Trade Rules, Tutorial Hints & SEO Groundwork
The past few days were all about small but impactful improvements: rookies early in their careers are now trade-protected, the tutorial explains more clearly which players are greyed out and why, and behind the scenes the groundwork for a clean AdSense integration has been laid. On top of that, a reworked robots.txt lets Google crawlers fully index the game.
🔒 Rookie Trade Protection
- Rookies in their 1st and 2nd year after the draft can no longer be traded — they are meant to develop with the team that drafted them
- Rookies in their 3rd and 4th year remain tradeable
- Affected players are automatically greyed out (opacity 0.4, checkbox disabled) in
trade.phpandtradingblock.php, with an explanatory tooltip - CPU trade offers no longer include young rookies either — for both the user and CPU side
📚 Tutorial Hints
- Tutorial step 6 (Trades) now explicitly mentions the rookie trade block and explains that players may be greyed out based on roster size, position needs and strength needs
- Tutorial step 7 (Trading Block) received the same matching hints
- All new texts are maintained via language keys in both DE and EN
🕷️ AdSense Preparation
team.phpis now fully reachable without an activegameid— every<div>container and block ID stays in place, DataTables render without data- A new
$allow_nogame_ingameflag was introduced, hooked up inheader.php,footer.phpandheader_connect.php, providing default stubs for$game,$team,$userteam, etc. - This allows the AdSense crawler to see the page structure and reference block IDs for ad slot placement
🤖 Google Crawler Allowlist
robots.txtrestructured: all Google bots explicitly allowlisted (Googlebot,Googlebot-Image,Googlebot-News,Mediapartners-Google,AdsBot-Google,AdsBot-Google-Mobile,APIs-Google,Google-InspectionTool,GoogleOther)- All other bots remain fully blocked (
User-agent: * / Disallow: /) - Sensitive endpoints (
header_connect.php,functions.php,startgame.php,/db_migrations/,/.claude/, etc.) stay blocked even for Google
The rookie trade protection adds a meaningful layer of realism to the trade logic — and with the AdSense groundwork now in place, the path is clear to keep the game ad-funded and free forever.