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.
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!
The “Top Performers” report is an excellent source of player stats and fantasy scores for your league, as discussed here on this blog last summer. Now we’ve added even more flexibility to this report to allow you to select the specific time frame of weeks that you want to display. There is a new “Start Week” and “End Week” selection list at the top of the report, compared to the previous choice of selecting a specific week, or year-to-date, or the past 3 or 6 weeks. So now you can fine tune your starting and ending week when viewing player scores and stats. It will still default to the year-to-date option by automatically selecting week 1 as the starting week and the current week as the ending week, so the basic functionality hasn’t changed. Some examples of ways that you can refine the report now:
You can separate the first half of the season from the second half, and generate a report for each half as needed.
You can view the past two or three weeks, or any other number of past weeks as needed.
You can view just the regular season weeks 1 through 17 even if your league uses the NFL playoff weeks.
Hopefully the new time frame flexibility will help you with your player research for your upcoming draft as well! Watch for more changes and improvements with the various stat reports in the future.
We’ve updated an option on the “For Commissioners > Setup > Starting Lineups Setup” screen with some more flexibility for those fantasy football leagues that prefer to hide the starting lineups until after kickoff. Previously, this was just a Yes/No option that could be turned on or off, and it would hide starters until kickoff of the first game of the week. Now it gives you the following choices for hiding starting lineups:
Never hide starters.
Kickoff of the first game of the week.
Kickoff of the first Sunday game of the week.
Kickoff of the last game of the week.
This will provide more options for leagues that want be even more selective about how long the lineups are hidden from other owners. To clarify, it is still an option that most leagues generally wouldn’t want to use, but for those commissioners that want to add a competitive wrinkle to their league, they now have more control.
We’ve added a new report and a few new options to your league on MyFantasyLeague.com to help you keep track of your championship fantasy football teams from year to year. For starters, check out the new “League Champions Setup” screen on the “For Commissioners > Setup > History Setup” screen. You’ll see a pull down list that lets you specify your championship franchise for the current season. Note that you can specify up to the top 4 teams, so if you want to specify the runner-ups as well as the champions, you are all set. Then you can do this for each year of history that you have on MyFantasyLeague.com.
After that is done, you and your franchise owners can use the new “Reports > Records > League Champions” report to view the history of all of the championships for your league over the years! There is also a new Home Page Module called “League Champions” that you can add to your home page as needed.
We’ll continue to add more history oriented features to the system to help you track your league history and keep track of milestones and special accomplishments by players and franchises in the league!
As long-time customers know, here at MyFantasyLeague.com we pride ourselves in trying to have the most feature-rich fantasy football league managment site on the web. We’ve been hard at work on that goal for over 14 years now.
There’s a down-side to all of those features, however – too many features makes our site too hard to use for some folks, especially new customers who might not be familiar with the MyFantasyLeague.com style of league management. Folks who come over from simpler league management systems, like Yahoo!, for example, can easily be overwhelmed with our site and our features.
With that in mind, what we’re spending some time doing this off-season is a bit of “spring cleaning” – cleaning up existing features to make them easier to use, and in some cases, deprecating certain features. “Deprecating” is just a way of saying “hiding a feature from a new customer, but keeping that feature available to existing customers.”
Some features that we’ve already deprecated include:
“Offense Minus Defense” scoring.
The “Classic” menu option.
The “Stacked” league layout option.
Buttons at the top of league pages.
We plan on deprecating more features later this off-season, too. Not only will hiding these features make the site easier to use for new customers, it will also allow us to do some clean-up on the back-end, allowing us to roll out other features easier in the future.
To reiterate, these features will still be available for the time being for customers who have upgraded their 2008 (or prior season) league to 2009, but not for customers who set up a new league in 2009.
As always, feel free to submit a support ticket to us if you have any questions about the features being deprecated, or, if you have any specific parts of the site that you find especially difficult to use, so that we can make the site better for everyone!
When you create a fantasy football league on MyFantasyLeague.com, you are the commissioner of the league, and you have full control of all of the league settings and options. Our philosophy is that the commissioner has complete control of the league, and therefore ultimately has full control of the owners and their abilities within the league. To that end, each league has the “Abilities Setup” menu item on the “For Commissioners > Setup” screen that allows them to control the various functions that each owner is able to access. By default, all owners have full abilities. Some of the abilities that can be controlled include the following:
Submit Lineups
Perform Waiver or Free Agent Moves
Propose and Accept Trades
Change Franchise Setup Info
Post to Message Board
Customize Home Page Appearance
Depending on the league, there are times when the commissioner needs or wants to limit the abilities of some or all of the owners to perform these types of functions. For example, if you want to disable teams from making trades during the playoffs, but only for those teams that are no longer in the playoff race, then you can use this Abilities Setup screen to selectively disable trades for just those teams as needed.
This week, we added another option to the Abilities Setup screen for controlling the ability for owners to “Post to League Chat.” If you want to be able to disable a specific franchise owner from participating in the league chat, you can now do that as needed. It fills out the other communication related functions that are already available on this screen, such as “Post to Message Board”, “Write League Article”, and “Create League Poll.”
One of the most popular features of MyFantasyLeague.com is the flexibility of the league home page. The commissioner can choose any template or skin to apply to the home page, and can select any type of arrangement for the home page by moving modules around the page and adding tabs to arrange the various home page modules as needed. In addition, franchise owners can also choose their own home page layout if they don’t like the way the commissioner set up the league. Each owner can use the “For Owners > Franchise Setup” menu item to select their own skin and/or to select their own Home Page Layout.
Sometimes, though, an owner can get carried away and change the page so much that he or she would prefer to go back to the way it was. Now each owner can do that with a quick click of the mouse. There is a new option on the “For Owners > Franchise Setup > Home Page” setup screen called “Reset to Commish View” that will remove all of the owner customizations and revert the league appearance to the way the commissioner has it configured. This new option is in addition to the previous option called “Reset to System Default“, which removes all of the owner customizations and reverts the league back to the default layout of a brand new league.
So if you are an owner in a league on MyFantasyLeague.com, feel free to get carried away with the Home Page Setup and experiment with all of the different home page modules available to you. Be sure to use the “Preview Module” link in the lower left of the Home Page Modules and Tabs setup screen to check out each module in more detail. Then add the ones you want to see on your home page. And if you ever get lost or create too much clutter on your home page, you can quickly start over with the default system layout or with the commissioner’s layout. Enjoy!
Now that we’ve launched our leagues for the 2009 season, we are hard at work making various improvements, big and small, to MyFantasyLeague.com for the coming year. One change we made this past week involves the way that our Average Draft Position rankings are utilized during the draft for leagues that use Team positions such as Team QB or Team Kicker, for example. In the past, since not very many leagues used these positions, our system wouldn’t always have enough data within the ADP Rankings at those team positions. So if a team owner was relying on our ADP rankings to select a Team QB, it wouldn’t always have enough data to make a good pick. Now, we’ve updated the system to use the corresponding individual QB as needed, so if your league uses the Team QB position, and Kurt Warner was the highest ranked QB in the ADP, then the Arizona Team QB would be selected where appropriate for that league.
So if you are part of a league that uses Team QB, Team Kicker, Team Punter, or Team TE as a position, you’ll now have a more intelligent draft helper tool during your draft!
