What is wrong with FanFooty?

[m0nty]

Sorry to SammyH and others, I only saw this thread today. I have been answering some questions like this over on BigFooty, but I suppose I should set it all out in full here.

On the servers: myself and Tai, my business partner, decided to try running FanFooty on one big server in 2009, rather than two smaller servers as we had been doing over the past year. That experiment failed, obviously. We are now back on two servers, but even that configuration is struggling now under the weight of a 100%+ increase in traffic over last year. We have now upgraded both servers this week - these things take time - and we are hopeful that the new configuration will handle the vast majority of traffic situations.

You have to understand that it's very difficult to handle the sort of traffic that fantasy footy demands. Take Monday night, for instance. We had been going along fairly sedately all weekend without a hitch, pretty much, until suddenly the Channel Seven coverage in Melbourne goes to half time and BOOM, tens of thousands of people all want to access FanFooty at once. The problem was compounded by the fact that the game had actually just finished in real time, so we were getting the other tens of thousands who were listening to the radio also hitting the site at the same time. It's no wonder that both FanFooty and the VirtualSports sites couldn't handle that kind of sudden spike in demand. Monday nights are a test this year by the AFL, and one of the lessons is that Web sites are going to struggle on school nights.

On the blogs, I apologise for not writing Rollercoaster and Boys on the Bubble features last week. I am going to try to get those two done, if nothing else, each week this season. I am busy during the week, partly on paid contract work that supplements my income up to something I can actually live on. I can assure you that I'm not rolling in cash by any stretch of the imagination from what FanFooty generates, at least at the moment. Also, I do take one day out to play golf each week on a Monday or Tuesday... a man's got to have a day off when he works weekends!

I know Mitch has come under a lot of fire for the quality of his blogs. For that I partially blame myself, because I should really be editing his stuff before it appears. I am prepared to give him a go, however, because I think it's important for young journalists to be given opportunities to see their name up in lights at an early age to give them confidence that they are good enough to make a career out of journalism. Mitch can't always write his wraps on the Sunday night due to school work and what have you, but I'm willing to wait for him because he puts a lot of work into them and I'm very happy with his output... especially on the match blogs, where he has been an absolute champ on several occasions.

(As an aside, I still need help with the match blogs. Please email me at m0nty at fanfooty com au if you want to help out, and please specify your preferred nickname colour!)

I am a feature writer by training, so my own blog posts are focused on quality not quantity, as Hitman said. I'm not in the habit of squirting out those short and sharp 50-word posts like the DT Talk boys do. Again, it's rather time-consuming. Warnie obviously isn't working hard enough at his teaching job! :P

Beyond Mitch's and my own contributions, I am conscious of being part of a wider fantasy footy community, so in some ways I think it's actually a good thing that FanFooty doesn't have three 1500-word features per weekday. I am perfectly happy for all of you to visit DT Talk, Your Super Coach Coach, DT Ruined My Life, Footy Tragic, AllFooty.info, Too Serious, SnooperCoach, TFKG=14 and all the other blogs and podcasts out there during the week. I don't want to monopolise your time.

One other aspect of that is that I am tending to fit all my midweek analysis into the Coaches Box at the moment. If you download and listen to that, it contains most of my thoughts on the week. The show runs to somewhere between 90 to 120 minutes each Wednesday, so that should be more than enough content for you to handle!

On the subject of regular injury updates and such, I built a system for that a couple of years ago. Like some of you, I really like the way Rotoworld does it, and my system was a pretty shameless copy. It's still operational, but at the moment all I'm doing is pumping through match report copy. To be brutally honest, it is too much work for me to handle at the moment. The other option would be to resurrect the news aggregation code that I had running a couple of years ago, which took headlines off other sites. Maybe in the offseason, depending on what happens with the site.

Finally, on subscription fees, I don't believe in that at all. We tried that back in 2005 (IIRC) and it was a complete failure. It's my responsibility to make enough money to deliver a solid free service. I have not been doing that of late, but I'm working on it.

I hope that answers all of your questions. Sorry again for not answering earlier.

m0nty

[chris]

Good response there m0nty.

Be very happy if the servers arw fixed for this weekend, much more of a SCer and livid that your not allowed to display live SC scores but any live fantasy scores is better than nothing.

Be good if this could be linked sonehow to the front page, sick of seeing the complaining in the blogs "where is the round wrap", "why are the servers crashing"

Your doing a good job, not sure how long the ban is on not being able to show live SC scores, but that'd make it even better

[Don Gibson]

Pip pip to you Monty and Mitch and all of the other behind the scenes cronies.

Like someone said, even when no articles are up, the site is a good central site for general banter.

As a fellow writer, i know how long quality takes and will always prefer it over quantity.

Get those SC scores up and when the servers settle down, you'll be laughing.

[Flame]

I think you said what we are all thinking Master Blaster. Well done!!

Go Hawks!!! Let's get back to the footy...

[Prospector_1]

Great response m0nty. Thanks.

Surely there's someone who could volunteer to do the injury list etc? Speak up ppl.!

Is "I'm here all day" really there all day?

I bet somebody is.

[BradStar]

i'm going to email you soon m0nty but i'm happy to do live match blogs, even a small part like eg:

     Fletcher is working on bradshaw moving onto brown and stuff like that.

Email You Soon.

(Green For My Personal Colour)

Waiting to be Unbanned anyway from doing something very light.

[BradStar]

just a note for you m0nty if you are reading this and haven't checked your emails, i sent you some details about doing things on this site.

if you have questions reply to me on the email.

[roo boys!]

Wow cop that!