Major software update

(19:00 09-04-2026)
Just a quick update on what’s been happening behind the scenes on Maxithlon.

Over the past weeks we’ve been working on a massive code update. We’re talking about thousands of lines of code changed, often touching parts of the system that are up to 20 years old. As you can imagine, when you work on something like this, a few issues here and there are pretty much inevitable.

That said, considering how deep and widespread the changes are, the problems we’ve seen so far have been quite limited and localized. Still, we know it can be annoying when something doesn’t work exactly as expected, so thanks a lot for your patience.

This update is not just a technical refresh. It’s actually a necessary step to keep Maxithlon alive. At the moment we are blocked on several fronts, including server upgrades and security improvements, and without this work we simply couldn’t move forward. So this is really the foundation for everything that comes next.

In the meantime, we’ve also taken the chance to work on a number of other things. We ran several frontend experiments, made various improvements, restored the XML system, completely rewrote the authentication classes, completely rewritten the cron system, and reactivated the CDN to improve performance, especially for users who are farther away from our servers in the south of Germany.

In these days we are also occasionally switching the platform to PHP 8 for a few hours at a time. This is currently our biggest technical challenge, and these temporary switches allow us to collect real-world data on migration errors that are very difficult to reproduce in a test environment. So far, no major issues have emerged during these temporary switches, which is encouraging.

One small request that would really help us: it would be much more effective if bug reports and feature requests were posted as dedicated threads, one per report/request, using the existing board: International Fed > Proposal&Suggestions. We’ll refer to this thread: How to post in this board

If you can include URLs, screenshots, or any useful detail to better understand the issue, it makes a big difference. Sometimes we actually spend more time figuring out what the problem is than fixing it, especially based on the messages we receive.

We’re still in the middle of this transition, but things are moving in the right direction.

Thanks again for sticking with us, and as always, feel free to report anything strange you notice. It really helps.

Ned