Νέα

First of all we would like to say that we are very sorry it has come to this. Hattrick is a football game and we don’t have any political agenda. We only want you to have good time here – but we should have been able to spot your concerns and find a workable solution for this at an earlier time. We apologize for this.

But as you know (at least by now) there are real life issues which carry over to the Hattrick world, it’s unavoidable. Our reasoning in such cases is that we can’t solve what diplomats and politicians around the world have failed on, nor can we say who’s right and who’s wrong in a certain dispute. The only way we can handle this is to use international standards.

Our country name policy
It is absolutely necessary for Hattrick to have a country/league name policy that is sufficiently clear and transparent. That is why we base our country name policy on the names FIFA uses. We have done this for many years now, as it makes perfect sense for us to do so. Hattrick is a global online football game, and FIFA is the international governing body of association football with 208 members – including Greece. What's more, we are of the opinion that the FIFA policy (as the world’s leading football association) is influenced by the stance the UN has in the issue of the name of the country, and we are satisfied that this is reflected in their name standard already.

About FYR Macedonia / Republika Makedonija
We do follow our FIFA policy even in this particular case, as we use the same names as FIFA does. This is the country info from FIFA’s site (http://www.fifa.com/associations/association=mkd/countryInfo.html):

• Country: FYR Macedonia
• Country (official name): Republika Makedonija

While we use what FIFA uses (both now and in the future), it should be mentioned that an overwhelming majority of UN countries recognise the country under its constitutional name “Republic of Macedonia” and use the constitutional name when dealing with it. These include security council members USA, United Kingdom, Russia and China (as well as Sweden and most other EU member states). Add to that thousands of companies (including many news agencies such as BBC and CNN and encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and Brittanica) also use that name. So, it’s not like everyone uses the appellation "former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”. Fact is actually that it is a term which UN explicitly said was a provisional term purely "for all purposes within the United Nations" and not mandatory for others to use. And as written above, most countries (and companies) don’t use the appellation.

Our language policy
When it comes to languages we want Hattrick languages to be recognized by the ISO 639 standard, as well as being an official language in at least one country. FIFA has very little to do with languages though, so the when in doubt of anything we rely on what ISO and SIL International say. ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is an international-standard-setting body composed of representatives from 159 national standards organizations and SIL (Summer of Linguistics) is an organization which that studies and documents languages. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for example has granted formal consultative status to SIL. SIL is also the publisher of the “Ethnologue: Languages of the World”, a catalogue over all known languages in the world – making SIL a very reliable languages source.

About Македонски
Македонски fulfills all our language prerequisites (http://www.sil.org/ISO639-3/codes.asp?order=639_1&letter=m), hence why we use that name. Please note that we write it with Cyrillic letters in our dropdowns, as that’s what this language use (and that way it can’t be mistaken for any other language either).

Fact is also that Macedonian is the name used by the UN. EU also uses this name in their official style guides and publications (and if you followed the FIFA link above I guess you’ve seen that they actually also use this name). Worth mentioning is also that there is no "official compromise" in regards to the name of the language.

http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/maplib/countinfo.htm
http://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-370200.htm

Names now and in the future
As shown above, we do follow the international standards regarding the names. When the name dispute is finally settled between the two parties we will happily apply whatever names the parties agree on. Until then, we will keep on following the international standards according to our policies mentioned above. This means if FIFA changes approach regarding the country name for example, we will too.

What we can and WILL do about this situation in Hattrick
Even though this naming dispute is a real world issue that carries over into Hattrick, we just can’t ignore it within Hattrick. As mentioned, we want you to have a good time and even though we will not take sides in a political conflict we can try to make the best of things within Hattrick. We have listened a lot to the criticism from the Greek community, and there are areas where we haven’t been active enough or consistent enough in the past. Together with the community we have agreed on a way forward, to “solve” this situation within Hattrick:

• Have country names in the English FIFA standard in our dropdowns instead of local names, meaning FYR Macedonia will be shown instead of Makedonija in the dropdowns.
• The removal of political provocations and symbols (such as the star of Star of Vergina).

Country dropdown names change
From tomorrow on we will show the English name instead, for all countries. In this case, it means that the name in the dropdown will be FYR Macedonia instead Makedonija. This would not only make us more compliant with FIFA (this more or less how they display the information), but also more user friendly as many users do not understand the local name of foreign languages.

Symbols, political provocations and propaganda
Hattrick is not a place for political issues, and we should not allow Hattrick to be a base camp for political provocations of any kind. This naming dispute has been carried over from real life into Hattrick, but it doesn’t mean we should allow it to grow any further within Hattrick. We are aware that many provocations have been ongoing between your two leagues, and that we have probably not done enough to prevent and control abusive behavior in these cases.

This is something we must and will get better at. We will review our rules for the displaying of political symbols and historical references, and make them stricter so that these symbols can only be used in their right context (this means for example that the Star of Vergina can’t be used together with FYR Macedonia, as that’s not the right context for that symbol). We will also review existing teams to make sure these rules are working.
It should also be clear that we will not tolerate any other political provocations (on forums, guestbooks etc) either, we will amend a much stricter approach on this. Naturally, this goes for both Greek and FYR Macedonia users.

We hope that the actions included in this “solution” for Hattrick will be seen as a reasonable and unbiased compromise in this conflict. The rest of the world follows the same overall practice as Hattrick does (or rather, we follow the rest of the world), so we simply can’t believe we are that far off a reasonable policy. If there are still people who feel that they cannot live with our decisions in spite with the changes we are making in response to the criticism from the Greek Community and want to leave the Game or stop being Supporters, then we regret that. What we cannot do is to take sides in any political conflict.