A Filter Fix, and Two Quiet Hours I Owe You an Apology For
Short post today, with one piece of good news and one apology.
The fix
A reader wrote in last week with the kind of report I like best: specific, reproducible, and slightly embarrassing for me. Some filters on Game Statistics weren't doing what they said.
Two of them were simply being ignored:
- Away saves. You could set a range, and the results came back as if you hadn't. So a search for matches where the away keeper made six or more saves quietly returned every match instead.
- Home pass accuracy. Same problem: the value was sent, then never applied. Home sides completing 88% of their passes or more now means exactly that.
And one pair had its logic the wrong way round. The comeback filters were swapped: asking for home comebacks gave you away comebacks, and the reverse. Both now point the right way:
None of these were dramatic on their own. But a filter that's silently ignored is worse than one that's missing: you get an answer, it looks plausible, and nothing tells you it's wrong. To the reader who took the time to notice, check it twice and write it up properly: thank you. This one is entirely down to you.
The two quiet hours
Here's the part I'm less pleased about. The deploy that shipped this fix hung partway through, without an error and without telling me. For about two hours the site simply wasn't reachable, and I didn't know until I went to check it myself.
If you tried to visit during that window and got nothing, that's why, and I'm sorry. It's a small site, but a lot of you use it on match days, and two hours of silence are two hours you couldn't look something up.
Everything is back up and should be working normally now. I'm also changing how deploys are done, so that a stuck one gets noticed quickly instead of sitting there quietly.
Try it again
If you'd given up on a search because the numbers looked off, it's worth another go. A few to start with:
- High-scoring matches: five goals or more since August
- Level at half-time, both teams scored
- Or open Game Statistics and build your own.
Keep them coming
This fix exists because someone wrote in, and that's how most of the site's improvements have started. If a filter gives you a result that looks wrong, if something is missing, or if there's a feature you'd like to see, SmartSoccerStats@gmail.com reaches me and I read all of it.
Thanks for bearing with me. See you in the data.