Global chat, email validation, dWAR, and more!
Hey everyone. It's been just over three months since I last posted. I hope everyone is having a great summer, enjoying the absurd amount of homeruns in real-life baseball, and able to spend a little quality time on Pennant Chase!
While life is hectic, I'm doing what I can to continue to advance the site. You're probably seen some of the new features. Let's break it down:
Global Chat and Chat in All Leagues
Chat is now going to come "out of the box" for all leagues. The chat icon will be available in the header as well as the red mobile nav bar (for those who use the mobile app). It will remain on the homepage as usual as well (assuming you turn it on via the Commish tools). Over the years, MANY people have asked for chat in Auto Leagues, so it's now a reality. Auto Leagues tend to have pretty mediocre active participants, so I wouldn't expect much chatter, but it's an option now at least.
Note, the league homepage chat box and the pop-up box are the exact same thing - there's no difference between the two. The header of the pop-up will inform you which league you are chatting on (or if you are on the Global Chat).
Global chat is also something that has been asked for by many users. I'm excited to see how it goes.
Email Validation
You all probably have seen the notice to validate your email address. There are a couple reasons I had to do this:
1) Email policies across the web are getting more strict. If our site sends a bunch of bounced email, we risk getting penalized. Unfortunately over the years, many users entered a bogus email address (probably not realizing email was not a mandatory field). Email validation will ensure we dramatically reduce the number of bounced emails we send.
2) Emails aren't free! Reliable email services cost money for every email sent (and this includes text messages!). In order for PC to not get charged for emails that never get delivered, we have to ensure we are sending to valid email addresses.
BTW - I really encourage everyone to keep an email on their PC account in case you forget your password, because it's the only way to retrieve your password! You can always opt out of emails even if you save your email address on your account.
All of this work should result in more reliable email delivery as well, so that you all are getting your league alerts in a timely manner!
dWAR
Everyone's favorite subject! I did some clean up work on the D+/- stat. For those who don't know, under Team Stats you can see a running total of how many "hits saved" your defense made based on dWAR. A negative number means you're allowing more hits than you are saving. I noticed the stats were not compiling exactly correctly - sometimes more +/- were being recorded than actually happened. To be clear, this did NOT impact game play and it did NOT show an incorrect balance across teams. It's just that the compiled number was too high for ALL teams.
I know many of you want to see the actual stats attached to each fielder. That will be coming some day down the road. It's a fair bit of work to compile that to each player, show it in the box score and/or PBP and then archive it properly in the historical stats.
As always, the PC wishlist is a mile long. Don't stop sending those suggestions, because as you can see, even if it's months and months or years down the road, it could happen!
While life is hectic, I'm doing what I can to continue to advance the site. You're probably seen some of the new features. Let's break it down:
Global Chat and Chat in All Leagues
Chat is now going to come "out of the box" for all leagues. The chat icon will be available in the header as well as the red mobile nav bar (for those who use the mobile app). It will remain on the homepage as usual as well (assuming you turn it on via the Commish tools). Over the years, MANY people have asked for chat in Auto Leagues, so it's now a reality. Auto Leagues tend to have pretty mediocre active participants, so I wouldn't expect much chatter, but it's an option now at least.
Note, the league homepage chat box and the pop-up box are the exact same thing - there's no difference between the two. The header of the pop-up will inform you which league you are chatting on (or if you are on the Global Chat).
Global chat is also something that has been asked for by many users. I'm excited to see how it goes.
Email Validation
You all probably have seen the notice to validate your email address. There are a couple reasons I had to do this:
1) Email policies across the web are getting more strict. If our site sends a bunch of bounced email, we risk getting penalized. Unfortunately over the years, many users entered a bogus email address (probably not realizing email was not a mandatory field). Email validation will ensure we dramatically reduce the number of bounced emails we send.
2) Emails aren't free! Reliable email services cost money for every email sent (and this includes text messages!). In order for PC to not get charged for emails that never get delivered, we have to ensure we are sending to valid email addresses.
BTW - I really encourage everyone to keep an email on their PC account in case you forget your password, because it's the only way to retrieve your password! You can always opt out of emails even if you save your email address on your account.
All of this work should result in more reliable email delivery as well, so that you all are getting your league alerts in a timely manner!
dWAR
Everyone's favorite subject! I did some clean up work on the D+/- stat. For those who don't know, under Team Stats you can see a running total of how many "hits saved" your defense made based on dWAR. A negative number means you're allowing more hits than you are saving. I noticed the stats were not compiling exactly correctly - sometimes more +/- were being recorded than actually happened. To be clear, this did NOT impact game play and it did NOT show an incorrect balance across teams. It's just that the compiled number was too high for ALL teams.
I know many of you want to see the actual stats attached to each fielder. That will be coming some day down the road. It's a fair bit of work to compile that to each player, show it in the box score and/or PBP and then archive it properly in the historical stats.
As always, the PC wishlist is a mile long. Don't stop sending those suggestions, because as you can see, even if it's months and months or years down the road, it could happen!
Logged in users can send feedback via the feedback form or make a comment on the public board.