9 August 2019

Apologies for the interruption to our normal service

Last night's planned site update proved a little more difficult than we expected, so thank you all for bearing with us. The site is functioning normally again, but we thought you would be intrigued to hear what happened!

We all love emojis, but for a while they have posed a problem for Local Tennis League players. While the tennis pros happily use them all the time in their social media messages, if you tried to use most emojis in your match commentaries, our website hiccuped, locked down and rejected your score.

Last night we attempted to implement the fix we had already tested successfully in our staging site. A surprisingly far-reaching update, it meant making a "character set" change to just about every field on the site. Unfortunately, a couple of tables on our live site just wouldn't play ball and after many sleepless hours (we scheduled the work for the early hours of the morning) we took the decision to back up and return to the status quo.

We will be looking to fix our naughty emoji issue at a later date, so thank you for your patience in the meantime.

For a small organisation, totally reliant on our players support, these IT glitches are a headache and costly. If you are reading this and haven't played recently, please do consider joining a round. We think you will have a great time playing as well as being in with a chance of earning a FREE can of tennis balls and/or winning a group prize worth £20. And everyone who does join is playing their part in making the vision we share of friendly, competitive tennis possible for more and more players across the UK

Choose a league near you And get playing!