12/18/24
June 26, 2014
MetaFilter User Proposes New Site Called 'Sportsfilter': A MetaFilter user fired up about the World Cup has proposed the establishment of a new sister site devoted to sports. "There are quite a few people on mefi who love teh footy, and many more who love the World Cup, and it would give us a place to chat about it and not clutter up the Front Page. ... Sportsfilter is likely to be way way less a contentious place, and much quieter, as sports fans make up a smaller subset of mefites overall," writes Marienbad.
posted by rcade to navel gazing at 09:18 PM - 13 comments
I've often wondered why thing have seemingly gotten so quiet here. Some days, all we have is the daily huddle. I suppose that I'm as much to blame as anyone else, but the general malaise seems pretty widespread. This used to be the first site I'd check over coffee in the morning, looking for lively discussion over the latest news or the latest in the series of user interviews.
How does the site's traffic stack up to it's historical numbers?
posted by flannelenigma at 01:56 PM on June 27, 2014
Hey, it's still pretty awesome though.
posted by flannelenigma at 01:57 PM on June 27, 2014
How does the site's traffic stack up to it's historical numbers?
Not well. I don't know if it was a Google algorithm change or some other factor, but around 4-6 years ago traffic stopped growing and began a decline.
We could use more front-page contributions, certainly, but I think there need to be other reasons to come here too.
I'd like to tie all fantasy games together in a yearly competition that ranks the best player across all of them.
posted by rcade at 02:18 PM on June 27, 2014
That's a fantastic idea.
posted by flannelenigma at 01:40 PM on June 30, 2014
The annual competition is an intriguing one.
Also, you may want to sidebar this. I'm not sure how many people check the LR after nearly a year of idling.
posted by Ufez Jones at 05:33 PM on July 02, 2014
Good idea.
I haven't come up with a scoring scheme I like for the year-long competition, or how to account for players not always entering every contest. Perhaps the top 10 in each competition would accrue points, or a percentage based on your position and the number of entrants would be used in the calculation. So finishing 17th out of 34 would be the same as 10th out of 20.
posted by rcade at 06:14 PM on July 02, 2014
Just off the top of my head...
For each tournament, the top 5 spots are awarded the following points:
1st = (6 * C) points
2nd = (5 * C) points
3rd = (4 * C) points
4th = (3 * C) points
5th = (2 * C) points
Everyone that participates in the tournament (for every round, if it is a multi-round pick'em) gets (1 * C) points.
C = the number of fully qualified competitors at the end of the tournament.
So if 12 people enter, but only 9 play all the way through, C = 9, and first place is worth 54 points.
(Side note: I'll let other people decide what happens if someone finishes in the top 5 but doesn't play in every round.)
This rewards success but also promotes participation (and repeated visits for each round of a tournament).
Now, for things that take place over the span of multiple months, maybe those get an extra weighting on them. Finishing first in the World Cup confidence pool only takes a one-time input, but finishing first in the CFL pick-em pool takes months of participation, so it should get extra weight for that.
Maybe another multiplier could be used based on how many rounds of picks? World Cup = 1, but NFL regular season pick'em would be = 18.
(Or a sliding scale so winning one tournament doesn't basically win the whole year long competition.)
What would need to be established is a set of ground rules:
1) At least 1 week's notice before the start of the pool. It's not fair to announce a pool the day before it starts. Give people a chance to enter.
2) All pools must be listed on the side bar with their start date.
3) The rules have to be pretty straight forward.
4) The competitions have to be run from the SpoFi site. I don't like the idea of forcing people to enter contests on 3rd-party sites. Let's keep it simple like weekly/round pick'ems and confidence pools.
posted by grum@work at 02:59 PM on July 03, 2014
(It seems I have a very large "top of my head".)
posted by grum@work at 03:02 PM on July 03, 2014
I don't understand the daily huddle. It frightens me. That's why I stopped coming.
posted by Fat Buddha at 06:24 PM on July 10, 2014
Wait, seriously? I do think the Huddle can have a negative effect on the number of posts as it's far easier to dump a link in the huddle compared to framing a post, but I think it does a good job of handling the daily chatter of sports well. Might just need to encourage more link to be made into posts if they're worthy of it.
As a web dev nerd, I think some bug fixing and a bit of a spruce up to the tools might encourage more discussion. I don't know how hard it is to support OEmbed in PHP (there's a package here), but I've been using it on sites via Python and Micawber and it's pretty awesome. It turns urls from places like Youtube and Twitter into the videos and rendered tweets right in the page with no work from admins or posters which adds a lot of rich content for free.
posted by yerfatma at 10:10 AM on July 14, 2014
I like the idea of OEmbed support. I'll dig into that. Thanks.
posted by rcade at 10:35 AM on July 15, 2014
I've been gone for a long time after being a daily visitor. I spend a lot less time on the web in general, and a lot of my sports surfing time is spent on various team and sport subreddits. I can't really say why, just that habits slowly change over time. There are many sites I used to visit daily that I haven't seen in years.
Just wanted to say hi to everyone and I'll try to poke my head in more often.
posted by mbd1 at 10:25 AM on July 23, 2014
It's amusing and deflating at the same time to read this. If 10% of the people who post sports-related links on MetaFilter wandered over here, we'd have a thriving front page.
Though it is OK with me if SportsFilter remains a low-traffic hangout for the people who've been coming here for years, I would like to find ways to attract new users.
I enjoyed coding the confidence pool, and I'd like there to be some interesting fantasy games here that aren't already being done everywhere else. If you have ideas for this, let me know. I can write the PHP/MySQL code to make the games as automated as possible.
I have other ideas, but I'll start there. If anyone has things they'd like to see and do here, feel free to experiment.