Six on Stage Blog

Category: Website

  • A brief hiatus

    Despite a pretty devastating cyberattack, Six on Stage was back online within a month.

    A zero day exploit in the hosting system that powers our server – rather than the site itself – enabled hackers to delete the entire site and issue a £5k ransomware demand for its return. As that’s about a decade’s running costs for the site, and there would be guarantee of actually getting the site back from them, it was not an option.

    Thankfully, we were able to supplement the last backup available with pages from the Internet Archive, and took the opportunity to add in more 2026 data at the same time.

    There shouldn’t be anything visibly missing, although some of the data you don’t see is gone for good. That is mainly source attribution for the last couple of year, as it’s useful to keep a record of where a particular fact came from in case it is queried at a later date. If you do notice anything wrong, please, as always, get in touch.

    The only thing left to restore are the earlier posts on this blog, which has moved to a new subdomain. Again, the Internet Archive is the source. What a great resource that is.

    Thank you to everyone who sent supportive messages during quite a stressful period, and to those who supported the site financially through Ko-fi – it’s much appreciated. Needless to say, we are now paying for full server backups!

  • 10,000 and onwards!

    Six on Stage has reached a big milestone with 10,000 people connected to the Eurovision Song Contest now listed on the site!

    That includes 5,632 people who have performed on the Constest stage at in some capacity as part of a country’s entry, 2,880 songwriters (some of whom performed as well), 833 national spokespeople and 1,765 jurors. There are also 339 conductors – the only number that’s not going to increase any time soon.

    With national final season for 2023 now underway, more people will be added to the site in the coming weeks. The 9,999th person I added was Sidorela Kelmendi, one of the newly-selected family group representing Albania alongside Albina Kelmendi in Liverpool.

    But the 10,000th person was a juror from 1974. Lawyer Basil Herwald was interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme by guest editor Björn Ulvaeus. They discussed Basil’s contribution to the 1974 Contest as one of the UK jurors – none of whom gave their one vote to ABBA.