English
The future of the site.
Hello everyone, this is your webmaster. I have few very sincere words.
1. I am getting more and more annoyed mails and comments nowadays. Something is not working, the site is down, you did not work through that mail I sent you, you are not adding the info from the forum fast enough, you did not add that thing that I sent you via a facebook message, you do not add the photos often enough, you are not adding the data through the photo upload function (which is madness, btw).
2. This has reasons I want to talk about. I have been working on this site since 2004. I put endless hours into it - and so did some other people, which is great. But I don't have as much time as I used to have. Since 2020 I have an rpg company that actually earns a bit of money and is also more fun to do.
3. There is so much more data available nowadays. Which is nice on the one hand, but means that just adding the new match data from the internationals is taking much more time (Also, friendlies now have even more substitutes, so they take much longer to add). Also adding season data and doing the transfers takes much, much longer - more leagues have data nowadays and more transfers happen. So just covering the basics is already too much work, it turns out. I don't have time to go through the photos, I don't have time to do the forum stuff, I don't have time to work on historical stuff. This is no fun.
4. The site gets attacked all the time and much more often than used to be the case. We have got one programmer who basically works for free (So you have been getting a free and add-free site for 22 years) and who has to fix everything. It gets worse with GenAI, which in my opinion makes everything in this world worse. You can disagree, but it definitely makes keeping up an old-school web site much more difficult. Trust me, this is hell, and we have not even seen the beginning of it. So the site is down now and then, in the last three years much more often than before. This is annoying as hell, but it doen't help if it only leads to people complaining all the time. It just makes me think that I should just close this down to finally get some quiet.
5. So, we will need help or you will just have to live with a site that is less up-to-date. We can't magic it better, it's all a lot of work. ANd I don't need additional admin work in my life, I have enough already.
6. What to do? I would like this site to keep existing. I still like it very much. Dirk is trying his best to get some more people who work on the site so the work will be shouldered by more people. Very admirable, let's see how that goes. But I will not be able to put more work into NFT and that will not change again. So, let's give it another year or two and see how the situation is then.
I wish you all the best,
Benjamin