When registration broke — a post-mortem

Every game has a front door, and ours is a short path: create an account, found your club, build your world, arrive at your dashboard. In August 2026 we discovered that, for some new managers, that path had a hole in it — and while fixing it, we briefly locked the door altogether. This is the account of both.

The hole in the path

A handful of new players reported the same strange experience. They registered, went through the wizard, and arrived in a world where they did not seem to have a club. The world existed; their place in it did not.

We traced it to the order of the steps. Under certain conditions, a new world could be created before the club it was meant to contain was properly in place. Nothing warned the player, and nothing stopped the world from being built anyway.

Three layers of protection

Instead of patching that single moment, we added protection at three points along the path:

1. At the door of the game. A single check now makes sure every manager entering a world has a club; if not, they are taken straight to club creation, with a short explanation.
2. When a world is requested. The game refuses to start building a world for a manager without a club, and says why.
3. While the world is built. If, despite everything, the club cannot be placed in the new world, the build stops and is marked as failed, rather than finishing an empty world.

We then counted. Of the 39 worlds created in the day after the fix, none was missing its club.

The ten minutes we would rather forget

The next day, while preparing a follow-up update, an older version of part of the site was put back by mistake. That older version carried a stricter security setting, and that setting blocked the "are you human?" check on the registration form. For about ten minutes, nobody could create an account.

We noticed quickly, restored the correct version and confirmed that registration worked again. But ten minutes is ten minutes, and it should not have happened at all.

What changed in how we work

Two habits came out of that week, and both are still in place:

• Before any update goes live, we confirm that what is about to go out matches what we expect — so an older version can never quietly replace a newer one.
• After every update, we test the real thing. Not a quick look at a status page, but an actual registration in a normal browser, from the sign-up form to the dashboard. If it fails, the update is treated as broken until it passes.

A word to the players affected

Some managers who joined during those days ended up with a world they could not use. Those unusable worlds were cleaned up so that the accounts behind them could start again properly through the normal path. If you were one of them and something still does not look right, write to support@managefc.com — we would like to hear from you.

Next in the diary: players now age like players.