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Yesterday I added another Left-To-Right language to SoccerProject, Arabic. Manager fafz12 will from now on try to complete this language. Good luck !
Meanwhile manager Sjoerd resigned as a Dutch Modarator and he was replaced by Robstje, who is probably the youngest mod ever on SoccerProject 
I noticed some extra subscriptions today, so I tried to find out where they came from. Turns out we’ve already had over a hundred subscriptions from http://web.17173.com/_soccer/. I don’t have a clue what they’re are writing, but it must me something good I even found a reference on their homepage, if only more Chinese websites would do this …
Anybody any idea how they rate us ?
A few days ago manager adnan started on the Albanian translation. I’d like to wish him good luck and hope to see him finish the translation during 2008. For now he has already done 10 %, let’s hope he can keep up that pace…
Manager Ivan Pavlovich left the sheriff team today. We’d like to thank him for all his sheriff work and wish him all the best in his further SoccerProject-career !
One thing we’ve always been disscussing is the necessity of keeping the old SoccerProject games in the database. Who’s interested in a game played in season 5 where most players who particpated have disappeared already ? So far we’ve kept all the games, but maybe we’ll decide to delete the old games. We’ll see about that….
But while they are in the database, they should be available to all managers of course, which wasn’t the case for old friendly cup games. So I rewrote some code and now all results of friendely cups played during old seasons are avaialble again. Now you can all enjoy the history of SoccerProject and especially the fifty editions of the Ponziani Cup of course …
PS: Already down to 55 Mantis issues, too bad the difficult ones are looking to stay around for another wile
Although I didn’t have any particular plans for this evening, I did manage to close 8 issues of our Mantis-list. Not all of them were real bugs, but at least 3 of them were. And the other ones were very useful improvements for SoccerProject. I guess that makes this a very good evening
I’m not gonna explain all of these little enhancements into detail, but at least one of them might interest you if you are a SoccerProject-manager. As from now your assistant manager will be a little bit smarter. If you forget to choose players for the bench, he will now choose players more realistically himself. Previously he just made sure the bench was filled, now he wil try to make sure you have a goalie, a defender, a midfielder and a forward available when one of your starting eleven gets injured. That’s the least he could do, of course.
That makes 69 more open issues left to tackle. If only I could have more evenings like this one …
Ever since the release of the new layout on SoccerProject, some IE7-users had been reporting the same bug. The advertising banner at the bottom of the screen was not moving when they tried to scroll (up nor down). Very annoying because sometimes very crucial functionality was hidden by the banner. Because the bug only appeared with some users and it was not reproducable by me, I never had a clue about the cause. None of my questions about this bug were decently answered, so it seemed like this puzzle would never be solved. Very discouraging, but that’s what IE7 is known for, isn’t
Until recently manager JNV reported the problem again. He found out himself that his IE7 browser was identifying itself as IE6 by using the User Agent String
[Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)]
Changing this in the registry solved his problem. He even provided me the code for two .reg-files which I could use for testing.
Allthough I was very glad to know the cause and to even have a solution, this was not going to solve the problem for all those users who never make it to the forum, so I needed to keep looking for a solution. Obviously this was a lot easier now I knew how to reproduce the problem, by simply double-clicking the correct reg-file.
In the process I learnt that it’s very easy to your own User Agent string by filling in
javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent)
in the address bar of your browser. It turned out that my IE7-browser had this User Agent String:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; formsPlayer 1.4; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Or after clicking the other reg-file :
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; formsPlayer 1.4; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
I expected the strings to be different, but I never expected it to be double. I mean the string “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; formsPlayer 1.4;” is simply repeated. Only in the second case it’s with a small change, IE 6 instead of IE 7. In fact this opened up the possibility to a solution, because now I could still check if the browser was IE7, although it also identified itself as being IE6. That would never have been possible if the User agent string wasn’t repeated. I’m not sure this is how MS meant it to be used, but at least it has worked for us.
Of course, if the user Agent is simply “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ;” We will never be able to display everything correctly, because the client identfies itself different from how he renders the page, but that should never be the case, unless a user explicitly wants this.
While I was not sure when I was implementing it, I just came accross a very nice example of how the SoccerProject Dashboard can be used.
On this Czech site somebody made an overview of all of his friends teams. Looks very handy, I’m even considering adding this feature to SoccerProject. This way manager could very quickly see the standings of all of his favourited teams. Wouldn’t that be nice ?
Another example : http://sportssa.blogspot.com/ . There’s no way for me to find them all, but I’m glad to see it’s being used like I hoped it would.
I’ve prepared a short press announcement, which I’ll be sending to some (game-)news sites in order to promote SoccerProject a little more. Until the creation of an I-division, I think the release of the Chinses verion is the best timing for it. Feel free to copy or translate it and send it to any local or Chinese website or anyone else who might be interested.
05/03/08 : Soccerproject goes China
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Free online football management game SoccerProject has just released its Chinese version, which means http://www.soccerproject.com is now available in 24 different languages. After last year’s complete layout make-over and the perfection of the transfer market, this is a new step in creating the best football management game on the web. With 40 000 active SoccerProject-managers already, this release of the Chinese language might just be what’s needed for an explosive growth in 2008.
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