How it all began
Stamtavler.no was created in 2009 by Camilla Berger, with great help from several Norwegian breeders who entered their dogs and pedigrees. The page kept developing as feedback was given by the Stafford community, and more and more features were added. Everyone could sign up and add dogs to the database, and in 2013 the database had grown quite big, but it also had tons of duplicate users, duplicate dogs, and even other breeds registered. The website code, the actual engine of the database, was also outdated by then. There was not much "development" with the website those first 4 years, and seeing how much traffic it had got, it was now necessary to make this database a worthy pedigree database for our breed. With the help of two other breeders, Andrea Strobl in Austria (Williewalkers.englishsetters.at) and Sylvia Voorn from the Netherlands (weimaranerpedigrees.com), the database got a new start and launched in January 2014 under the new name SBTpedigree.com.
With these new pages it was easier to maintain information and sort out duplicate and wrong entries. From 2014, SBTpedigree grew even faster as new users discovered the pages every week. In summer 2014, Brian Owen also shared his "book of champions" and over 2000 dogs were added later that year from his collection. Many people have contributed to make the database grow, either by adding dogs, giving permission to add dogs, or sending scanned pages of pedigrees, stud books and show catalogues. The pages were still free to use at this point, and the time spent on this "little pedigree project" was exceeding a normal hobby website. The decision to change the database to a paid service was made later on so it was possible to keep working and developing the database, which by 2014 had thousands of visitors every month. In 2016 the database started to collect L2hga & HC results by email to keep the information about these important diseases correct. You can read more about this here.
In 2019 new challenges arose as several unknown persons started to show interest for the database and found their own way in and helped themselves to a piece of the database. It was necessary to look for options to re-design the entire page and change the database structure so it was possible to manage the pages more easily and keep them updated at all times. For those who are not familiar with how programming works, the website could in 2019 be compared to a car running at full speed on 15 year old bad parts. Things would start to fall apart, and they did. Not to mention the insane traffic the pages had, which crashed the server now and then. It came to the point where closing the entire page and leaving this project for good was an option.
Some trials and errors were done, and not long after the frustration had set in pretty hard, Flitzen Technologies was introduced. SBTpedigree.com was in 2021 re-born into a professional, good looking, functional database with their help. The professionalism is beyond words, and the service and communication was and still is impeccable. (Highly recommended — check out their website here)
After the re-launch of SBTpedigree.com it runs smoothly, and the work on improving the database and features is done each month.
→ Read more about the work behind the scenes of SBTpedigree.com