta and Daviebhoy.

With the forum growing in numbers each day and no sign of the return of Etims most knew that this would be their new home online.

Christmas 2004 and after a charity fund raiser and a night out Fitzpas decided to lose the tag of Erefugees, instead preferring to become detached from Etims and become a permanent online celtic community.

On 1st January 2005 the new forum name was announced and thus www.kerrydalestreet.co.uk was born and with it a selection of snazzy banners. For non-Celtic fans reference, Kerrydale Street is the address of the street where Celtic's stadium is in Glasgow.

From there became a steady rise in the joining numbers and new forums were added, such as the Tv and Film forum and the Music forum which have proved to be very popular among the users (which was later merged into the Entertainment forum after squabbles with the Music clique).

Further moderators were recruited with the addition of Fatboab, Mikebhoy, Kevtic and Klubber Lang.

The Etims forum returned but there was always going to be one outcome and Kerrydalestreet.co.ukwww.kerrydalestreet.co.uk is the home to more than four thousand celtic fanatics. Notably, as a very welcoming forum there are non-Celts who are regular contributors also including a Liverpool Supporter ("Debbie") and even a Rangers Fan ("STB").

In September 2007, after 3 years of hard work on the KDS forum, Fitzpas (founder of the forum) decided to take semi-retirement from the board in order to pursue other personal projects, a sad loss for the forum, however he was soon back again!!! Can't keep a good man down.

Honours

In August 2007, the founder of the forum, Fitzpas was deemed the second most influential Celtic man on the web, a great and deserved achievement, whilst the rest of the moderators on the forum were also given the welcome accolade of being at no.9. Link
In the 2008 poll, Fitzpas again featued highly in the list, but there were others also from the KDS forum also (5 of them!). Link

(from the Top Twenty Most Influential Online Tims 2007) 2. Fitzpas the admin from KDS just narrowly misses top spot. When the ETims forum closed its doors Fitzpas stepped into the breach with the forum that became known as Kerrydalestreet.co.uk, a site now considered, despite it not being the largest online, by the old media to be the place to go to take the pulse of the Celtic fans. Why? Journos like its structure and the general level of debate to be found within the threads. Given that many tims in the media use this forum ahead of the others this is more often than not the forum which breaks the big stories. This level of structure and debate has led KDS to being unfairly caricatured as the middle class (or post McCann) fan forum. This doesn’t seem to bother the countless punters who access it every day.

(from the Top Twenty Most Influential Online Tims 2007) 9. The moderators on Kerrydalestreet.co.uk Well there’s just too many to single one out. There’s hundreds of the buggers. I’ll speak more about KDS further down the line but regardless of whether you think they are a bunch of prawn sandwich munchers or some of the finest Celts around there is no denying they run a tight ship. Rarely in the field of human internet gubbings have so many threads been merged into so few by so many. Or something.

(from the Top Twenty Most Influential Online Tims 2008) 3. (2) Fitzpas – KDS. Despite “retiring” Fitz continues to be the main man on Kerrydalestreet. Every time he thinks he’s out, they pull him back in. For rational debate KDS is the Celtic site of choice. The challenge KDS is faced with is that it’s extremely difficult to maintain the high standards that have been set. Even with a battalion of moderators ready to merge, lock or delete a thread at a moments notice there is a natural cycle to a forum that generates peaks and troughs. The problem for Fitz and KDS is how do they avoid the troughs – which mainly appear in the threads about whether WGS is up to the job as manager or no. Maybe it’s just me but there seems to be a lot of repeats on KDS recently. Almost as many as there are Maloney rumours on here to be honest. Despite this Kerrydalestreet continues to be the first stop for fans looking to Celtic information and rumour. And of course, it continues to be the first stop for sports journos looking to fill their back page.