whilst i do miss the live rankings, i can see they are an awful lot of work for all invloved, to tell us something that generally we will know for certain in a couple of days time anyway.
In the past i used to just look at the week start ranking list, take off points the player i was interested in (and you'll never ever guess who it was) was defending and add points he had won a look up hte reudlt. which whilst wasnt that accuarte was also generally not too far out to be good enough for the week.

just want to say thanks for all the hard you you and the rest of the team have put in in the past.

If no-one else offers, that sounds like a good idea to me, Steven.

If anybody is thinking of taking over but is worried about the sheer size of the job, maybe it could be split up? One person to do Andy, another for Jamie B, another for Boggo etc? In fact while those two are so close they could probably be amalgamated. The easier job by far is Andy - all the people that highly ranked are usually playing in ATP tournaments only. It is when you have to get down to the Futures level that my poor old brain packs in.

What would be ideal would be to have several people that could "own" a tournament or two each and input the results when they come in. That way, it's a 5-10 minute job to update rather than an hour or so.

Tables- wise, they generate pretty much automatically, then there's some work analysing and providing commentary/ what-ifs etc..

thanks for the work you've done with it Rob, but if you don't want to be doing it anymore then there definitely isn't any reason for you to continue.

Steven's idea sounds good if nothing else can come from it.

From experience, I second what Madeline says, it's the lower ranked people and futures results that are the most troublesome. Particularly when you remember that futures points don't go on until the following week.

If the live rankings could be continued some way, I would appreciate it. However it's not going to be the end of the world if that's not possible.

Thanks again Rob.

Looks like there's no enthusiasm for a more team- based effort.

I think Mad's still monitoring the top end of things, so maybe she can help out with Andy's ranking during the grand slams and masters events.

OK, well thank- you all for your thanks and best wishes, and I'm going to get myself more of a life

Rob,

Just like to re-iterate all the comments and thanks made to you above.

What a job you have done. I also had to make some time choices a while back but the work you undertook was immense.

I think if we didnt have Stevens table 25 then Im sure we could have got together and got a team together.

And perhaps just keeping an eye on Andy would be possible.

Again a great big thanks Rob !

I'm sure you've made the right decision Rob - much as your rankings tables were appreciated, and I imagine you found ways of doing them more efficiently over time (as I have with my tables), it always seemed to me like it must have been an astonishing amount of work to keep track of that many players just to project the rankings of a handful of Brits.

I came up against a similar brick wall last year when I was putting my table directly onto four different sites with slight differences between them (it was great that people were asking for it to be added to their sites, but it did make a 'quick update' take ages!) and providing a full GB men's singles results service on the GR site - the latter being something that Peter Too later started doing for the women and is stll doing brilliantly.  I was away for a couple of weeks and just couldn't face getting the table back up to date, so ended up posting nothing for a couple of months.

Maybe I should have just given up and got (more of!) a life too at that stage, but cutting the full results updates (which I still do on here when I think I've seen them first, but I know that others will take on part of that load so I'm not 'expected' to do it and that makes all the difference) and setting up the table again to make it easier to update (it is far easier to update now even though there is a lot more info on it), plus finding a way to FTP it to one site and then just linking to it rather than posting it directly on four sites has made all the difference.

Of course, the unexpected success of pick 'em has since made time even tighter (and so far stopped me from doing an equivalent table for the GB women, which is a pity - I might get there one day!), but pick 'ems are such fun and some of the entrants get so involved (in fact, one of the newer teams, Centre Court, is even more into it than the original boards used to be) that I guess I'm going to be persevering with those for the foreseeable future, as long as Bethan doesn't decide she's had enough - without her help (not to mention her uncanny ability to know when it's only safe to follow the instructions and when it's best to use her initiative), especially the weekend before the tournaments, I'd sink without trace!

Rob, the lasting benefit of your tables is probably that they have taught a lot of people more about how the rankings work and how to work out the projected rankings for the players they are most interested in whenever they want to, and that's really cool!

-- Edited by steven at 13:24, 2008-05-14