Is it time to ditch Yahoo ?

[wly_29]

Not only did they let our beloved Buser go, but they are blowing many live draft since last week.
I personnaly had 2 drafts canceled today, one from a league which saw his first draft killed by the infamous error 260 last week-end.
It seems that downsizing was not only for employees but for computers or broadband too...

[ggs]

i too noticed the glitches in drafting today - Yahoo still my preferred fantasy site over espn at this point though. most comfortable with the interface and fairly intuitive. also seems they keep adding to it, albeit a few years after football side gets it.

[RedHopeful]

Hmm, same #260 error got a draft of mine this morning too. Commish rescheduled it for 2 hours later and it worked.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Yahoo's decisions either. Buser + Phan gone, the complete lack of articles earlie and bunch of useless garbage late (seriously Lebron v. Durant?) have ensured I won't spend any time looking at any future writings. Unforunately, I agree with ggs that their platform is still better than ESPN's so by default will still use it for all fantasy games.

[swyck]

Would hate to ditch Yahoo since that is what I've been using for years. I'm used to it and I like the way it works for the most part. I commish a couple of leagues that have been around a few years and I'd hate to lose that history, and also trying to get people to migrate to a new league.

I've been following Yahoos downsizing the last few years and I've been waiting for it to affect their fantasy sports. Probably not a big money maker for them, or more likely they don't know how to monetise it.

Me I'm staying for now, haven't had any draft issues yet but got one coming up.

[deadshot11]

My main league stays at Yahoo because it carries the history of past years going back over 10 years. We actually use the ESPN draft interface though, because it gives power to do things like trade draft picks, pause the draft, and undo mistake picks if needed. Then we upload the results to Yahoo.

[Grounded Polo]

I did try ESPN for a baseball league this year, it really is better but I'm just too used to Yahoo that I found it hard to use. I loved how the standings would update automatically without opening a separate stat tracker window.

I've been following Yahoos downsizing the last few years and I've been waiting for it to affect their fantasy sports. Probably not a big money maker for them, or more likely they don't know how to monetise it.

It's hard for Yahoo to monetize it when ESPN doesn't do it and things like PLUS leagues, paying for stat tracker, etc. flopped. Whatever money it did bring in must have paled in comparison to advertising revenue.

[Fantasy Sports Genie]

Short answer: no

re: people leaving
Note that sometimes we don't let people go. Sometimes they leave us. Business is business.

re: draft troubles
Here is the deal. We had problems with drafts on the morning of 10/20. We did what we typically do in those cases:
- For public leagues, we reset the draft to one week later. This gives people time to leave and join a different draft slot if the new time doesn't work
- Private leagues are in a sense easier now that we let you reset your own draft. We put your draft into a failed state, which means that if you reset your draft time it doesn't count against your limit of 3 resets. Your commish can then choose a draft time that works for your league.

We were frustrated because it really wasn't obvious to us what caused this outage. A key machine lost its mind and became completely nonfunctional. We couldn't even log into it. We had never seen anything like it before. We started work on a few initiatives that will actually make us way more resilient in the future, but we didn't want to be hasty and push out a really big change on short notice right before the season starts.

Alas, at the exact same time a week later, the same thing happened. That was good in that we're almost positive it highlighted what was causing the problem so we can stop it from happening again; it wasn't a coincidence that it happened twice exactly a week apart, and that highlighted the issue. But it was really bad because it meant any drafts that did just schedule one week out from their first failure would probably have failed *again*, and without another week to go before season start. It was also frustrating because we have the really cool long-term fix baking, but it just wasn't ready to push live quite yet.

So there is only so much I can say to apologize to people that got hit by these outages. It drives us nuts when people lose their drafts, because we know how hard it is to schedule them. I'm actually really happy with how much more reliable we've made drafts in the last few years (hint: a TON), but that doesn't make us feel any better when something like this happens. I am feeling good about the long-term fix that is coming out of this incident. It removes another key point of risk for getting drafts kicked off smoothly, and makes it even less likely something like this will happen in the future.

The only other thing I can say is that I definitely wouldn't take the examples you're noting and use them as evidence of Yahoo!'s demise. This was a bug, and nothing more. Not a sign that we're short on people, short on hardware, etc. etc. This particular weakness has always been present, it just never happened before.

EDIT: On a brighter note, for anyone who didn't notice, our basketball mobile app is live for both Android and iOS, prior to season start. Enjoy...

[silentjim]

Short answer: no

re: people leaving
Note that sometimes we don't let people go. Sometimes they leave us. Business is business.

re: draft troubles
Here is the deal. We had problems with drafts on the morning of 10/20. We did what we typically do in those cases:
- For public leagues, we reset the draft to one week later. This gives people time to leave and join a different draft slot if the new time doesn't work
- Private leagues are in a sense easier now that we let you reset your own draft. We put your draft into a failed state, which means that if you reset your draft time it doesn't count against your limit of 3 resets. Your commish can then choose a draft time that works for your league.

We were frustrated because it really wasn't obvious to us what caused this outage. A key machine lost its mind and became completely nonfunctional. We couldn't even log into it. We had never seen anything like it before. We started work on a few initiatives that will actually make us way more resilient in the future, but we didn't want to be hasty and push out a really big change on short notice right before the season starts.

Alas, at the exact same time a week later, the same thing happened. That was good in that we're almost positive it highlighted what was causing the problem so we can stop it from happening again; it wasn't a coincidence that it happened twice exactly a week apart, and that highlighted the issue. But it was really bad because it meant any drafts that did just schedule one week out from their first failure would probably have failed *again*, and without another week to go before season start. It was also frustrating because we have the really cool long-term fix baking, but it just wasn't ready to push live quite yet.

So there is only so much I can say to apologize to people that got hit by these outages. It drives us nuts when people lose their drafts, because we know how hard it is to schedule them. I'm actually really happy with how much more reliable we've made drafts in the last few years (hint: a TON), but that doesn't make us feel any better when something like this happens. I am feeling good about the long-term fix that is coming out of this incident. It removes another key point of risk for getting drafts kicked off smoothly, and makes it even less likely something like this will happen in the future.

The only other thing I can say is that I definitely wouldn't take the examples you're noting and use them as evidence of Yahoo!'s demise. This was a bug, and nothing more. Not a sign that we're short on people, short on hardware, etc. etc. This particular weakness has always been present, it just never happened before.

Thanks for the response!

Anyone think ESPN would do the same?

[plonden]

On a brighter note, for anyone who didn't notice, our basketball mobile app is live for both Android and iOS, prior to season start.

Genie, I downloaded the app for iOS last night and I love it so far. I haven't really used it yet because the season (obviously) hasn't started yet but the look and feel of the app is great and it appears to have all the functionality that I expect/want. If you have a smartphone and you play in a Yahoo! league, you must download this app.

[Fantasy Sports Genie]

On a brighter note, for anyone who didn't notice, our basketball mobile app is live for both Android and iOS, prior to season start.

Genie, I downloaded the app for iOS last night and I love it so far. I haven't really used it yet because the season (obviously) hasn't started yet but the look and feel of the app is great and it appears to have all the functionality that I expect/want. If you have a smartphone and you play in a Yahoo! league, you must download this app.

Glad to hear it. I have to say I'm always a bit confused when people get livid if our mobile apps aren't available months before the season starts, when there isn't much of anything to DO anyway. But I am glad we were able to add an NBA app to our game; I'll pass on the kind words to the folks that worked on it.