Q: Why isn't this a nice HTML page? A: There's something that I love about the purity of plain old text files. Also, I'm extremely tired of messing with the style sheets. It'll be in a nicer format soon. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Are these really "frequently" asked questions? A: Okay, you got me. Most of these are just going to be questions which I think you guys probably should be asking but aren't. Hopefully, this page will provide you with some insight as to what can and can not be accomplished in our humble little community. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Why can't I sort the front page by winning percentage? A: It's coming. I promise. The best answer I feel like I can give you has to deal with the overhead involved in first calculating everyone's rank and then displaying all of those picks in a certain order. I know it sounds simple but it's a problem of time-efficiency. If the page takes an extra five seconds to load, that's not a feature worth implementing in my opinion. I really do try to look out for everybody's user experience. That said, I think it can actually be done for cheap. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Be patient. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: How are the spreads calculated? A: Okay. So. I have a program which goes and retrieves the latest version of the NFL odds page provided by covers.com. This page is seriously awesome because it lists start times and current scores and spreads from nine different casinos. A game will not have its spread set until we're within 48 hours of it kicking off. Further, a game will not have its spread set until at least five of the nine casinos listed have set a line for it. The actual spread calculation involves averaging all of the real casino lines and rounding to the nearest half-point with whole numbers rounding down (instead of up, as you would probably think). Once a game has its spread set on our website, assuming it's a reasonable number, it will not be changed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: What are half-points, anyway? A: Half-points are, of course, nonexistent in football. Whole-point spreads, however, afford the opportunity for a push. For instance, if the Rams are favored by 4 over the Vikings and the final score has the Rams winning 21-17 (on seven field goals by Jeff Wilkins, naturally), the spread has neither been beaten nor covered and the game would typically result in a push. Pushes are lame, though. They make every game not count. Part of the fun of this contest is seeing the week 16 and 17 races and for games to result in a push is just horribly anticlimactic. As such, every spread we post will be a half-point spread. This is not to say that we have no mechanism for pushing a game should some weird junk happen (for instance, if a portion of Giants Stadium collapses in the second quarter and tons of people are injured and the NFL calls the game to no result). We do. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: I want my favorite CFL team's logo. How do I get it? A: Favorite team logos are earned by winning at least a share of any week during the regular season. If you accomplish this incredibly impressive feat, you'll get an email from me asking which team you want. I've been delinquent making some of the logos in the past but, for the most part, it'll probably be ready to go within a few days of your reply. Also, keep this a secret, but I might be working on a message board avatar feature. That's just between you and me, though. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Why are some games colored differently than others? A: On the big board, a game will be one of two colors. Games which appear consecutively on the big board and share the same color all kick off within fifteen minutes of each other. The motivation for this was chiefly to distinguish the random Thursday and Saturday games that will come around much later in the season. Also, though, at a glance, you can tell which games were "early" and which were "late". -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: What kind of formatting can I put in my profile/message board post? A: We support simple BB code. By example: Bold [b]bold text[/b] Underline [u]underlined text[/u] Italic [i]italicized text[/i] Strikethrough [strike]struckthrough text[/strike] Link (1) [url http://www.firejoemorgan.com/]Fire Joe Morgan[/url] Link (2) [url]http://whattheballs.com/~jpnance/trippy-xml.png[/url] Link (3) [url=http://www.kotaku.com/]Kotaku[/url] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Why don't you put more information on the big board? A: The answer is space limitation. There's only so much you can put on a page and have it remain visually attractive. A huge thing for me with the big board is avoiding scrollbars. In my ideal world, nobody would ever have to scroll any amount at all on the big board. I do recognize that some people have some pretty sweet monitors with high resolutions, though, so I've done my best to help fill their screens up. If you go poke around the preferences page, you can click that "show date/time" checkbox which will darn near double the height of the big board. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: How can I find out when a game will be played? A: Just hold your mouse cursor over it for a second or two and a tooltip should pop up with anything you could possibly want to know. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Why does the site look so god-awful? A: Unless you're just being mean, you're probably using Internet Explorer 6. Before I describe the problem, I'll give you one of four solutions: 1. Go into your picks league preferences and switch to the "simple" style. The page will still look like junk but will be far better than the "standard" style. 2. Upgrade to IE7. This is probably the most painless. 3. Switch to Firefox or Opera or Safari. While you're at it, switch to Mac OS or Linux and help fight the good fight. 4. Beg me to make an IE6-supportive style sheet. This really isn't that hard. Not doing it is my personal protest against Internet Explorer. The main problem contributing to the absolutely disgusting way the page looks in IE6 (http://www.coinflipper.org/images/ie6-standard.png) is that every cell of every table in the "standard" style uses a transparent PNG image to create the gradient effect. A bug in IE6 prevents it from rendering PNG transparency faithfully and, instead, assigning transparent pixels shades of gray. The bug has been fixed in IE7. ..But even if you use IE7, you're still using a browser which is an absolute pain to develop for. There are some CSS properties which IE7 simply has no notion of (max-width) and some Javascript functions which IE7 implements differently than every other browser (Option.add() and remove()) and, come on, it's a Microsoft product and they're evil and all that. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Why don't any of my display settings show up on other computers? A: Display settings are a browser-dependent thing. Just because you want a huge big board on your laptop doesn't mean you'll want the same look on your work computer. Maybe you have a decidedly low amount of network bandwidth at home and want the "simple" style but enjoy the attractiveness of "standard" when you're at work. Now that I write this, though, I'm having second thoughts about this design choice. Consider this an open question and let me know your thoughts. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Why can't I edit my message board posts? A: Easy. I believe it encourages a higher standard of posting. ..And I hate writing stupid "edit post" code because it always comes out so sloppy. Seriously, though, I do believe that we're all better without it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: So, uh, how do I make my picks? A: After you log in, the big board will display (in purple) any games which are not yet locked that week. In order to make a pick, simply click the purple box until the team you're picking shows up. Once the box on the screen turns orange and shows your team, the picks has been made. Seriously, that's all there is to it. Refresh the page if you wanna "be sure" the picks have been made. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: How long do I have to make my picks? A: You can pick a game up until five minutes before its scheduled kickoff. If you wake up four minutes before kickoff and haven't made your pick yet, you can probably just email me and I'll make the pick manually for you. I tend to be nice about that stuff unless the games have started. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: When are reminder emails sent out? A: Reminder emails are sent out at 9am on each day which precedes at least one game. The reminders are sent to whichever email address appears in your preferences. Later, I'll have a separate "reminder email" field so you can, say, re-route the messages to your phone or whatever. For now, though, just the one. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Can you make a "default pick strategy" feature in case I forget a week? A: This is a question that I've given a lot of thought over the years. I really do my best to be unbiased about it and consider all the viewpoints. So far, though, I've only ever come to one answer: Absolutely not. Allowing default pick strategies (i.e. "pick every underdog") stands a possibility of rewarding inactivity which is Not Good for the Picks League, in my opinion. A follow-up question might be posed: Well, sure, but I can pick every game at the beginning of the season and then never pick again. Isn't that inactivity? What if I win doing that? I'd say, yeah, that's inactivity. You got wildly lucky. I don't like that that's how you chose to participate in the league and I think, regardless of what you won, you wasted your entry fee. You also successfully missed a huge portion of The Point which is to encourage all of the players to take an increased interest in the NFL and you wouldn't be invited back the next year if I knew you had done that. I'm willing to risk that sort of inactivity, though, because I honestly don't think that it has any chance of happening. No matter how apathetic anybody is towards the NFL, we all feel like we'll do better picking the games ourselves than letting Lady Luck take over. Again, this question has got me thinking. Consider it another open question whether future weeks should be pickable at all and tell me your thoughts. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Do we pick the playoffs? A: Nope.