Pearljammer

Manager Leonardo sent me a message today, explaining he can no longer be a Polish forum moderator due to some personal problems. Of course I understand and I can only be very thankful he even made a suggestion for a new moderator.

I’d like to thank Leonardo for all the work he did during the past years and I wish him all the best in his personal life.

Meanwhile manager pearljammer has already accepted to be the new Polish forum moderator to help the other moderator Gladiator. Good luck Pearljammer !

Facebook review

After having spent a few hours subscribing and configuring my profile on Facebook, a few things are worth mentioning.

First of all I was astonished by the speed of the site. As I have quite some experience in this with SoccerProject, it really amazed me the site was quite slow. Maybe we’re not doing that bad at all with SoccerProject. To be honest WordPress.com is even worse.

Secondly I noticed some nice features which we actually could use in SoccerProject as well. There’s an easy-to-use invite-your-friend application which allows you to search your existing address books for friends with a Facebook-account. Very handy and I was surprised to find 100 contacts with a Facebook-account. You’ll agree with me, that means the site is quite popular I can only assume it means thousands of SoccerProject-managers must have a Facebook-account already.

Also nice was the possibility to import external rss-feeds. I imported the rss-feed from this blog which means every message I post here, will be published on my profile on facebook as well. I guess Cicco would like it if we would implement such a feature…

Last but not least, very simple, but very effective I guess. On a lot of pages they display a simple link to invite friends to Facebook. Why didn’t I think of that instead of writing regular game-messages about it ?!

SoccerProject@Facebook

I’ve had been postponing it for a few months, but with my non-geek friends talking about it too, I could no longer wait of course . So tonight I created myself a Sjarel-Facebook-account.

Although I’ve never really understood why people would be interested in this, it certainly looks like Facebook is going to be around for a few more years. After they conquered the USA, more and more people from all over the world seem to be joining, also in Europe.

I’ve had a LinkedIn account for a while now, which I use for my professional career, but I decided to create a Facebook-account for my hobby as well. Quite keen to know how it would/will turn out …

I was pleased to find out there already existed a SoccerProject-group on Facebook. Obviously I joined immediately and I hope the group will continue to grow in the future. Later I uploaded our SoccerProject-video, and invited people I know through SoccerProject to be my friend. All set, now I only have to wait until people get in touch I guess.

I’ll try to post a Facebook review later, since I did notice some interesting stuff as well. Meanwhile you’re all welcome to add me as a friend and join the SoccerProject group, I think that’s what it’s all about : bringing together people with shared interests…

Hungarian translation

Manager Snowflake kindly offered to continue the Hungarian translation. We’ve had some Hungarian translators in the past, but none of them was able to finish the job. At the moment about 2300 items are left to translate. Good luck Snowflake !

All-time Div A stats

Upon request…

Manager cheathunter asked me to publish a new ranking of managers and the number of seasons they played in div A. I remembered I once made a press announcement about this, it turned out to be on August, 2.

Time to make a new list, here it is (not counting season 21):

kenny 16
Sjarel 15
jimman23 13
krcgenk 9
Badbuffalo 6
cicco 6
cheathunter 6
dockseven 6
vlalex 6
OscarCookie 6

Of course managers who left the game are not mentioned, eg. koenb who played in div A for 9 seasons…

Instant-Buy-Price

After a few discussions on the forum, of which this one was the most recent, I decided to implement the ‘Instant-Buy-Price-feature’. Of course it will be tested by our Beta-panel before releasing it, and I’m interested to know their reactions.

Comparing all suggestions made to prevent managers to make false promises of selling a player for a certain price, I think this will be the best solution :

- Extending the 2-day period you cannot sell a player in, to 3 days.
- After 3 days, the seller will have an option to set a ‘Instant-Buy-Price’ which has to be at least 20% higher than the current highest bid. The ‘Instant-Buy-Price’ cannot be changed nor deleted afterwards.
- All current bidders will be notified of this ‘Instant-Buy-Price’.
- If any manager bids this ‘Instant-Buy-Price’, the player will be sold immediately.

It’s an option nobody has to use, but when negotiating a direct transfer, it can come in handy. I don’t see any downsides at this time, but maybe you guys can think of some. Don’t hesitate to mention them before I start implementing …

Coincidentally e-Bay had some issues with this kind of feature as well today. Apparently they were sued over this, let’s hope that won’t happen to us …

Trader stats

After reading a forum topic I ran a little query on our database. I wanted too know how many transfers are performed on a season by the top traders on SoccerProject.

In the image you can see the top-10, with login-buys-sales-total. 123 is of course a very big number, so maybe the topicstarter has a point we should limit that. As always it is hard to find a good maximum to set, but it turns out only 100 managers have done more than 40 transfers during season 20, so it looks like 20 incoming and 20 outgoing transfers each season should suffice…

20 seasons Division A

With the season finally over, I took some time to find all of the SoccerProject division-A winners through the years. It’s a nice list, which brings back some nice memories ..

20. The Skunks
19. The Skunks
18. Maccbi Natanya
17. Maccbi Natanya
16. AS Vlalex
15. kfc de pomp
14. Nop’s Heroes
13. FC Bruggenhof
12. Teefjes Vrolijke 11
11. Mado
10. Teefjes Vrolijke 11
9. The Naked Chef
8. fb2004
7. maluyaca
6. fb2004
5. fb2004
4. ReesingGenk
3. Racing Brugge
2. Heidebloem
1. Ketoak

Wishlist Nokia E65

I recently bought myself a new mobile after having lost my previous one. That one was a Nokia 3330, great phone for calling and SMS, impossible to break, one of the kind they don’t make anymore.

Anyway, I decided to go for something better this time. The one thing I especially wanted was Wifi, that way I would be able to check mail or go on the Internet whenever I was in the range of a wireless network. Might come in handy sometimes for SoccerProject, I thought.

A few weeks later now, and I’m quite satisfied at the moment, but … I’m missing a few things

1. I use Google Calendar a lot, as you could read in one of my previous posts. I’m glad I can now sync my mobile very easy, but I want to be able to do the same thing for my E-mail, RSS, etc. One button – sync all.
2. I would like a good SSH-client, preferrably password protected. I wasn’t able to install s2putty, maybe I missed something…
3. I still didn’t find a good RSS reader / aggregator. I want to be able to download all my favourite feeds when I’m online, just to make sure I can read them whenever I have some time for it, even when I’m offline at that time.

Any hints are welcome of course …

249 Broken Friendly Cups Deleted

Great fun on Thursday. After one of the webservers was already experiencing database connection problems during the day, he complete crashed right before the 18.00h simulation. This resulted in a completely failed simulation. Unfortunately this time we were not able to recover from this correctly.

ReesinG and I spent all of our free time during the weekend, to make sure the site was up-and running, but also tried to figure out how to fix the situation and prevent it from happening again. In the end we decided there was no other option than to delete all broken cups (249 out of 3403), which is what I started tonight. I hope it all works out as planned, I did try the procedure on a copy of the database first, but you never know of course …

Although the site was down for several hours on Thursday and again on Saturday morning, I must say the SoccerProject managers have been very patient and understanding about the situation. Even though some of them really suffered from the crash, one manager even lost 5 players because of this, they certainly didn’t overreact.

I’m very sorry I couldn’t help the managers who were influenced by the crash, and I’d like to apologize once again to them, but I would also like to repeat I’m trying my best to prevent this kind of situation from happening in the future.