hey there, as Ymiris mentioned we are doing a bit of work here at madden stats to prepare for madden 09, and also just get the site redesigned a bit - and easier for you folks to use.  With that however we are disabling the old manual game data add.  Never fear though, we now have a completely automatic way of tracking your game stats, thats right, no more copy and pasting or other random manual work.

Please just go into your game and change the email to send your stats to be our stats tracker email which is stats@madden-stats.com.

This will start storing your stats automatically for you and as soon as we have the new profile pages in place - you will be able to just come view your stats, whenever you wish.  Unfortunately because i completely rewrote the back end, the new stat tracking does not update your current stats pages (the old ones you are used to using) - but we hope to have the new display pages up soon…..OR if that does not go as planned I will modify the current stat pages to run off of the new data system.  Any problems or concerns, feel free to leave a comment on this post, or if you prefer you can email me directly squidpunch@gmail.com

The web is alive with madden 09 news and rumors, we here at madden-stats are working hard to prepare for the new game to better take advantage of all the new features as well as change our look.

While you wait, go read up on the new features!  http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/sports/maddennfl09/news.html?sid=6190577&mode=recent

As this year starts to get going it occurred to me that we really need a way to separate each year and then compare those years against each other, not sure how difficult this will be but I think it’s something we need to implement.  Also was tossing around the idea of making a real message board to talk to other people and maybe setup some games, even a ladder type of event.

Just some thoughts, I will get with Squidpunch and see what he thinks, feel free to voice your opinion as well.

Well Ymiris requested this a while back so I finally sat down and dedicated some time to putting it online.  You might have noticed the game insertion process changed a little.  It’s still a 2 step process but now instead of confirming our email parser you will have the ability to select the teams played by the players of the game.  It is not required, you can keep it as ‘not selected’, but please remember to hit the Confirm button to actually submit your game to the system (same as before but we aren’t showing the results of the email parsing).

I have some other things in mind if I can free up the time to work on it, I see we got a few new members on the site inserting some game data - so please leave some comments on how we are doing, what you would like us to include in the site - etc.

So now that squid has implemented a ton of ideas, I want to throw a couple others out there.

First I think it would be very valuable to be able to manual enter the teams played, that way you can see what team you or your opponent use most often, this will help understand how they play as well as what their real skill level is. Someone who constantly plays a high ranked team (upper 90’s) probably hasn’t had to adjust much compared to someone who playes teams across the board.

My other idea isn’t actually my idea, more of squids but something that should be discussed in the public since it would affect all of you. That is to not allow others to see your name if they have never played with you. Right now you can select anyone who has ever entered stats and compare, which is silly considering the fact it’s possible that person may have never played against you and goes against what I was thinking when I thought about this site. However, I can see how it is entertaining to do, so I am looking to your for suggestions on if we should change that.

So, tell us what YOU think, and as always, give us more ideas to toss around!

Just wanted to mention I see some new members signing up on the site, and posting their games….thats great to see!  Please feel free to post us any comments or suggestions, or errors that may occur as we continue to try and make the site more useful and friendly to use.

Ymiris pointed out to me this morning that when viewing the stats for a single game it was no longer working.  At this point I am not sure how it was broken since I haven’t really been able to dedicate much time to coding on the site lately - but in any event this has been resolved.  I have seen some new accounts created, but no new games inserted by these accounts - please let us know if you are having issues

well its pretty basic, and I am still putting the final touches on it - but I figured it would be best if we provided a forum which you can post suggestions, problems, or whatever random things on your mind to.  There is a link in the navigation bar, for those of you wondering how to access it.

Small as in visible, but a little bigger behind the scenes.  The following changes have been implemented.

• authentication is now integrated with the overall wordpress authentication.  So once you are logged in, you are logged in here on the blog, as well as the stats area
• modified some of the email parsing code to expand its capabilities.

I have a few other things that are a work in progress, but wanted to get these changes online as soon as I could.

As promised the Add Games functionality is alot easier now.  All you do is copy the ENTIRE email that you recieved from EA that contains your game stats and click submit query.  You will then be presented with a screen so that you can verify that we read the data from the email correctly.  If everything is fine you can select to have that game inserted into the database for you.  No more selecting the players, and no more hand keying all the stats….and now friends, it is time for some sleep!