Turkmenistan

After I asked for managers interested in helping us with translating SoccerProject, we received two positive reactions. Managers andhi97 and Turkmen2 will help us with the Indonesian and Turkmen version of SoccerProject. Good luck guys !

Long time no see… There has been little to write about lately, but at last something happened behind the scenes of SoccerProject.

French translator titou wrote me last week about an offensive post on the French part of the SoccerProject forum. I deleted the post as soon as possible, but also noticed we did not have a French moderator yet. So I decided to ask him if he could keep an eye on this forum and luckily he agreed.

Thanks titou, I wish you the best of luck as a mod on our forum

I nearly forgot about it, but Isis just told me. Actually she only reminded me about the fact I only told her about this one day later, like she does every year

Anyway, it’s hard to believe it’s already 4 years since we started with only a few dozens of managers. Looking back at the past year, I’d wish we had been able to make more progress, but unfortunetaly that hasn’t been the case. Luckily ReesinG has indicated he will have more time to spend in the second half of 2008. Lets’s hope that will come true …

Ever since we decided to also show the substitues in a SoccerProject match report, we noticed some spots on the bench were left empty by the assistent coach. Clearly this was a bug, but it turned out very hard to find the exact cause.

Thanks to manager el stino and a few other persisting Dutch managers we were able to spot 2 specific cases in which this anomaly would occur. As often, once we found those, it was an easy fix in the code.

Although we can never be sure all N.N.-related problems are solved now, at least I’m sure I fixed 2 bugs and I’d like to thank all managers who helped finding this bug. Muchos Gracias !

Goodbye Yockr … This weekend I received a message from manager Yockr to tell me he was quitting SoccerProject. It’s always sad to see a manager leave, but obviously I understand there are more things to life than SoccerProject.

Since he was on of our Dutch moderators at the forum, I needed to find a replacement. Luckily manager Visje69 immediately accepted to replace him. I know him from the Belgian SoccerProject meeting 2007 and I hope he’ll do a great job in keeping the forum a nice place to ‘hang out’…

I’d like to thank these 2 managers for their efforts and wish both of them good luck in their ‘new life’

For the past few days (and probably for some more time to come), I’ve been working on the Persian translation. Actually that’s not true, because it’s manager Jose Morinho who did all the hard work of translating every text on SoccerProject into Persian.

But, now it’s my turn. Persian is the first right-to-left language which has been finished by the translator, so I should make it available on SoccerProject as soon as possible. This has turned out not to be simple…

I did find a tool by Google, which seemed perfect for the job : CSS Janus. If you’re ever facing the same problem (how to make your site right-to-left ready), I think this is the tool you should try out. Unfortunately, it was not sufficient for my needs.

That means that I’m rewriting css myself at the moment. Kind of hard, because I need to look at SoccerProject in Persian, of which I don’t understand a word Luckily ‘Jose Morinho’ helps me and shows me which things to fix….

Last week I had to replace the Portuguese translator, this week it’s the moderator position which gets a new ‘inhabitant’. As from now manager o_vencedor will replace manager Ivan Pavlovich as the Portuguese forum moderator. I hope he’ll do a good job and maybe he can make his forum a little more active.

While I’m at it, I might as well review another advertising site: Text Link Ads. Actually I can be very short on this, it was no succes at all. Not only did we never get any reaction for our advertising space (this time the price was set by Text Link Ads themselves), but I was also dissapointed in their feedback. I’ve never got the impression they really wanted to help us. So you’ll never see one of their ads on SoccerProject …

For about 6 weeks I’ve been trying Adtoll now and I wanted to share some experiences. Not an in-depth analysis, just a few simple thoughts on how it felt being an AdToll-publisher and advertiser.

First up, my publishing experience. On AdToll there are two possibilities, Run-Of-Networks Ads and ads bought by advertisers. The RON-Ads are being used whenever the ad space you make available for AdToll is not being bought by advertisers. In general we’ve had very few reactions by advertisers, maybe they found the price we set was too high, but I don’t really feel that’s correct. This resulted in a lot of RON-ads being shown. That wouldn’t be too bad, if only they’d gave us enough statistics about that. Ron-ads are being paid per click, but not only did they not show the number of impressions we got from this, their number of clicks also differed significantly from our own OpenX-numbers. I did ask about the difference, but their answer didn’t really explain why their count was 90% lower than ours. That said, I must admit they never let an E-mail unanswered, which is something I enjoy a lot, definitely a plus !

On the advertising site, I was very pleased with the ease-of-use. Simply pick a campaign of your choice, pay by PayPal and the campaign is started. It gave me the chance to experiment a little and as I could have guessed, choosing the right site to advertise on is by far the most important thing to do. For example, over 1200 clicks from RON ads resulted in less subscriptions on SoccerProject than about 200 clicks on another MMOG, which even costed us three times less. That brings me to another downside. When I wanted to rebook the ad on the MMOG, they refused it, which is exactly why I’m not mentioning them here. Obviously they can do that, but as an advertiser you’re glad when you find an advertising spot worth advertsing on, so it’s a dissapointment if it’s gets rejected after a few hours.

As a conclusion I think I can say it’s a nice system, it just turned out not good enough for us. Especially the eCPM on the RON ads for publishers is not good enogh for us to keep using Adtoll as an extra Ad serving site. However, as I said, I was very pleased with some advertising campaigns I bought, so if you’re looking to advertise in a niche market, you might find some good deals here.

Portguese translator Nistelrooy_10 decided to quit his function, but luckily we found a new one soon. From now on manager chance will handle the new translations. We’d like to thank Nistelrooy_10 for the contribution he made to SoccerProject and wish manager chance good luck in his new “job”.