Message from Ned

(19:00 11-04-2026)
Hi everyone,

first of all, thank you. The positive comments in the INT federation and personal message really makes a difference, especially in a period like this. I am speaking not just for myself, but also for Guy, who has been sharing the same slightly unreasonable working hours lately.

What you have been seeing over the past weeks did not just start now. It actually comes from a decision we made some time ago, when it became clear that we were at a technical and perhaps even technological and strategic crossroads.

For a long time, Maxithlon has been running with a number of historical issues behind the scenes. They were not always visible, but enough to constantly consume time and energy. At a certain point, we realized we were stuck in a loop. If you only have, say, ten hours per week to work on the game, and you spend all ten fixing small problems instead of solving root causes, you never really move forward.

So we made a conscious decision to invest that time differently, even if it meant being less visible at first, and started a deep rewrite of core parts of the system. We began with the cron system, then gradually moved into many core functions.

It is also worth remembering that Maxithlon was originally built in a completely different era. This was before Facebook, before smartphones were a thing, before the iPhone even existed. For the more technical among you, back in 2005 we were dealing with PHP 4, without transactions, without namespaces, and with a very different way of structuring applications. Even CSS was in its early days, while today we have far more advanced frameworks and a lot of logic handled directly in the browser.

Over time, features and fixes have been layered on top of each other. Programming can become a bit like shoelaces. You keep tightening and adjusting them, but eventually the only real solution is to untie everything and start again from scratch. Some of the long term issues were exactly the result of that kind of layering.

On the technical side, we have now moved Maxithlon to PHP 8.0. This is an important step, considering the platform was previously running on PHP 7.4, which reached end of life back in 2022. PHP 8.0 itself is already past its end of life in 2023, so next week we will also be switching servers to align with PHP 8.4 and bring the platform back in line with current development standards.

PHP 8.0 has actually been live for several days now. As expected, we are resolving a number of small bugs along the way, but everything is moving quite quickly and smoothly.

You may not have noticed, but for example the script for next week’s selections stopped temporarily. It did not cause any issues or break anything, it simply waited for a fix and then resumed correctly. At the same time, the other cron processes continued running normally, because the system has been redesigned to be more resilient and intelligent in handling these situations.

You may have already noticed some small changes along the way. For example, we have updated the login flow. Now the system retains the page URL, so if you refresh while logged in and are asked to log in again, you will be returned to the page you were viewing and not the homepage. It is a small thing, but part of a broader effort to modernize the experience.

You may also not have noticed that the online users counter in the header is now updated even while the page remains open, without requiring a refresh. These are small experiments, but they are part of a wider effort to improve the technical capabilities of the platform and open the door to more dynamic features in the future.

The good news is that this work is now starting to pay off. If we can free even part of those ten hours from constant firefighting, it means we can finally spend more time building, improving, and adding new features without being blocked by underlying technical constraints.

We are not at the end of the process yet, but we are definitely moving in the right direction.

Thanks again for your patience, your feedback, and your support. It really helps more than you might think.

Ned