World Cup Challenge 2026

All 72 fixtures. Correct dates, correct matchups, who's got skin in every game. Banter unread badge fixed. Failed upset picks now show. Schedule got a team filter. Names are your colour now, not a flat yellow.

Your Banter name now drives everything personal — no more "View As" picker. Groups page has a My Groups toggle. The ticker calls out your results and flags upset picks 24h before kick-off. Banter badge fixed.

Results, cards, standings — all live from API-Football now. No manual updates. If the lower-ranked team won, it's an upset. Simple.

Match events — goals, cards, VAR, halftime — are now sent to Claude in real time and come back as sharp, personalised commentary for the people in this group whose teams are on the pitch. Add your Anthropic API key in Settings and every event gets a fresh, context-aware one-liner. No key? Falls back to the built-in templates so nothing breaks. One batched API call per poll covers all new events at once.

Added a proper Settings panel — accessible from the sidebar nav and the mobile hamburger menu. Paste your RapidAPI key in once and the live match feed just works. No more opening the browser console, no more localStorage.setItem() spelunking. Future keys and config options will live here too.

During an active game, the mobile status box expands into a live match feed — current score, goals, red cards, yellow cards, VAR decisions, halftime, and sharp commentary about the people whose teams are playing. Events are pulled automatically from API-Football every 4 minutes (one call covers all concurrent games). Banter chat sent during the game window gets injected into the feed too, so the whole group's commentary ends up in one place. New messages pushed via Ably keep the feed current in real time. When the final whistle goes, the feed clears and the status box returns to normal.

The status ticker is now fully automated — no more manual updates to a jsonbin. It reads the live scores data and writes its own commentary: match results, leaderboard movement, card counts, upset confirmations, and a teaser for the next game. Items are fresh within 48 hours of the match. More results means more material. The countdown clock now detects in-progress games and switches to a live match clock showing elapsed minutes (e.g. "43'"), halftime, and stoppage time. Knockout games get the full treatment — extra time and penalties included. When the final whistle blows, it flips back to the next game countdown automatically.

The schedule now buries played games in a collapsible section so you're not scrolling past history to find tomorrow's kick-off. Card icons show individually — three reds means three red squares, not one with a multiplication sign. The Upsets page stopped pretending a seven-column table was fine on a phone screen and switched to proper cards. The mobile menu now shows the elemetric logo and version. We've also hidden an easter egg somewhere in the dashboard — 20 bonus points to the first person who finds it and posts it in Banter.

The dashboard has a permanent home at enablon-presales-wc2026.netlify.app. No more downloading HTML files, no more "which version do I have", no more corporate IT blocks because it looked like a local file. One URL. Everyone gets the same thing. Updates deploy instantly. This is objectively better and only took until week two of the tournament to happen.

The Fouler panel grew up. It now shows every picked team ranked by card points — yellow worth 1, red worth 2. South Africa collected 5 points of chaos in a single game. Three red cards. The tournament is 63 games long. The group stage alone has them in the lead. Backed by Dez. Dez knows.

Someone had to document the carnage. Version history added to the nav. Sharp-tongued, because why would we do anything straight. Also: auto-scroll to bottom on chat load, because apparently gravity needed to be coded in manually.

Hover any message and hit ↩ reply. Your retort shows up with a quoted preview, Teams-style. The original sender gets full credit when you dunk on them. Stored in jsonbin, visible to everyone. There is no undo.

Anitha, Chalida, Leo Bernardes, Ruben, and Bon joined fashionably late. Adding them required exactly one array entry each. The entire dashboard — all panels, stats, charts, draw table, chat dropdown — updated automatically. This is what good architecture feels like. Leo picked Brazil to win. He was assigned France. The football gods are not subtle.

Everything that was hardcoded across six panels is now derived from one PEOPLE array. Champion charts, group picks, upset tables, fouler league, draw assignments, chat dropdowns — all rendered dynamically. A live scores system was also wired in via a second jsonbin: Paul updates one JSON file after each game, the dashboard computes everyone's points automatically. No more editing HTML between matches like it's 2003.

Giphy API integration: search, preview, send. 100 API calls per hour, shared across 24 users. Do the math and behave accordingly. Emoji picker also added, because sometimes a 💀 is all you need. Tenor was investigated and rejected — they stopped accepting new clients in January 2026, which tracks.

A real-time group chat powered by jsonbin.io, accessible to all 24 entrants. Messages persist for the duration of the tournament. @mention support added. A disclaimer warns users that messages are not encrypted before they type something they'll regret. The Netherlands colleague's corporate proxy blocks it. We investigated. We cannot fix corporate IT.

19 entries received, all hardcoded stats refreshed across every panel. Ticker messages rewritten — data-driven, moderately cruel, occasionally affectionate. Taffy still has Cabo Verde. The ticker mentions this.

48 teams, randomly assigned. One per entrant, no duplicates. Vern's first draw was quietly re-rolled — nothing to see here. Taffy got Cabo Verde. Senda got Argentina. The football gods were consulted and had opinions.

16 entrants. Champion picks, group predictions, upset picks, dirty fouler league. A schedule tab with live countdown timers. Lock/reveal logic keeping individual picks hidden until form close. A ticker running sharp commentary about everyone's picks. The dashboard that started as "a quick HTML file" and became a minor engineering project.