April was a busy month at Fantasy Box Office! We shipped a ton of updates, fixes, and new features. Many of the features come from user suggestions, especially on the Discord. If you're not in there yet, join us! We're currently testing the beta for the upcoming Fantasy Box Office iOS app (ooh, aaaah.)
Splashy stuff
- League chat! You can now talk with everyone in your league. We've had a surge of traffic from places like Reddit and Twitter lately, and many people are linking up with strangers to form leagues. This should make it easier to schedule drafts, trash talk movies, and form lifelong friendships.
- Added an Edit Mode so commissioners can change the movies within their studios. It's primarily meant as a corrective tool, e.g. to fix draft mistakes, but it also opens up new gameplay options for adventurous leagues. (see our full blog post for more info!)
– Added movie messages that show up on movie cards, so that we can communicate budget sources or delays in grosses.
– We added a new mock draft tutorial intended to help new users learn the ropes of a draft. The old mock draft system was, frankly, a glitchy mess that only half-worked. This new one has a comprehensive step-by-step process so you learn the basic game rules and all the bells and whistles of the draft board.
- Adult-only titles were removed from the database. Funny story: I realized that the most popular movie pages on the site were all pornographic titles sourced from our movie data source, TMDB. I had never implemented a filter for adult-only titles – I honestly never thought about it until checking Google Search Console and discovering that every day, a substantial amount of people were coming here to look up Japanese pornography. Whoops! If you depended on Fantasy Box Office to get your hentai fix... you're cut off. I'm sorry.
– We completely overhauled the mobile UI, including the navigation, sidebar, and back buttons – thanks to all users on the discord, especially wbart__ for the suggestions!
– International/domestic splits are viewable on movie details cards. Thanks to NihalDaBaller and wbart__ on the Discord for the suggestions!
- Added "top performers" pane to league scoreboards, so you can easily see the top earners in the league (thanks to Evan and his league The Anti-Streaming Wars for the suggestion!)
- Added drag-and-drop to player movies on the league scoreboard (thanks to Evan and his league the Anti-Streaming Wars!)
– Changed the behavior for movie release-date changes. Now, when a movie changes from Winter to Summer and you decide to "lock it in" as a Summer movie, instead of locking as a first-round pick, it will lock in the pick's original round. In other words: if your third-round pick gets bumped to a future season and you want to keep it on your slate, it will lock in as a third-round pick, not a first-round pick.
Small Stuff
– Drafts now auto-lock after 72 hours if the league commissioner hasn't locked it themselves. League commissioners can also pause the auto-lock timer if they need more time.
- Added a commissioner badge onto studio detail cards, so you know who is commissioner in a league (thanks to wbart__ on Discord for the suggestion)
- Added "Go to Draft" buttons to the league scoreboard page (thanks to cody on Discord)
- We spent some time tweaking and improving the first-time-user signup flow
– General stability and performance pass, especially on the landing page, dashboard, calendar, and league pages. The whole site runs a lot faster now, and with more reliable loading states.
– Fixed a glitch where the Calendar page wasn't persisting sort/filter options across page views. (Thanks ilDosh for the email!)
- Fixed a bug that was causing replacement movie selections to go through twice (Thanks to Bear for the email tip)
- Updated the blog index look
- Darkened negative red text on movies drafted by red players – it was too confusing to tell if a movie was profitable or not if a studio was red! (Thanks to !ofir in the Discord)
- Fixed "Last updated" timestamps showing timezones in the league scoreboard footer (thanks to Pilaz on Discord)
- Fixed a visual glitch when browsing a movie on its release day (thanks to Pizza Man on Discord)
- Fixed a scroll issue on movie popout cards that overflowed their containers (thanks to Pizza Man on Discord)
– A host of other, smaller bug fixes and UI fixes across the whole website