Footy Darts is a magnetic darts game that simulates the ebb and flow of an Australian Football match. WFN writer Ash has reviewed the game, and creator Dale Wilson has two free sets of the Ultimate Footy Pack to offer international clubs (containing the magnetic football darts game and a markmaster footy, package valued at AUD$50). We think the game could be used at footy clubrooms or as a prize for an up and coming junior. Readers from clubs outside of Australia are encouraged to write (click here) and tell us about your footy club and how you think you might make use of a set. We'll select two responses and courtesy of Sports Darts send them the Ultimate Footy Pack. Read on for Ash's review.

Yes, it's time for WFN to put out another request for assistance. With the steady ebb and flow of work and life commitments of our volunteer reporters we are currently in need of help covering two countries and one continent. Our writers are all volunteers who have a passion for seeing Aussie Rules grow internationally. At the end of the day we're only a very small piece of the puzzle, but feedback from leagues, clubs and fans is that WFN helps that community achieve its goals, so getting involved this way is a chance to help with the cause even if you aren't based in any of the place we have vacancies for. In fact your location isn't particularly important - being based in the given country or region is helpful but not a realistic requirement for the job. More important are reasonable writing skills, a love of footy and the willingness to get involved.

Our main area in need is Asia, covering such growing areas as Japan, China and many more. Language skills relevant to those countries would be a huge plus but again, not a requirement, and we have plenty of English speaking contacts. We also require people to write on Canada and Ireland.

In all cases we will give you support, provide plenty of contacts, and no particular computer skills are required - we'll show you how to upload your stories through a relatively simply web page. So if you have an interest in supporting international footy and getting a behind-the-scenes view on the game's growth, then consider volunteering to write for WFN. Contact Brett here for more information, or visit our About Us page to see our current structure.

Just a quick note that our 2005 International Cup multimedia section has been restored after being inadvertently lost during a system upgrade. We have also decided to allow commenting on most stories by registered users. It was a worthwhile feature previously and sometimes provided excellent new information from readers. We remind users the system is intended for constructive comment on international footy. Please respect this community resource - abuse and deliberate misinformation will not be tolerated.

We note that the recent story regarding the start of the 2007 Papua New Guinean footy season is the 1000th story by WFN since we began back in mid-2004. Many thanks to all our volunteer writers, contributors and regular readers who keep the passion for international footy alive. Let's hope there's 1000 more stories on their way as our great game continues its steady growth around the world.

Just a quick note to explain that Ash is checking through the WFN Links section, and any modified addresses or descriptions will result in old links appearing in the "LINKS last 2 weeks" section in the right hand column, along with any new links added.

Apologies for the broadly directed post, but a short message is in order to advise that when new users attempt to sign up for accounts they are competing for our attention against many "spambot" automatically generated account requests from spammers.  Because of this issue there is a risk that a genuine application will be rejected accidentally, as happened today.  If you sign up for an account and do not receive your password for several days then you may wish to try again.

Apologies if the site's behaving oddly, we're upgrading our software and we may get stuck for the next day or two.

Hopefully won't be long before WFN is back to normal.

WFN covers Aussie Rules in many countries and as such the characters used in stories go well beyond standard English. Unfortunately we do not have the resources to support multiple languages through human translation (readers will have to rely on the often inaccurate translations available from sites such as Google). However logged in users can set the language to suit their native tongue, such that default messages are given in that language (see Preferences in the left column once logged in).

Yet how stories appear can be different to what the author intended if a different character set is used. This is a technical issue for software engineers. For example for a primarily English language site to support such characters as used in "Skåne" (the footy stronghold of southern Sweden), a character set such as UTF-8 is used by this site. That is the default set now for readers who are not logged in, and for those that create a new account. Existing users should check under Preferences that they are using a UTF-8 character set under the Language option, such as "English (UTF-8)", otherwise non-standard characters will appear as "junk".

A quick note to say that the link to our World Footy Wiki has been removed due to problems when WFN changed host provider (no perjorative implied towards the provider, more an issue regarding our lack of technical support). We also feel that wikipedia has become such a major source of information that it is better that clubs and leagues maintain their information there. As such, links to countries on our World Footy Atlas to our internal wiki have been re-directed to wikipedia sites. Where an equivalent is not available a stub (a simple initial page) will be created. Our thanks to all who contributed to our wiki and if anyone feels there is significant information worth retrieving please let us know and we will try to extract it for use in wikipedia.

Just a quick note to let readers know that we have recently added "ClustrMaps" to our site, in the right hand column, under Geo Stats. This third-party software produces a nice snapshot of where across the world people are viewing worldfootynews.com