Future Changes (Suggestions Welcome) 2023-24 Edition

[ModeratorMike]

There the State Championships are listed, is there a way to show who was the Coach for each team.

While possible, and I do like the idea of having this, this is probably something that'll have to wait a bit just because my list of things dealing with archives is so long already I don't want to commit to something I'm about 99.99% sure I won't be able to get to anytime soon.

This off-season I'm completely re-doing the archives to make it easier for me to 1) add games that aren't already added and 2) specify whether a game was district/playoff/state championship. Once I've got that done, I'm going to be really pushing for folks to help backfill all that data back to 1994 (where possible). Then, I'm going to open it up to prior to that. Eventually I'd like to have every Texas six-man school and every Texas six-man game ever played listed on this site.

Basically, if someone wants to know anything about six-man football, past or present, they should be able to find it here (or just ask @Leman Saunders which is generally my go-to ).

 

[ModeratorMike]

Slowly, but surely, I'm starting to get things knocked off this list. I just wanted to come here to let y'all know about a few changes we'll be making to the pick 'em starting this year.

Pick 'em changes

The last few years we've had a pick 'em but it only included UIL schools, and only during the playoffs.

Starting this year, though, we're going to be including all schools and running this thing from week 1 all the way through the playoffs.

That said, when I was coding this thing and trying to dial in exactly how it should work, I decided that having 100+ games during some weeks for members to pick from was a bit crazy, even for me. So, what we're going to do is let The Toy decide on 30-40-50 (I'm not sure how many just yet honestly) games and use those games for the weekly pick 'em. The games will be decided by the teams playing in those games, and those team's overall rankings. We'll take the "top" games from each week after the rankings are ran.

Team overview page changes

As some of you might have seen on the home page announcement, or even just browsing team pages, I've made a few changes to the team overview pages. The main thing I'd like for folks to notice is that there is now an "Edit" link just below every team's overview page. Clicking that link will bring up a form that you can fill out to submit changes to those team pages. Right now they only contain basic information such as the team's location, county, the year the school was established, the first year the team ever played six-man football, etc. However, I do plan on adding more and more information as time goes on and we start to get a larger percentage of the base data filled out.

Eventually we'll add things like coaching history (coming soon actually), notable players, and information about the team's field. I didn't want to add too much, too soon, though, just so we can focus on getting a little bit here and there done.

So that's it for today. I'll keep hammering away and getting things ready to go for next season!

 

[Tigerfan85]

Slowly, but surely, I'm starting to get things knocked off this list. I just wanted to come here to let y'all know about a few changes we'll be making to the pick 'em starting this year.

Pick 'em changes

The last few years we've had a pick 'em but it only included UIL schools, and only during the playoffs.

Starting this year, though, we're going to be including all schools and running this thing from week 1 all the way through the playoffs.

That said, when I was coding this thing and trying to dial in exactly how it should work, I decided that having 100+ games during some weeks for members to pick from was a bit crazy, even for me. So, what we're going to do is let The Toy decide on 30-40-50 (I'm not sure how many just yet honestly) games and use those games for the weekly pick 'em. The games will be decided by the teams playing in those games, and those team's overall rankings. We'll take the "top" games from each week after the rankings are ran.

Team overview page changes

As some of you might have seen on the home page announcement, or even just browsing team pages, I've made a few changes to the team overview pages. The main thing I'd like for folks to notice is that there is now an "Edit" link just below every team's overview page. Clicking that link will bring up a form that you can fill out to submit changes to those team pages. Right now they only contain basic information such as the team's location, county, the year the school was established, the first year the team ever played six-man football, etc. However, I do plan on adding more and more information as time goes on and we start to get a larger percentage of the base data filled out.

Eventually we'll add things like coaching history (coming soon actually), notable players, and information about the team's field. I didn't want to add too much, too soon, though, just so we can focus on getting a little bit here and there done.

So that's it for today. I'll keep hammering away and getting things ready to go for next season!

Cool ideas. Thanks Mike

 

[Coach Rabon jr]

Would it be possible to make a filter where coaches would be able to filter open weeks to find games? Like filter lets say "all week 5" open dates and just see the open week 5 dates? Just curious

 

[ModeratorMike]

Would it be possible to make a filter where coaches would be able to filter open weeks to find games? Like filter lets say "all week 5" open dates and just see the open week 5 dates? Just curious

I do already have an "Open teams" link under Schedules. The only issue I see with that page is that it simply lists all active teams that don't already have a game in the schedule. So if a team has a BYE in that week, they'll still be listed. Also, especially this early, if I don't have a team's schedule, they'll be listed there because I may not have a game for them on any given week.

I do have a plan for an option for coaches to list certain weeks as a BYE so they won't show up there, but that's probably not something that'll be completed any time soon.

Is this what you were looking for?

 

[ModeratorMike]

Don't know if this is possible, but you should do something to what the old LoneStarFootball.net website used to have where on the team pages a list of each team's most common opponents.

Just wanted to let you know, in case you hadn't already seen it, this has now been implemented. If you looking at any team's "Overview" page, there will be a list of their top six rivals. Please keep in mind that teams must have played each other at least three times to be listed so all teams may not have six rivals listed, especially newer schools.

I will, in all likelihood, expand on this a bit in a future update, such as having a "view more" option, but for now this is all we're going to display.

 

[ModeratorMike]

One idea that I’ve had before is a in-depth analysis of each matchup similar to how it is listed on maxpreps. The way this would work is there would be a button on the schedules tab and on the individual team schedules for each game. This tab would show a season recap for each team like a comparison of home, away, and neutral site records for that season, common opponents for that season, (If Westbrook is playing Rankin that week, and both Westbrook and Rankin have played similar opponents ( Buena Vista, Ira,) it would show each team’s record vs those teams compared to the other. Lastly it would show each team’s individual rankings in the overall standings as well in their respective classifications and as well as league( if they aren’t in the same already, like if a UIL is playing a Tapps school it would show the UIL schools ranking vs the TAPPS schools ranking. For an example look into the pictures below.

Just as a heads-up, this one is going to be partially implemented with the next update (within the next week or so). There will now be a "Matchup" link next to all games listed in the current year's schedule, as well as on all games on team's schedule pages. The matchup page will include the game header at the top, which will include the current game score (if we have one). It will also include information such as each team's rank, rating, record data, points per game, and points allowed per game. It will also include any common opponents from the two teams, as well as the results of those games.

I think I covered everything except for the individual league rankings, which is something that's on my radar to get added to the site, but still isn't something I save. As soon as I get that data into the database, I'll also add that to the matchup pages.

Here's a look at what they'll look like, again, assuming we have score data for any given game. Please keep in mind that this page will look slightly different if viewing on a mobile device with a narrow screen, but all the same data will still be there.

 

[ModeratorMike]

So none of this is listed here, but I wanted to share it all with y'all, there's not another section of the forums for this kind of stuff, and I didn't want to start a whole new thread for it. So, here we are.

In the upcoming weeks I plan on upgrading the site once again, which will include some upgrades to the site that aren't football related.

Dark mode

More and more folks are browsing on their mobile phones these days and a popular thing for mobile users is making use of the phone's "dark mode". It doesn't do much good, however, when you're browsing the website because the background is white no matter what you do.

With this update, however, we'll now have a new dark mode, which will include a black background, and adjustments made to the rest of the site to accommodate that change. What's more is that the site will automatically update itself based on your device settings. So if you switch your phone to dark mode while you're on the site, the site will automatically update too.

Don't worry, though, if you don't want to use dark mode. There is also an option to choose either light or dark modes and not have it change by device settings.

Conversations are now called direct messages

Right now when you want to send someone a private message, you click on "Start conversation". That was chosen because of the ability to send to multiple people at once. It's not really just a private message if other members can be added to it. However, it's now been decided that "start conversation" is a bit confusing to some users and, since most people are familiar with what a "DM" is, from now on you'll use "Send direct message" instead.

Passwordless login with passkeys

So some folks aren't too good at remembering their passwords, or maybe you just don't want to type it in every time. Now you'll be able to set up a passkey and use that to log in instead. For example, on my Android phone, I use a thumbprint scanner to log into my apps. Well, now I'll be able to set that up so I can use my thumbprint to log in to this site too, and that passkey will be saved across all my devices that use the same thumbprint. If you have an iPhone, with a Macbook, that both have a thumbprint scanner, you can set up the passkey on your phone, and it'll automatically also work from your Macbook.

Search suggestions

Now when you're using the search box at the top of the page, you'll be given some search suggestions as you type. This will work similar to how the team auto-complete boxes work, but it'll work for all threads and content on the site.

Conclusion

That's it for now. Hopefully there will be more planned before the season starts so stay tuned!

 

[ModeratorMike]

I just completed the major parts of the server/site updates. If you notice anything that appears to be broken, or have any questions, please let me know.