Happy birthday to TaskMaster.Info!

It's February 16th, which means that TaskMaster.Info was officially launched exactly one year ago today! However, when the site was publicly launched, I had already been working on it quietly for one year, so today marks both the second anniversary of the actual birth of the site, and the first anniversary of its official launch.

A lot has happened in the past year, so I thought I would share some stats and highlights with you, as follows:

• The site is currently averaging around 700-800 visits a day, logged 22,000 clicks from Google searches in the past month, and had its busiest day on February 2nd, when over 3,500 people came looking primarily for information about Taskmaster AU. The previous busiest day was on December 1st, when over 2,000 people came looking for information on the then just-announced cast of Taskmaster UK S15.
• I have it on good authority that the site has been used as a reference by people working at a few of the companies involved in the production of shows in the Taskmaster franchise.
• Since the site’s official launch, three new adaptations of the Taskmaster format have started airing, in the form of Portugal’s Taskmaster PT, Quebec’s Le Maître du Jeu, and the currently-airing Taskmaster AU.
• 14 new seasons and specials having aired, across the franchise, since the site’s launch, and two are currently airing, with potentially 10 or more seasons and specials anticipated to air before the end of 2023.
• There are currently 2,367 tasks documented on the site, including some unaired tasks (where details are known). This includes 1,355 ‘original’ tasks, and 1,012 tasks which have been categorised as ‘adaptations’ – whether those were straightforward reproductions of existing tasks, incorporated minor variations or, in some cases, may have been examples of ‘simultaneous invention’.
• On the day of the site’s launch, I had only documented the task attempts from Taskmaster UK S01 (just 158 attempts in total). Today, the site has 5,701 task attempt records in place! I can personally only take credit for about a fifth of the task attempt descriptions; I am just about managing to stay on top of the new episodes as they come out, but I don’t also have time to go back and write up the descriptions for previous seasons.
• Many thanks must go to the wonderful Taskmaster Wiki contributors, whose work on writing up task attempts for the subsequent seasons of Taskmaster UK, and for Taskmaster NZ, I have re-used on the site, until such a time as more detailed descriptions can be produced.
• Major kudos also needs to go to the contributor known as ‘Jenny R’, who has been an absolute machine in recent months, writing up detailed attempt descriptions for: Stormester's S04 and S05, and all of its Christmas specials; Direktor Svemira's S01; the Bäst i Test Christmas specials from 2021 and 2022; and - coming to the site very soon - Taskmaster PT's S01.
• Thanks should also go to: the contributor known as ‘Hanny Time’, who wrote up the task attempts for the 2022 Taskmaster New Year’s Treat; the anonymous contributor who wrote up the attempts for the first episode of Le Maître du Jeu; and to another individual who is in the process of writing up the attempts for Suurmestari S01.

This brings me to an important call to action: There are still over 150 episodes of various adaptations of the show for which there are currently no task attempt descriptions written up, and on which no-one is currently working. Also, as noted above, It’d be great to have more detailed descriptions of all the tasks from Taskmaster UK S02 – S14 and Taskmaster NZ S01 – S03 in place at some point. So, if you can string a few sentences together, need an excuse to rewatch some Taskmaster, and would like to become one of the site’s awesome contributors, let’s talk! Hit me up via one of my social media accounts, linked down their in the footer. I’m afraid that all I can offer you in return is a writer’s credit (with optional link to a website or online profile), but it’d be amazing to be able to post another update, one year from now, sharing that the site is 100% up-to-date on this front.

Finally, I’d like to extend my gratitude to everyone who, over the past few years, has made episodes of the international Taskmaster adaptations available to those of us not residing in their countries of origin, or has been involved in the transcription, translation, or proofreading of subtitles. Without all of you, this crazy project would not have been possible in the first place. Really... thank you SO much for enabling my obsession!