After Saturday's victory over the Millers the Albion were still clinging onto the safety net in another rollercoaster ride for the drop zone.

Rougier's ability to persuade Rotherham into scoring for us contributed to his man-of-the-match award as well as maintaining his positive relationship with the fans.

His playing style may owe more to the battering ram than the corps de ballet but if it gives us the points and maintains our goal difference, who cares?

There's always Bobby Z on hand to provide the Brighton beauty pageant and even more goals!

Reputations can be made or broken overnight and this is particularly true of loan signings. Saturday's man-of-the-match can easily become the midweek's fallen hero or, if the game has gone spectacularly badly, Tuesday's 'Palace in disguise'!

Nowadays the day of judgement doesn't have to wait until the fans can gather in a pub. With the sort of internet access that only three or four years ago was unheard of, especially at work, the football websites and message forums provide instant and popular sounding boards.

And there are an awful lot of opportunities for online communication out there.

A quick browse of a single Albion-links page showed 38 fan sites alone, and the list didn't include the official club site or every online fans' forum.

Multiply this by the number of League clubs alone and there are literally thousands of web sites out there, all devotedly dedicated to some aspect of the beautiful game.

Of course, quantity alone doesn't guarantee quality and there are certainly some football forums that consist of little more than incoherent and barely literate streams of head-kicking drivel.

On the worst of these bulletin boards, the drivel is often interspersed with the sort of debating style that screams "Home Alone" since it comes from contributors whose parents have obviously gone out without making adequate babysitting arrangements.

Pointless as this stuff might seem to the casual observer, I guess there are many more dangerous ways to run up a parental phone bill and it doesn't take long to work out which sites are best avoided.

With the Albion having such a diverse fan base as well as the sort of recent history that inspired fans to speak out, it's no surprise that we have the best message boards on the web.

Ironically, among the next best contenders in this respect are the Palace although as I say this, I'm crossing my fingers in the hopes that I've still got a certain degree of anonymity in the South Stand!

The Palace, however, could never reach the standards of wit and repartee regularly exchanged between Brighton fans and the following interchange that took place is a perfect example. In answer to the question "What should I shout when I do a bungee jump?" the outright winner, in my opinion, was the wag who replied "Brighton 'till I die"! There's plenty of serious and well-informed debate going on at the same time though and a brief browse will soon identify the hot issues.

One question that nobody has ever had an accurate answer to is whether the players visit the message boards or whether they've ever posted messages. While one or two players have told me they've taken a quick look at a couple of forums, they've been somewhat evasive about the circumstances!

Although they, of all visitors, could easily hide their real identities and maintain anonymity because, in the world of Albion cyberspace which is populated by people posting messages under usernames like "Bobby's Boots" and "Pethick's Haircut", who would ever suspect that a contributor called "Hart's Shirt" might just be the real owner of it?

Roz South edits Brighton Rockz fanzine. Email: roz@southspark.co.uk