The World Cup is over, and with it went the most intense time ProdeLibre has ever had. Groups formed in an afternoon, people making picks from work five minutes before the deadline, and a traffic spike that, on its best night, was more than twenty times the usual.
Now that the dust has settled, I want to tell you what I took away from all that and what's coming next.
What the World Cup left behind
First: it held up. With a few tight spots on match nights, but it held up. That’s already good news.
Second, and most importantly: you wrote to me a lot. Questions about penalty scoring, requests for phase-based rankings, people who couldn't find how to activate their group's BONUS, and a bunch of random comments about things that looked weird or were hard to find.
That inbox was the best source of information I had. Several things that came out in these months—the stage-based ranking, the BONUS deadline, the penalty explanation—came from there. And several more are still on the list.
Why big changes happen now
You don't touch anything in the middle of a World Cup. There's a match every day, people are submitting picks at all hours, and anything that breaks bothers a lot of people at once. So, everything big stayed on a list waiting.
With a quiet calendar, that list can finally be tackled. This is what's coming in the next few weeks: version 2.0.
A new home: prodelibre.com
ProdeLibre was born at prodelibre.com.ar and is moving to prodelibre.com. A shorter name, easier to share, and without the country-specific ending: there are people playing from outside Argentina and the .com.ar never really represented that.
You won't have to do anything. The old links will keep working and will automatically take you to the new address, so if you have ProdeLibre in your favorites or on your phone's home screen, it will keep working just the same. Your account, your groups, and your picks go with you.
The only exception is notifications: the browser ties them to the domain, so when the change happens, I'll ask you to turn them on one more time. It's a quick tap and you're done.
A new data provider
I don't manually enter match results: a data provider brings them in automatically every few minutes. We are switching to a better one.
The main difference is that it brings much more information than we can show today: the actual match minute, stats, lineups, top scorer tables, and access to many more tournaments. None of that will appear overnight: I'll be adding it to the screens as soon as the migration is finished.
To give you an idea of the catalog size: besides the Liga Profesional, the Copa Libertadores and the Copa Sudamericana, there are first divisions from almost the entire continent—Brasileirão, and the leagues from Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Ecuador, Peru, and Paraguay—plus the big ones in Europe: Premier League, LaLiga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Primeira Liga, and Eredivisie. Also Liga MX, MLS, the Turkish Super Lig, and the Saudi league.
I won't turn them all on: a pick'em pool works best when the tournament matters to the people in the group. If there's one you'd like to see on ProdeLibre, now is the time to tell me.
Your picks and points won't be touched
This is the delicate part and I prefer to tell you in advance.
Switching providers has a real risk: if done in a rush, the system might not recognize old matches, re-register them, and your picks end up hanging on matches no one is updating anymore. Points freeze without any error popping up, and no one finds out until it's too late.
So, it's being done the opposite of the fast way: first, a check that compares both providers match by match, and refuses to change anything if it finds a single inconsistency. In testing, that check already stopped the migration several times, and I'm glad: every stop was more work for me and one less problem for you.
By the way, some Clausura kickoff times that were published provisionally will be corrected. I'll let you know when that happens, because if you had noted down when a matchday closed, it might have changed.
The goal is simple: the same number of picks and the same points before and after. Not a single one moved.
A new look, and dark mode 🌓
While we're at it, a redesign is also coming.
Dark mode is arriving. You'll turn it on with a button at the top right, next to the bell icon. ProdeLibre will still look light by default; dark mode will be your choice and will be saved on that device.
The rest of the changes are more subtle, but noticeable:
- Bigger titles and a colored bar above each card depending on the section
- Numbers stop dancing when a score updates
- Fewer emojis used as icons, which looked different on every phone
- Points no longer appear in red, which read as if something was wrong
The new design came from an unexpected place: the World Cup infographic. When I put it together, I gave it a level of care the rest of the site didn't have, and I ended up liking it more than the app. So, I took that language and I'm applying it to all the screens.
And something you won't see
The system will monitor itself. Every 15 minutes, it checks that data is arriving and, above all, that there are no finished matches without a result loaded. If something doesn't add up, I get an email. Until now, I depended on someone writing to me, which is a really bad way to find out.
All of this will be rolling out little by little. When it arrives, if something looks weird or you notice anything out of place, write to me. The changes are big and I'm sure I'll miss something.
Thanks for sticking with me. See you on the next matchday ⚽