OSUBeaverSports.com blog

2009 March Madness Bracket Contest

2009-03-16T14:46:00.000-07:00

Play the brackets with OSUBeaverSports.com

How do I play?
If you played with us last year:
Go to http://obs.mayhem.cbssports.com/brackets. You should just have to log in. You were already entered in the OSUBeaverSports.com bracket group automatically.

If you haven't played with us before:
Sign up at http://obs.mayhem.sportsline.com/e
Password: gobeavs
We are managing the bracket with the CBS bracket manager. You will need a CBS Sportsline account.

What are the rules?
You'll get set points for each correct pick - plus we'll add the seed of the team you picked. For example, if you pick a 10 seed to win and you are right, you'll get 10 extra points. If you pick a 2 seed to win, you get 2 extra points. This means that you get rewarded for picking upsets correctly. Choose wisely!
For more on the rules see the rules.

When do I have to get this done?
The entries must be in before the first tournament game starts on Thursday.

Bowl Pick 'em

2008-12-14T17:56:00.000-08:00

With Bowl Season coming up, it's time for a Bowl Pick 'em contest.

Sign Up

You will need a free Yahoo account to participate.
Leave the password blank.

Anyone can play - invite your friends!

Have fun and good luck!

Bracket contest winners and t-shirts

2008-04-08T13:25:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone for playing the bracket contest.
I had a lot of fun with it, even if I did get destroyed (damn Pac-10 loyalty!)

It's something that we will definitely do again in the future. I am hoping to do future contests with the baseball tournament, Pac-10 football picks and a bowl pick 'em.

Congratulations to our bracket contest winners!

Whitney Loper (269 points) - picked all 4 final four teams (way to go out on a limb there - four number ones :-) )
Scott Baranick (263 points) - one of only three people to pick Kansas to win
Dylan Darling (255 points) - duck fan whose insane duck loyalty cost him

Thankfully disaster was averted and Duck fan (and former Duck mascot) Dylan Darling was pushed down to 3rd place after leading earlier. Whitney and Scott made great picks and rose in the standings as the tourney went on.

You are all the lucky recipients of a brand new OSUBeaverSports.com t-shirt!

If anyone else wants to buy a t-shirt ($15), please email me at nick@osubeaversports.com.

(see full final standings for the bracket challenge http://obs.mayhem.sportsline.com/opm/standings)

Some new imporovements

2008-04-03T20:39:00.000-07:00

I've added a few new improvements to the site over the past week or so.

Keep me logged in - this feature will allow you to stay logged into the site. No more logging in every time you want to do something on the site.
Simple filter/sort - it's now a lot simpler to filter and sort messages. Advanced options are still available via the advanced tab.
Improved the message rendering. Message threads have always looked pretty nice on Firefox, but they looked pretty bad on Internet Explorer. It now looks even better in both browsers.

More improvements will be coming soon...

March Madness Bracket Contest

2008-03-15T19:07:00.000-07:00

Play the brackets and win some prizes with OSUBeaverSports.com

How do I play?
Sign up at http://obs.mayhem.sportsline.com/e
Password: gobeavs
We are managing the bracket with the CBS bracket manager. You will need a CBS Sportsline account. Since your CBS user name will be different than your OSUBeaverSports.com name, we will need a way to sync up the two. Please post a message with your CBS id in it to this thread so that everyone knows who you are and so that we can give you prizes!

What are the rules?
You'll get set points for each correct pick - plus we'll add the seed of the team you picked. For example, if you pick a 10 seed to win and you are right, you'll get 10 extra points. If you pick a 2 seed to win, you get 2 extra points. This means that you get rewarded for picking upsets correctly. Choose wisely!
For more on the rules see the rules.

When do I have to get this done?
The entries must be in before the first tournament game starts on Thursday.

What about the prizes?
You mean the glory of competing and winning against the best Beaver Nation has to offer? Well, since you insist, we will have some prizes for the top three finishers. More details to follow, but they will probably be some brand new OSUBeaverSports.com T-shirts!

Why do I have to go to some CBS website to make this work?
We will hopefully have some bracket software on the OSUBeaverSports.com website soon. That way we can do future contests and you won't have to create a new account on another site. Future bracket contests will include the baseball playoffs and the football bowls.

RSS Feeds!

2008-01-06T21:52:00.000-08:00

We now have RSS feeds working! This means that you can now keep up with the latest on OSUBeaverSports.com without even coming to the site. You can use an RSS reader.
For any of you out there who don't know what RSS is - this site does a great job explaining it "the Oprah way". Basically RSS allows you to see what is new on a website quickly and easily, without even going to that website.

We have a few feeds set up:

Top-rated articles
Recent articles
Top-rated message
Recent messages
Upcoming events
Recently submitted events

Internet Explorer and Firefox can both read RSS feeds. You can also use a site like Netvibes (I use this all the time, it's awesome). There are lots of other feed readers out there you can try.

Check out the OSUBeaverSports.com RSS feeds.

You can also subscribe to this Blog's RSS feed.

There are also a few other small improvements to the site. The best one is now the results on the view articles page are separated into pages and the total number of articles is shown.

Enjoy the feeds!

Article moderation popup

2007-12-10T20:19:00.000-08:00

Now after you've read an article, you will see a popup waiting for you. In this popup you will be able to submit your moderation for the article. This should make it easier for everyone to moderate a bunch of articles.

Thanks,
Nick

New notification features and ads

2007-12-04T14:16:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone enjoyed the Civil War. It was definitely great to see it in person in Autzen!

Notifications
I've been busily working on some new features. The most exciting new feature is notifications.

You can now sign up to receive notifications when certain things happen at OSUBeaverSports.com.
You can get notifications when someone replies to

A message you posted
An article you submitted
An event you submitted
A thread you started

If you sign up to be notified when any of these events occur, you will receive an email. In the near future we will be adding RSS feeds as well as a way to get notifications in a profile page. We will also be expanding the number of things for which you can receive notifications. For example, if you just want to watch one particular thread or be notified every time there is a new article in one particular subject, we will have that soon.

Speaking of profiles - we will have a more fully featured profile system in the future. If you are familiar with FaceBook or MySpace, the profile page will be familiar to you. It is basically a place where you can see everything that applies to you. Right now we have a lot of that stuff in the account settings area. We will be breaking out the profile as its own distinct page. You will be able to upload an avatar (picture) and we will have user-to-user private messages.

How do I get notifications?
It's a simple two step process: confirm your email and select your notifications.
First you will need to confirm your email address with the system. You can do that by going to http://www.osubeaversports.com/requestEmailConfirmation.do
You can also get there by going to the account settings page and clicking on the "confirm" link near your email address. New users to the site will automatically receive an email confirmation when they sign up. Since you all already have accounts, you will need to just do this confirmation step now.

Next you just go to the notifications page and choose which notifications you wish to have. You can get there by going through the account settings page or here: http://www.osubeaversports.com/notificationSettings.do
By default all of the notifications are turned off. I didn't want to spam you. You can turn on all of them or none of them.

Under the covers
Under the covers I've added some new security features. I was hesitant to publicize the site too much before, because I knew that it was vulnerable to being overrun with spam. I now have some stuff in place that, should it become necessary, will make it very annoying for someone to post much spam. I will be getting the word out more aggressively now to get more people to join in. Please keep inviting your friends and family to the site.

Ads
One final update - we will have ads soon. The ads will be provided by Google. The way it works is that Google checks the content of each page and places an ad that is appropriate for the page. Ideally, we will get ads for things like OSU merchandise, football tickets, etc. Hopefully we won't get ads for Duck gear or stuff that just comes out of left field. I have the ability to filter out certain ads based on the site that they come from. Please let me know if you see anything inappropriate. You can either email me, or post to the "bad ads" thread in the feedback forum. See http://www.osubeaversports.com/viewThread.do?threadId=524
Make sure to include the URL (address) of the ad. That is what I use to filter them out.

Keep posting, keep rating
Thanks to everyone for your participation. All of your posts and ratings have really added up. Last month we had 214 articles submitted, 322 article moderations and 250 messages posted. Our collective efforts are creating the best OSU sports site on the web and we're just getting started!

Thanks,
Nick

New look and a few new features

2007-11-05T21:03:00.001-08:00

We've been busy for the past few weeks!

The first thing that you'll probably notice is the nice new look. Thanks to everyone for your suggestions. I think the new look is much cleaner, easier to read and just looks better. I'm going to continue to refine the look of other things on the site, so our work here isn't done.

You Internet Explorer users out there will probably notice that it looks much better for you too. I've been focusing on Firefox up until now, but now things should be much better in IE.

I've also added a few features.

The dates that are shown are much friendlier now too. Instead of something like "Posted Tue Oct 30 09:10:21 EDT 2007" you'll now see "Posted 3 days, 5 hours ago".
Double submits - now if you submit a link that has already been submitted, you will be warned before submitting it. That way we can avoid double posting an article, which has happened a couple of times before.
Links open in new windows. Links to new articles now open in a new window. You can change it back to opening in the same window by changing the setting in your account settings page.

There will be more new features coming soon...

Welcome

2007-11-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the OSUBeaverSports blog.

This is the space where we'll be keeping you up to date with what is new on the best Oregon State sports fan site, OSUBeaverSports.com.

To be kept up to date, be sure to sign up for the RSS feed.