League Championship Plaque

Plaque

As discussed earlier this month, we added a new League Champions Report that keeps track of the winning franchises in your fantasy football league each season.  Since then, we’ve also added a new League Championship Plaque home page module.  Be sure to check it out if your league has been with MyFantasyLeague.com for more than one season.  It will show your league’s yearly champions on a graphical image of a plaque, complete with the franchise name and owner name for each season.  You can use the “For Commissioners > Setup > Appearance > Home Page Modules and Tabs Setup” screen to add this to your league and to position it where you want.

Developers: Get Ready For 5-Digit Player IDs!

(This entry is meant for customers who use our Developer’s Program.  If you don’t, feel free to ignore this message.)

Since day one, MyFantasyLeague.com has relied on 4-digit player ids.  As those of you who have worked with our developer’s program might know, we are now close to filling up the available space of 4-digit player ids – we’ve recently added player id 9481.  Based on past player additions, we’re anticipating that we’ll get to player id 9999 sometime within the next 12 months.

Once we use up player id 9999, we’ll start using 5-digit player ids:  10000, 10001, 10002 and so on.  We’re starting internal work now in preparation for player ids being either 4 or 5 digits long.

If you’re currently a developer who is storing our player ids in your database, we definitely recommend that you start preparing as soon as possible for 5-digit player ids from the MyFantasyLeague.com system.

Our goal is to complete the internal work and testing we need to do for this milestone here in the next few months, and then sometime early this summer, publish a dummy 5-digit player id to make sure we’ve got everything in order for “real” 5-digit player ids!

As always, please submit a support ticket to us if you have any questions or concerns about this.

Trade Offer Deadline

We added a new option for owners when making trade proposals in your fantasy football league on the “For Owners > Trades” screen.  There is now a “Trade Expires” option which lets an owner specify a date that the trade offer automatically expires.  By default, this new expiration date is set to be one week.  That way, any offers and proposals will be taken off the table automatically after 7 days of no response from the other party.  The expiration date can be changed as needed by the owner that is proposing the trade if he or she wants to make it shorter or longer.  This option is a great way to allow owners to make trade offers without having to worry about remembering when to cancel them later in the week after the next set of games have started, for example.

Extended League Downtime on March 28th

Just a quick reminder that due to an important off-season hardware upgrade, all leagues will be unavailable next Saturday, March 28th, from about 10am ET until approximately 10pm ET.  During that time, no one will be able to access any league functionality on the MyFantasyLeague.com web site.

If you have a question regarding this hardware upgrade, please submit a support ticket to us.

Franchise Setup changes

The “For Owners > Franchise Setup” screen was getting rather long since we allow owners to customize their fantasy football team with quite a few options.  So we’ve updated the “Advanced Setup” portion of that screen by splitting it into two separate sections. One is called “Customize“, and it contains all of the various appearance and sound options, such as the logos and links that each owner can specify to customize their franchise.  The other section is called “Contact Info” and is pretty self explanatory.  In addition to the contact info, it also contains the email options that allow each owner to specify which system generated email messages they should receive, such as when trades are proposed or when opponent lineups are submitted or weekly results are updated, etc.

In any case, we’re confident this new change will make it easier for Owners to update and maintain their franchise information.

St. Patrick’s Day

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  For those of you that want to celebrate with your fantasy football league, you can change the appearance of your league by selecting the “Irish” skin on the “For Commissioners > Setup > Appearance > Select a Skin” screen.  Note that the skins can only be selected if you have not chosen to use a Template for your league.  For what it’s worth, we’ll hopefully have more flexibility in the future to combine skins with templates, so watch for news on that development later this off-season.

If you enjoy the holiday themed skins, you can also select the “Seasonal” Skin option for your league.  After you choose that setting for your league, then the appearance will change automatically throughout the year.  As always, if you have ideas or suggestions for new skins, please let us know!

Freeze Standings after a Certain Week

There is a new option on the “For Commissioners > Setup > Standings Setup” screen to allow you to freeze your fantasy football league standings after a specified week.  The option is called “Stop updating league standings report after week:” and it defaults to Week 21, which means your league will continue to update as it always has in the past.  However, if you want your standings report to stop updating itself after your regular season ends, then change this option to Week 14 or whatever week your final fantasy regular season game is played.  Then you’ll be all set.  The scores and stats will continue to be updated as expected, but the standings report will not update itself anymore during your fantasy playoffs.

Standings Legend Home Page Module

There is a new Home Page Module called “League Standings Legend” that you can use as a key to show your owners what the cusomizable symbols on your standings report mean.  Note that this module won’t show up unless you first go to the “For Commissioners > Setup > Standings Setup” screen to define your league’s standings legend.  The typical use for a legend like this is to indicate teams that have clinched a playoff spot, or a division championship, or a first round bye in the fantasy playoffs.  But you can use it for whatever you want if you have other ideas as well.

Transfer your League History

We’re working on an exciting project for those of you that are upgrading your fantasy football league to MyFantasyLeague.com from another hosting service this year.  We’ll soon be able to assist you with the process by automatically transferring some of the significant league information (scoring rules, rosters, salaries, schedule, scores, etc).  We’re currently looking for volunteers to help us test this process for various other services.  So if you had a league on Yahoo, Sportsline, Fanball, or another service last season, and you are planning on upgrading to MyFantasyLeague.com for 2009, be sure to contact us so we can help ease the transition for you! To get started, you can click here to set up a free 2008 historical league on our system.  Then after it is created, use the “Help > Help Center” menu item to submit a support ticket and let us know what service you used last year.  Or send an email to sales (at) myfantasyleague.com for more info and details about getting started.  After a few volunteers and a couple weeks of testing, we’ll post more information here with details on exactly how we can make the upgrade process very smooth for your league while switching from another service.

And don’t forget about our Customer Referral Discount Program.  If you already have a league on MyFantasyLeague.com and you want to earn a cool $20 discount on your league for next year, just refer a friend or co-worker to our site this year.

Follow Us On Twitter!

We’re experimenting this off-season with Twitter, and we’ve set up an account there at http://twitter.com/MyFantasyLeague – follow us, and we’ll try to post periodic tweets regarding site news, new features, and more.  If you have any suggestions for how we could better use this service, either for us communicating with you, or you communicating with your league-mates, we’d love to hear them!