Hatstats… It’s a term that nearly every Hattrick manager knows. It’s the bread and butter of match analysis and a it’s infiltrated nearly every single other statistical CHPP application to date. Hatstats is the Grandfather of Hattrick statistics.

Update: I’ve got the domain all set up and ready. I even got a spiffy logo! http://hatstats.net

Griggle started it up around 2003/2004 due to a desire to see how his team (in Oceania division III) was comparing with the others in his division and from then on, it just snowballed in popularity, spreading throughout the Hattrick world – requiring 5 web servers to host every single country. By this point, Griggle had enlisted the help of others to help provide the massive amount of statistical information as well as myself as a developer assisting with the website’s development and maintenance.

However, in 2008, after Griggle had quit Hattrick due to time constraints and I followed soon after (end of 2008), Hattrick faded into the background, aided by the release of a new statistics website called Alltid. Eventually, by 2009, the Hatstats.info domain had expired and that was the end.

Fast forward to the end of 2009 and I decided to rejoin Hattrick because I’d started to reminisce about the game and was starting to miss it. Whilst people were using Alltid for their statistical analysis, I would hear bits and pieces from various people that there were certain elements that Alltid didn’t cover but Hatstats did.  When Alltid started to have problems and the Hattrick staff attempted to integrate Alltid into Hattrick (and subsequently failed) people started to jump up and down because they couldn’t get to their statistics, they couldn’t brag about the number of ‘Hatstats’ they got this week or view their series’ “best team” – all features pioneered by Hatstats.

After Alltid had been down for a couple of weeks, I can’t remember if someone asked or whether I’d had the idea first, but I decided to ask Griggle if he would mind if I resurrected his pride and joy of 5 years. He was more than happy for me to do it so I made the decision to blow the dust off the Hatstats archive and go for it.  I had all the code, both the service and the website, the database schema, and Griggle’s blessing, so it wasn’t a hard decision considering the situation.  There would have to be some serious modifications as CHPP 2.0 had just been released which does away with the old security code and forces CHPP applications to use OAuth. The old service code, written in Perl, would have to be rewritten, mainly because I didn’t know Perl (I’m a PHP/Java developer) and it would be easier to port the code with the new OAuth rather than try and hack OAuth into a codebase I didn’t really understand that much.

So, Hatstats 2.0 will be a Java service and a brand new PHP5 website (the old website is PHP3 and doesn’t work!). I’ve been working on it for about 2 months, although the bulk of my work has been in the last week and the service is almost finished. The next steps will be for me to implement the service on my server and start loading stats from the season about to start. Once the service is stable I’ll do the new website. I’m hoping to release at some point in the first half of this season, but as with all things that are done in a persons spare time, it’s very much subject to change.

My initial plans is to just release for Oceania, as the web server load for Oceania won’t stress out my web server. At some point, I will start expanding it to other countries, just as Hatstats originally did, but I’ll probably have to get a hosted VPS to support the load. This, of course, costs money so if you’re from a country other than Oceania, please be patient while I have to sort that out. I also plan to release a mobile application for Hatstats but that is a while off yet.

Viva la Hatstats!