Free Teams Web Log

So you may have noticed something new in the admin area - we are in the process of changing our drag & drop sorting script for such features as our Officers, Team Types, Menu Links & Custom Pages. This will hopefully make things a bit less cumbersome for you by reducing the number of actions you have to perform when saving certain items. We have started with our Team Types feature and the Menu Links feature.

Along with the switch, we have upgaded some of our javascript libraries to smaller and more powerful packages and have started compressing more of our files, which for you means less code to download and hopefully a much faster website than you are used to.

If you have any feedback on the new drag and drop script, please let me know in the FreeTeams Forums

Freeteams.net has grown by leaps and bounds since opening our doors in June of 2007. As of writing more than 1,040 users have signed up and almost 800 teams have signed up. More than half of those teams have been active in the past 3 months.

When we added the user association feature, a new issue arose - namely that of notifications. As it stands now, you have to log in and check your website to see if you have any new users to approve. We will be adding in email notifications for admins when you have a new user to aprove, as well as for users - for example, when your team posts a new news story or new photos. You will of course will be able to turn these notifications on and off at the team and user level. In any case, this would amount to hundreds, and eventually thousands of emails being processed each day, which we could not do with our old server.

While our previous host is a good company to use for hosting new or small sites, it isn’t so good at keeping up with sites as they grow like FreeTeams has. As well, they have had a few serious issues regarding hardware failures. One such failure occurred Friday February 8th and wasn’t fixed until mid-day Saturday February 9th. This is no fly-by-night company either - they host more than half a million domains. In any case, I decided to purchase some more robust server space which will allow us to add in new features (such as the email notification system, and hopefully a SMS - text message notification system as well) that wouldn’t have been possible with our old host due to certain limits they imposed. Along with these new features, we are no longer sharing our server space with other sites, so hopefully the service should be quicker and more responsive when you’re browsing and editing your team pages.

I moved the server late last night; hopefully there wasn’t much downtime for you all. If you encounter any bugs with your website, please let me know ASAP as a server move is a pretty serious undertaking and there may have been a bug here or there that got introduced. I did as much testing as I could, but I’m only one man and I’m certainly not perfect.

Enjoy the new server.

Having your team’s information and on-field exploits in a professional looking website can be exciting. Sometimes though, having your or your child’s information displayed on the web for anyone to view can be a scary thought - and justifiably so. Well worry no more! We have expanded our privacy settings to include your team’s roster and player bios.

Currently, every team’s roster and bios are set to be shown to the general public and any user associated with your team. You can now change this so that your roster or bios show up to only the users you wish to show. You can leave them viewable by anyone, or you can restrict them to specific users who are associated with your team. The roster and bio are independent, so you can display your roster to the public, while restricting player bios, which may include more personal information, to users you trust.

To change these settings, simply go to the Privacy Settings page in your team’s administration area and check or uncheck which users you wish to give access to. This page is accessible through the Options menu.