Post by Little Bacon (Commissioner) on Jun 2, 2014 16:56:41 GMT -5
Hey guys, I cant remember it we've discussed this in the past or not, but I think we should consider a move form poolexpert.
The way I see it, $77 was allotted to poolexpert and paypal fees this past year. paypal's fees are typically 2.9% + $0.3 per transaction. if we have 13 payments for dues + 3 for payouts (total 16 transactions), that gives us $5.27 going to paypal. this leaves $71.74 going to poolexpert. maybe there's some rounding or miscalculations in there since i don't know the exact amounts, but I'm estimating $70 dollars is going to poolexpert!
To me that's a ton for something that is easily done for free elsewhere. Additionally, poolexpert doesn't even have a great interface IMO, but that's besides the point when I see $70 going to them.
I think yahoo is a very good alternative, if not better:
A) it's free.
B) league is easy to set up and user interface is fairly good
C) lot's of resources to search the player pool
D) I'm pretty sure the league settings can be set up the same as they are now with poolexpert. Our settings are simple compared to others I've seen and I know yahoo allows for points only leagues, where you can then choose which categories you want and how much they are worth
E) leagues can carry over year-to-ear. I'm sure poolexpert allows this as well, but in case anyone was worried, yahoo does this too.
F) league dues can be tracked on the league page using yahoo
The only downsides I see are that people have to learn a new system and the league & teams have to be set up. The league takes 15 minutes to set up, its really easy. The teams can be setup through an offline draft--it takes about an hour and a half to input the rosters this way and I have no problem doing it myself. After that, there's no maintenance required. Transactions are easily monitored on the home page of the league site. Commish notes can be posted there as well.
In terms of free agents and how we prevent people from adding players on their own, we can just set all rosters to be locked, which is essentially what poolexpert is right now anyway. This would then require the commish or someone with the given power to put in roster moves, which i believe is the same situation we are in now with poolexpert anyway.
So to sum it all up, I see yahoo as a nicer interface that can function the same as poolexpert, but at no cost. It jsut makes no sense to me to pay so much for poolexpert when we have so many workarounds that we do to make our league work, like the commish adding players himself, when we can do that on a free service.
Maybe I'm missing something that prevents us from doing this, but I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this!
Thanks,
James
EDIT: Yahoo probably doesn't have as deep a prospect pool as poolexpert, meaning we wouldn't be able to use it to track prospect squads. This would require one of two things (or both):
1) managers manage their own prospect team pages during the year, here on the boards. I think some of us do this already anyway.
2) a master list of prospects owned (by team I would suggest), would need to be kept.
The way I see it, $77 was allotted to poolexpert and paypal fees this past year. paypal's fees are typically 2.9% + $0.3 per transaction. if we have 13 payments for dues + 3 for payouts (total 16 transactions), that gives us $5.27 going to paypal. this leaves $71.74 going to poolexpert. maybe there's some rounding or miscalculations in there since i don't know the exact amounts, but I'm estimating $70 dollars is going to poolexpert!
To me that's a ton for something that is easily done for free elsewhere. Additionally, poolexpert doesn't even have a great interface IMO, but that's besides the point when I see $70 going to them.
I think yahoo is a very good alternative, if not better:
A) it's free.
B) league is easy to set up and user interface is fairly good
C) lot's of resources to search the player pool
D) I'm pretty sure the league settings can be set up the same as they are now with poolexpert. Our settings are simple compared to others I've seen and I know yahoo allows for points only leagues, where you can then choose which categories you want and how much they are worth
E) leagues can carry over year-to-ear. I'm sure poolexpert allows this as well, but in case anyone was worried, yahoo does this too.
F) league dues can be tracked on the league page using yahoo
The only downsides I see are that people have to learn a new system and the league & teams have to be set up. The league takes 15 minutes to set up, its really easy. The teams can be setup through an offline draft--it takes about an hour and a half to input the rosters this way and I have no problem doing it myself. After that, there's no maintenance required. Transactions are easily monitored on the home page of the league site. Commish notes can be posted there as well.
In terms of free agents and how we prevent people from adding players on their own, we can just set all rosters to be locked, which is essentially what poolexpert is right now anyway. This would then require the commish or someone with the given power to put in roster moves, which i believe is the same situation we are in now with poolexpert anyway.
So to sum it all up, I see yahoo as a nicer interface that can function the same as poolexpert, but at no cost. It jsut makes no sense to me to pay so much for poolexpert when we have so many workarounds that we do to make our league work, like the commish adding players himself, when we can do that on a free service.
Maybe I'm missing something that prevents us from doing this, but I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this!
Thanks,
James
EDIT: Yahoo probably doesn't have as deep a prospect pool as poolexpert, meaning we wouldn't be able to use it to track prospect squads. This would require one of two things (or both):
1) managers manage their own prospect team pages during the year, here on the boards. I think some of us do this already anyway.
2) a master list of prospects owned (by team I would suggest), would need to be kept.