Game Status

Updated: 10.30pm Sunday 16th November ITN: WORKS IN PROGRESS As some of you may have already noticed there are some pages not working properly in the site We are aware of this. Not only, this is necessary for the changes we're working on.We ask for your help and support for the whole coming week: we will be working very much on the site, and it will happen that ITN will be voluntarily brought down for programmed works.The first downtime is planned for tomorrow night MONDAY 17th November from 8.30PM to 10.30PMAnother downtime will be performed for Wednesday 19th November update, but this will be a much longer one.You will be kept updated anyway as usual. We know it may cause some disruption, but we're sure youall understand this is really needed for the growth of our game. - You still have this page open where we will add new features going live.- Prize money issue will be sorted soon, after we've checked what happened - You will also receive instructions on new Int. Teams during coming days

Updated: 3.15pm Tuesday 4th November END OF SEASON 10 Updates and New Stuff Another season has almost gone, and as happened at the end of last one, we are here with some updates and tweaks on ITN. We are currently trying to do our best to finish all the stuff in time for the new season, therefore we are currently unable to give you a detailed preview like we managed a few months ago. We will leave this page open for you to check and we will add to it all the features or changes as soon as they are done and tested. Of course we won't let anything go live without testing it first, or if we're not sure it works fine. We hope you will appreciate what we have thought for the new season, and good luck everyone!

Updated: 3.00pm Friday 31th October MAINTENANCE WORKS Please note that Sonia will be carrying on maintenance works tonight before running the update. As last time, we expect to complete all the stuff in 1,5 hrs. Do not worry in case it takes some more minutes, and thank you for your patience.

Updated: 2.40pm Saturday 18th October LOANS As discussions arose some time ago about loans at the end of the season, here comes the final decision. We decided it would be unfair to block loans, as some teams may need them. But it would be unfair as well allowing the top players to go out on loan for the odd week to win a promotion or a playoff. Therefore loans will be allowed and open until the end of the season, but loans submitted from now, October 18 2.40pm, until the end of the season, will be automatically renewed until week 6 included (not MD 6) of the new season. Particular requests, such as sales agreed at the end of the loan period are still possible. Please have a look at the "New Loan Rule" topic in General ITN forum to deal with these issues.

Updated: 11.05pm Monday 15th September IMPORTANT!!! The whole ITN team is going to London for a weekend. We will be absent from Friday 19th to Monday 22nd In that time there should be 2 updates (Friday and Sunday). There would be the possibility of the automated updates, but we don't want to use them this time. If connection drops during the update, or if the update fails, the site would stay down for 4 days, and we absolutely don't want this to happen. Therefore we decided to move the updates very slightly, to reduce the disruption as much as possible. Friday's update will be anticipated on THURSDAY 18th Sep at usual time (6pm) Sunday's update will be postponed to MONDAY 22nd Sep at 11pm Sonia assured that Monday's updated will be run even if we come back that very night, of course it can be a little late in case of late plane arrival... Sorry for the inconvenient.

Updated: 0.45am Saturday 13th September And the winner is... With Matchday 49 the Season 9 competition for Manager of The Season has closed his voting window. Here's the final table: 67 votes Steve Churchill (Borussia M`gladbach); 7 votes Paul Corns (Motherwell); 6 votes Michael Plaxton (Sydney FC and Spain); 6 votes Alex Barker (Bayern München and Holland); 4 votes Andy Waring (Compostela and Brazil). Therefore the winner of MOTS for Season 9 is Steve Churchill! Congratulations to him, and also to the other four managers for their great season anyway. And thank you to the 90 managers who partecipated by voting their favourite manager. We are very pleased to see the big interest you all showed in this competition.

Updated: 5.00pm Sunday 7th September Road works ahead...! Please be aware that on Wednesday 10th September Sonia will be performing works maintenance on ITN. All ITN datas are saved daily, but from time to time it is necessary to do complete backups and tests, and to do so we need all users to be outside ITN, to speed up the process and make it safer. Therefore it will be performed as the site goes out for the update and we estimate a downtime of 1h30'. We apologize, but we're also sure you will understand this is necessary for the "good health" of ITN.

Updated: 8.30pm Wednesday 3rd September And finally... MANAGER OF THE SEASON 9 contest is open! We are glad to announce that Manager of The Season 9 voting is open! We are sorry for the long wait, but it is not something running automatically and therefore needed some attention from us. Anyway now it is up and running, and will carry on from today, closing on Matchday 49. Feel free to cast your vote, and good luck to the Fab Five! Vote Here!

Updated: 8.00pm Friday 11th July Youth Promotions 3 DEFINITIVE The Youth Academy page is finally up and running. We tested it both offline and online and the outcome seems ok. Of course we'll need a bigger statistics, so we'll keep monitoring all youth players coming out from all teams.

Updated: 8.00pm Thursday 10th July Youth Promotions 2 We've put up a momentary youth academy page. It works well, so you can surely use it. As we already said the attribute engine hasn't been touched, so the quality of players coming out is the same of 2 months ago, or 1 year ago. When the definitive engine will be ready we'll put it up and see if it works.

Updated: 8.00pm Sunday 6th July Youth Promotions We've corrected problems in the Youth Academy page preventing the new engine to promote correctly. We tested it on a test page and it did work. But when the page was replaced, it didn't work, which is very weird. Therefore we disabled the page to prevent managers losing their academy weeks, until we sort it out. You will be noticed when the page is available again.

Updated: 6.00pm Friday 23rd May - Down
As you have noticed ITN has been down for quite a long period. A really unlucky coincidence created a very bad scenario, in which we had to rely not only on us, but also on the hosting company. They were very supportive and helpful but as you may imagine, they have their times and we must respect that. On top of misfortune the database kept going up incomplete, with us waiting even more for the job to be done.
Anyway the important thing is that ITN is back, and with small losses. The risk was to be forced to restore end of last season backup, which would have been a disgrace... The only point of restore bug-free we could find is around the 21st early morning, which leads to a loss of no more than half a day. But for this reason many managers at that time didn't submit their lineups and it would be unfair at this point to run the update immediately. No need for 20-30 abandoned matches and fines flowing. Therefore we are adding a poll, giving you the chance to decide when you want them, so that once again our users have their say and this time we must say they deserve it. We are very proud and relieved to see that we always got supportive messages instead of. complaining ones. And we thank so much for this. It was very frustrating for us too, maybe even more!
One last thing we ask you is to check and report us any strange thing you find. There might be some with all things happened If we can we'd be really glad to correct them. And remember to quickly vote for the updates!
OFFICIAL UPDATE
Winner is Choice 3 so here's the recovery schedule:
Matchday 3 (replay) Sat 24/05 12:00
Matchday 4 Sun 25/05 18:00
Matchday 5 Tue 27/05 18:00
Matchday 6 Wed 28/05 18:00 (back to normal updates with this one)

Updated: 10.30pm Wednesday 14th May News! The first update with the new engine went well, even if we had a delay due to the database backup and we are now having a close look if everything is correct in the database We've noticed there's something wrong with Managers' Award, but it looks it is something not automated we were not aware of, we'll try to find the solution as soon as possible
Match Day 2 - Weekly Update As we told you from now on weekly updates are held together with international matches on Sundays. But this time, and this time only, we've decided to run it on Saturday at 5pm GMT. This is for two reasons: first is that all managers waited a long time for a weekly update, and we tried to shorten this wait. Second is because all the ITN team is away for a big duty on Sunday and to leave an automated update with all the new tweaks going on for the first time it is something we don't want to happen. We want to be there ready in case something goes wrong as you can see it can happen, hence the move to 5pm to have more time at our disposal. This will be the last change. From now on Match Days will be run on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday 6pm.

Updated: 8.30pm Monday 13th May Here's End of Season 9 Report #3 You can see it by

Updated: 6.00pm Thursday 8th May Here's End of Season 9 Report #2 You can see it by

Updated: 5.00pm Tuesday 6th May Here comes End of Season 9 Report #1 You can see it by

Updated: 20.00pm Sunday 27th April End of season planner
First of all we would like to send our congratulations to all ITN clubs, to the winners and promoted teams for achieving a great goal, to the relegated teams for battling out anyway, hoping they will bounce straight back, and all other teams for their efforts in keeping their league status. As the new season is arriving, as we promised, there will be some news in the ITN world. Some improvements, we are working on will be unveiled soon. They won’t be huge ones, but a whole lot of needed fix, that we do hope they will enhance your game experience! Anyway we need to change a little bit our dates for the next weeks, so please take notice of these dates. We need this to allow us to improve the game.

Good luck for next season!

Updated: 18.00pm Wednesday 26th March New nations! The voting for our new international sides to be added has finished. Here they are: Mexico, Poland, Finland, Uruguay, Ivory Coast, Japan, Colombia, Egypt, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Ghana, Hungary, Chile, Korea Republic, Senegal, New Zealand, Iran, Tunisia, Algeria, Costa Rica, Israel, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China PR, Iceland, Jamaica, Latvia, Morocco, Paraguay, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Cyprus, Lithuania.
I would like to thank all the managers who told us their preferences, we were very happy for the great partecipation and this show us that people care about the improving of the game. I want to thank the staff as well as they were very useful and offered some of their spare time to help out with the game, for the benefit of all users.
Now this whole thing will disappear from your eyes, but it won't be stopped of course, it will work behind the stages. In the meantime, while working on these issues, we're preparing a whole lot of new stuff for the upcoming season. You will be informed in three consecutive "columns" at the end of the season!

Updated: 18.00pm Friday 21st March A little break! Would you believe also the players of the ITN world wants to spend Easter with their families? Could we force them to play? Jokes apart, we inform you that Sunday update has been postponed to Monday night 6pm. All of us will be away for the Easter (and we believe many managers too...) and we didn't feel like scheduling the update automatically. Should there be a problem the site would stay down for a whole day. Sorry for the inconvenience, we hope you understand. This means we'll have matchday today, then on Monday, deadline of new nations poll on Tuesday, and international matches on Wednesday, interesting start of the week! Finally we would like to remind you, if you haven't done it already, that you can still vote for the new nations to be added in ITN on the forum section. Deadline is on Tuesday at 6pm, and official results will follow later that night!

Updated: 19.20pm Tuesday 18th March Have your say! The final stage of voting to create new active nations in ITN is starting right now. Make sure you have your say in the development of ITN! We really liked the 1st stage in which many of our users voted with great interest and love for the game. We hope for this 2nd stage there will be even more response from you all! You can find all this in the forum section->general ITN.
The season is going on, and approaching the last weeks in which all the competitions will find their winners, and unfortunalely, losers. We wish all the best to all teams hoping they can achieve their goals for the season. In this last weeks of the season we are proceeding with our works on the site, some you can see (like the voting) some are hidden in the background. We would like to tell you anyway that you will be informed of all news and new stuff at the end of the season. Stay tuned for some interesting news coming along!

Updated: 19.20pm Wednesday 5th March Good News! and bad ones...
First of all a good news! Our first feature is online! Although not perfectly finalized but we wanted it to be online as it was really needed. New managers (and old ones too...) will be able to understand which team is more suitable for them. We hope this will prevent new managers to get a team in heavy debt and leave immediately the game.
On the other side another failed attempt to initialize updates from Ian's pc. A bit annoying but we hope it will go better on Friday.

Updated: 23.00pm Wednesday 27th February To keep you up to date...
Some news to keep you all updated.
The last few updates went smooth and they were very quick which is a good thing, but we're still experiencing problems with our logistics. At the moment there's only one active computer as Sonia is having problems with broadband. You shouldn't have problems with that anyway as updates should run normally. As for new features we are not changing anything at the moment, first because we need to have everything working to do so, second because we are looking in depth at some aspects before acting. At the moment we are focusing on the inside economy of the game, to understand if teams have enough money and how money flows. We are collecting global datas and studying graphs. We are also carrying on the database update work, which takes a lot of time. There's not a specific date for it to be finished, also because it's working as normal for you and you won't notice anything at the moment. We are also trying to understand what is needed first for the game, and I can say the two features we will complete as our first tasks will be a tool helping when choosing a team to manage in the managerless teams page (as some teams are in a very bad shape) and a tool for Administrators, to help them with their job.
We will tell you something more as soon as there are news coming in! Thanks for your support!

Updated: 22.50pm Wednesday 30th January IMPORTANT NEWS
Tonight update was normally run on Sonia's pc. We could not test the new system tonight due to a problem with installations. We will probably try on Friday, so please be patient should the update take a little more than expected. Rule change Managers Absence: On the rules we can read “If you have a friend in the game who you would like to look after your team during the absence you must ask the Gamesmaster for permission to do so (as logging into someone else's account is normally forbidden).” as a possibility for managers who are away for a period of time. But lately this thing started to get out of hand. It has changed from an extraordinary chance, when other roads are not possible, to a everyday possibility, with managers requesting it even for just an update! Of course this can't go on. First of all for our precious admins, who will go mad trying to recognize who can login as someone else and who can't. Second for safety reasons (some kind of datas are visible once someone else logs in). This is also unnecessary work for us, having to pass to admins, or post, a good number of requests every week! Therefore the rule will change from today on. Only this part of the rule will remain: “Please use the Manager - Settings to set your Absence Start and End date if you will not be able to login and submit team selections for a short period of time, but still wish to remain manager of a team. During your absence the same team as you selected before you left will play, unless there are injuries or suspensions when the computer will choose replacements.” We think that the possibility of having this feature allowing not to field an incomplete team, and preventing you from being sacked even after the 2 weeks absence is already a big deal if compared to many other online games that don't give you this possibility. So let's try to give the right value to this nice feature. Therefore, from today on no requests will be accepted. Of course the requests we accepted before today will remain valid.

Updated: 6.30pm Tuesday 29th January Tomorrow night we are going to set up Ian computer to be able to run the updates (Sonia's one did it so far). This is important to offer you a better service, as it's very important having 2 pc's able to run the update independently. Of course, as everytime a new pc is set, there could be some delays or small things to fix. To fix small bugs with Sonia's one it took around half an hour, but everything was smooth at the end. We hope to reduce the downtime at the minimum, but we hope to have your understanding and your support in case some extra time is needed.

(Updated: 6.20pm Sunday 13th January):As promised we are giving you our open letter of presentation You can see it by We are opening a thread in General ITN on the forum
we would really love to hear your opinions and suggestions about our letter

(Updated: 6.30pm Tuesday 8th January): This update went smooth, we are glad with the way things are going Thank you for the kind comments and your support. Only a small change in the schedule to better suit with our availability Matchday 27 - Club ITN Cup - was at 06:00 Friday 11th January will be moved to 18:00
Hope you will understand but we prefer to be carefully following updates at least for the first times.

(Updated: 8.00pm Sunday 6th January): This is the new ITN team, and we would like to apologise for the delay. A great event happened in ITN life, with our first update! It took some extra time as there were different settings between us and Andy. Now that everything is up and running we hope next matchdays will run on time! We thank you for your patience and you will soon hear about us, with our presentation and future projects on ITN. Thank you for your support! Ian, Sonia and Enrico

(Updated: 8.30pm Wednesday 2nd January):Apologies for the recent downtime. I eventually managed to track down the root of the problem which appears to be an accidental change made by the hosting company. As a result of more than a day of downtime we have had to move the following matchdays:

Matchday 23 - International Cup - 06:00 Friday 4th January
Matchday 24 - Club Level Cups - 18:00 Sunday 6th January
Matchday 25 - Club League AND Weekly Update - 18:00 Tuesday 8th January

Matchday 26 - International League - 18:00 Wednesday 9th January
Matchday 27 - Club ITN Cup - 06:00 Friday 11th January
Matchday 28 - Club League AND Weekly Update - 18:00 Sunday 13th January

(Update 16th December): Season's Greetings to you all. We come bearing good news: The takeover is officially under way and I am delighted to announce that Christian (Ian) Foletto and his team (Sonia Pettena and Enrico Tassoni) will be the new owners of In The Net! We are currently in the process of transferring all of the applications and information involved and although this shouldn't have any impact on the running of the game please be aware that there may be complications. Please try not to bury Ian with too many e-mails at this time as he and the team are already taking in a lot of information at the moment!

(Update 9th December): Sorry for the delay to tonight's matches. Unfortunately there was a technical problem which took time get to the root of and resolve.

(Update 26th November): Takeover talk - we are currently agreeing the finer details with the development team and would still prefer not to reveal the new owners so that they don't get bombarded with questions before even seeing the game code for themselves. However, they want you to know that they are taking all the ideas on board, particularly issues many of you are concerned about, and want to take "your" game forward.

That's just one reason why we went for this team. They have very knowledgeable personnel in place, including a web and software developer and a graphic designer. Plus many many years experience playing the game, showing great loyalty and an intelligent, democratic and favouritism-free view. But it is their ideas for development that are most exciting, looking to take the game to a truly worldwide audience, while keeping to its traditional values.

(Update 17th November): As some of you will have heard we have accepted an offer for ITN, subject to certain conditions, and will be commencing the takeover shortly. I would prefer not to name the winning bidder just yet but it is from someone already within the ITN community whose offer was exceptional and just ticks all the right boxes with the most important being their desire for ITN to continue to prosper as a free to play football management game. We had some other great offers from ITN players and it is to fantastic to see how dedicated many managers are to the ITN cause, thank you for all your efforts guys.

(Update 12th November): Many apologies for the very late update, unfortunately the automatic update did not complete and I needed to finish it off this morning. I would also like to take this opportunity to wish everyone good luck for the new season and to officially close the applications for taking over ITN, we will be in touch with all interested parties over the next few days.

(Update 31st October): Congratulations to Compostela who pulled off an excellent Premier Division and Cup double! And to all the other League and Cup winners. Best wishes of course to the ITN Cup finalists who have already done tremendously well to fight off all Premier opponents to reach the final.

As we reach the end of the 8th ITN season (well, 14 from the very beginning) I would like to publicly announce that we (Andy and Paul) are looking to pass the game on to new owners. Its no secret that we have had very little time to work on the game recently and haven't been able to take it on to the next level and to the larger audience it deserves. We will be advertising the site, and all the code behind it, for sale. Ideally we would like someone from within the game to take over, who has the time, enthusiasm and skills to develop and improve it and we will assess all offers with these ideals in mind. I would personally like to thank all managers, past and present, for your contributions to the game. Without you it could not exist!

Click here if you are interested in becoming the new owner (You have until the 11/11/07 to make an initial offer)

(Update 2nd October): Andy will be away from now until the 9th October and will be unlikely to respond to e-mails. Please send a message to one of the Admin team if you have a problem/question.

(Update 25th September): As you are all no doubt aware the update didn't run as it should on Sunday evening. Unfortunately I was away on business and hadn't left my PC running. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, if I had a power cut, internet connection dropped etc then Paul could run the update instead. However, there was an error with the update, the likes of which I haven't seen since the old days of manual updates (2006 and before) so Paul couldn't run the update either.

Thankfully the problem could be easily rectified on my return home. I am very sorry that ITN was down again for a short time. It has meant a need to change the matchday schedule a little (particularly as myself and Paul are both going to be out of the country alot in the next couple of weeks).

(Update 5th September): As things seem to (finally) be coming back to normal, I'd like to apologise for the long downtime and provide quick summary of the upcoming matchday schedule. As this is like a fresh start, so the matchdays will be having a new position, the cup day on Friday (like the one this Friday), league matches on Sunday, and internationals on Wednesday. This gives a better arrangement for those managers who only have clubs and hopefully a better match time for the main weekly update. Matchday times will stay the same for the time being.

So, to clarify, the cup matches (day 54) will be played on Friday 7th Sept at 6am, league matches (day 55) on Sunday 9th Sept at 6pm, and internationals (day 56) on Wednesday 12th Sept at 6am

(Update 20th August): We will hopefully be moving the site to new servers tomorrow (Tuesday) and there may be a period of downtime while this is taking place. We'll endeavour to keep this to a minimum.

(Update 13th August): We have recently experienced a rise in the amount of managers who are trying to register for a second concurrent team. Please note that it clearly states in the rules that you are only allowed one league team (and the possibility of one international team - if available). ITN think that owning more than 1 team (excluding the optional international) is against the rules. The admins monitor ALL applications and can ban accounts (with immediate effect) if someone is seen to be attempting to cheat by applying for an additional team.

If you would like to see other teams that are available click on competitions, teams & managers and then choose Managerless Teams.

(Update 5th August): We experienced some problems with the update. This has meant that the update has had to be put back until Monday 6pm. Sorry if this causes any inconviences but the updates will run as normal from tomorrow.

(Update 12th July): The draw for the next round of the Level Cups will be made on Friday (Matchday 37).

(Update 9th July): Its time for ITN to have a makeover. And we would like your ideas for a new logo. The expected colour scheme will be mainly white, green and blue, although all entries will be carefully considered. They will be done anonymously until after the voting (to pick the winner!) and you can enter as many times as you want. However, there is no actual prize, only the kudos that goes with being the winning designer! Send your designs in any common image format and size (over 100x100 pixels and scalable is preferred) to inthenet@itnsoccer.com

(Update 3rd July): Please see the Forum (Ideas and Suggestions area) for an FAQ on the proposed Gold Membership option.

(Update 21st June): I will be running the next update manually so this will take place between 8-9AM tomorrow morning. You will still have to make any changes before the usual time and the site will be unavailable until the update has run.

(Update 14th June):I think the major bugs have now been removed from the Forum, please let us know if you encounter any problems!

Just so everyone knows: Andy will be away from 18th-25th June. Paul is away the week after. As a result, the update on the 17th may be delayed, there is potential for problems with the match engine while Andy is away and because of an overlap the deadline for matchday 29 (Sunday 25th - International update) will be postponed to Monday lunchtime (UK time)!

(Update 4th June): Major new feature added tonight with an integrated forum. We love the Message Board but hopefully having the forums within ITN will get more managers using them regularly. If you have any problems please let us know. Our intention is to get a few of you to help us moderate the forums (we'll be contacting managers shortly) and to remove the notice board (hopefully with a chat facility instead).

You may also have spotted the logo to the top right of the home page. A new company has also been setup which will be responsible for ITN as well as other projects we have in mind, watch this space.

(Update 3rd June): It has come to our attention that some of the manager applications were not performed automatically as part of the last update. Please be patient whilst we look into this problem and try and locate the error.

Update - The problem was found to be an attribute which wasn't reset properly when the managers resigned and their applications were ignored. Problem resolved, apologies for the inconvenience (i.e. for giving those managers a big scare!)

(Update 15th May): Just a quickie :) - I have now added a new percentage to the ideas and suggestions section that shows how popular an idea really is. This percentage is a more acurate reflection of the low/medium/high score. This will be an important factor in the priority of the suggestions.

(Update 2nd May): A quick note to say thanks to Jeff for his very impressive kits, which I'm sure alot of you will take up. If you send Andy a kit please make sure you include your username in the e-mail

(Update 29th Apr): Andy's back, and very pleased to see how smoothly the updates went with Paul in charge. The game's moved on alot and having the facility to keep it running all the time is just another step forward

(Update 26th Apr): Hi again I will be running the update manually tomorrow so it is likely that the update will occur slightly later than the 6am proposed time. I envisage that the update will have run by 8:30 AM. Andy will be back for the next update so I want to make sure that all three updates have run successfully in his abscence as this means we have an another option (person - ME) to do updates whilst Andy is away.

(Update 25th Apr): Just to let you all know the update ran through fine again this morning although I am currently experiencing network performance issues which meant the update was slower to complete than normal.

(Update 24th Apr): The next update will take place slightly later than scheduled. This is due to the fact that I want to watch the update running. Please be patient with me as I want to make sure there are no errors. I anticipate that this will run around 8:30-9 AM. Paul

(Update 20th Apr): Don't forget that all club teams have a league match on day 2 (Sunday) which is traditionally an International update! Also, Andy is away on holiday from 21st-28th so please direct any e-mails to Paul. The updates "should" be able to continue as normal although if any unresolvable technical issue should occur then the site may not be available until Andy returns.

(Update 18th Apr): I believe the site has been down for several hours, I haven't yet got internet at home and the update ran automatically (and worked even though the website was down). As it was only friendly matches I have decided to let the update stand.

(Update 6th Apr): This week we are running an online poll which should load when you view this page. Please make sure you have popups enabled temporarily so that you can view it and vote on the future of ITN!

(Update 5th Apr): Apologies if I am slow replying to e-mails/messages and if tomorrow's update is slightly delayed. I don't currently have internet access at home (Andy)

(Update 28th Mar): As promised, we met up this weekend to discuss all the Ideas you guys have suggested to date as well as the overall way forward for ITN. It was a (surprisingly) productive weekend, and we will be responding to all of the Ideas in some form. Needless to say, we like a lot of them, but have had to prioritise or put some on hold, and others we will be throwing back at you to see what you think of our alternative suggestions... To conclude, thanks again for all your ideas, and please keep them coming because this is an on-going process.

(Update 28th Mar): This weekend Andy & Paul are going to meet up to discuss the ideas suggested and draft together a top 10/20 developments based on scoring and suitability for the game. We will post the results of these discussions on ITN. Therefore if you have a great idea which has not already been suggested please can you enter this on the ideas section (under INTERACT) by the FRIDAY Update. Also if you have not already voted on the ideas suggested already, please take a few mins to cast your vote for each title. Ideas with higher scores stand a better chance of being developed!

(Update 21st Mar): Hi, Paul again :) Just wanted to thank everyone for the ideas now on the Ideas and Suggestion area of the site. With well over 100 entries there have been some great suggestions. Andy and I have discussed some of the ideas already and looking forward to developing them. We are planning to meet next weekend and wanted to give you guys the opportunity to ask any questions so we can discus them when we meet. If you can think of anything just message Andy or myself and we will add it to the list of topics to discus.

(Update 1st Mar): **NOW LIVE** Hi, Paul from Grazer AK here. As this is my first posting I would like to say 'Hi' to you all and thank those of you who sent me good luck messages. I am excited that Andy accepted my offer to help him with the site development and hope in the next few weeks and months we can make the site even better than it already is.

I have been in constant communication with Andy over the last couple of weeks discussing how best to take the site forward. Believe me many ideas have been suggested :). However the first area we feel that would be benficial is for an ideas & suggestions section within ITN itself. With this in mind I have developed an area that allows managers to register ideas and also allows everyone to rate the suggestion (High, Medium or Low). I am aware that there is a suggestion area of the Message Board and we both feel this is still very a valid tool in conjunction with the new developments section. The MB is a great forum for more detailed discussions/debates about each idea but we wanted to try and record your inital thoughts within the site itself. This also allows us to update the status of the suggestion (which everyone will be able to see!) so you can trace its development (if accepted!). Therefore, later today, you will notice a new option under the INTERACT area of the menu. All I ask is that you read through any current suggestions before submitting your own in case of duplicates.

Thanks for reading this message! Hopefully more messages will appear soon with new developments :)

Paul

(Update 23rd Feb): As alot of you are probably aware there was a problem with the site with a request for you to enter a username and password in order to access. I am still in discussions with the hosts as to why this happened. The automatic update then ran while the restriction was in place. As the problem occurred close to the deadline I have decided not to re-run the update, I apologise to anyone this negatively affects.

(Update 22nd Feb): News of a different kind this week, I have asked Paul of Grazer AK to join me in developing ITN, which he has accepted. I am particularly excited about utilising his technical and business knowledge (as well as endless enthusiasm) to help to the game move to a new level. I know he already has lots of great ideas, including the creation of a proper test site where we can take the new step of testing new features before adding them (very unusual for me!). There should be an opportunity to get you involved in testing and certainly we want you all to be heavily involved with suggesting new ideas and your views on all potential changes.

(Update 14th Feb): Apologies for the extremely long delay with the update, this was caused by a very minor problem which escalated but everything is fine now and this is just a one-off.

(Update 3rd Feb): Number of modifications made: Absence - please now use the Manager - Settings page to select a period of absence (select start and end date). Private deals - You should now be able to sell retiring players privately. Stadium - The capacity change feature has been modified to help smaller clubs, the rules will be updated with the changes. Instant appointments - Managers can now takeover bottom level clubs (C-level) immediately rather than wait for the next matchday.

(Update 2nd Feb): Apologies for the delayed update, the connection to the online database seemed to get dropped for some reason during the automatic update so I had to finish it manually when I woke up!

(Update 27th Jan): Unfortunately the B-Cup draw was lost during the last cup update and I no longer have access to the fixtures so I have had to redo the draw for the Last 32. My apologies for any difficulties (annoyances!) that may cause.

(Update 26th Jan): Sorry I managed to make a change which lost the arrows (showing position changes) on the league tables this week, they'll be back after the next league matches. Also, I have made it so that retiring players can now be placed on the transfer list.

(Update 20th Jan): Prize Money has been increased for all top 4 finishes by at least 500k and there is now prize money for reserve league winners. See the Help page for details of this and a new section on Changing Teams

(Update 19th Jan): As some of you may have noticed the updates are running close to the matchday deadlines now. I have managed to get it running automatically, so far under close supervision but it seems to be very successful. This is a big step forward for ITN!

(Update 10th Jan): I have now re-run the level cup draws as they were accidently done on the league positions before today's matches.