Here’s a quick update to let everyone know about some improvements to the user dashboard recently:

• Mock draft list now shows 50 drafts
• Mock drafts archived by year
• Improved formatting of mock drafts table
• Easier to navigate to Draft Simulator, Draft Calculator, and Lineup Calculator pages

You can see the changes on your dashboard, and if you don’t have a free account yet, you can create one here.

Also, there was a glitch in the PPR rankings that caused QBs to be ranked higher than they should be. That has just now been fixed, and you should be able to draft with reasonable rankings again.  It was part of an update to the ranking system that will keep the rankings updated every day.

Lastly, bye weeks have been updated to reflect the NFL schedule that was announced today.

The site is officially live for 2012!

Here’s what’s new:

• Premium Memberships can now be purchased for this season.
• ADP has been updated for 2012
• Select rookies have been added to the draft rankings.  Remaining rookies will be added after the draft.
• The rankings have been updated.  They’re not perfect yet, so expect them to improve even more over time

So check out a mock draft for 2012, or sign up for the Draft Calculator and Draft Simulator.  It’s never to early too practice drafting.

Good news for you drafters who prefer old-fashioned pen and paper.  The ADP now comes in a printable PDF!

This new feature is available to all premium members.  Every format and league size of ADP now has a link that will generate a color-coded, draftboard-style, 1-page PDF for you.  Here is an example PDF, and below is a small thumbnail of what it looks like:

If you’re the kind of person who prefers to check off names as they’re selected in a draft, then give the printable ADP a chance.  Sign up for a premium membership to get instant access to the PDFs.

Today, the site had significant server upgrades to help handle the high traffic of the upcoming season.  It was also the final step of switching over from Amazon hosting over to Linode.  This is in response to the issues described in my post about downtime back in April.  The site is now on more reliable hardware and takes more frequent off-site backups.

However, most of the day today had glitches due to software bugs with the mock drafts and premium applications that were caused by the upgrade.  Those issues have now all been fixed, and it looks like everything is running smoothly.  I apologize for the bugs that happened today.

Anyway, this is hopefully the last administrative blog post I’ll need to write this year.  With this migration complete, there should be more time for traditional fantasy football related posts in the near future.

If you’re a regular mock drafter, you’re already aware that Fantasy Football Calculator has had an extended downtime of more than 36 hours.  Although we’re far from the peak mock draft season of August, that type of outage is not acceptable.  I’m sorry that you haven’t been able to do mock drafts during this time.

Here is an explanation of what happened, and what the plan is to prevent this from happening again in the future:

Cause of the downtime

Fantasy Football Calculator has been hosted on Amazon Web Services for the past 3 years.  Their track record has been great in that time, with only a few problems here and there.  If you have experienced any technical issues with the website in the past, it was most likely not Amazon’s fault, and was an issue with scaling the website to handle the high traffic that it’s been receiving in recent years.

On April 21st, Amazon started reporting problems, primarily with their Elastic Block Storage (EBS) product, which FFC uses for it’s database storage.  Many other larger companies, such as Reddit and Netflix use this technology as well and reported that they were affected by it to varying degrees.  You can read Amazon’s description of what happened on it’s status page, and I won’t bore you with the technical details here.  Anyways, Amazon finally resolved the issues that affected FFC’s database, and the website came back online at 3:45PM EST April 23rd.  No data was lost and everything is back to normal.

Prevention and future plans

FFC has regular backups in place, but this outage prevented us from restoring from them because they relied on Amazon’s EBS technology that was disabled during this period.  The last off-site backup was taken a month ago.   Just before the site was restored today, another off-site backup was made.

Obviously, more frequent off-site backups need to be taken.  If that had been in place, FFC could have been restored from one of those, and that would have reduced the downtime significantly.

Also, in the near future, FFC will move away from Amazon’s EBS technology completely because it has proven to be unreliable.  It offers a lot of nice features, but with problems like this, it can’t be trusted.

Lastly, FFC may stop using Amazon for hosting completely and switch to another company, such as Linode.  One of the features keeping FFC on Amazon was EBS.  If that is no longer being used, then alternative hosting companies may be better options.

Summary

• FFC experienced about 2 days worth of downtime, which is unacceptable.
• It was due to a large problem with Amazon’s web hosting services that affected many other companies as well
• The plan is to stop using the specific product that failed (EBS) and make more frequent off-site backups
• FFC may switch away from Amazon hosting completely

To make up for the downtime, key rookies will be added to the database this weekend so that you can draft them before they’re drafted in the real NFL draft next week!  The bye weeks will be updated to reflect the recently released NFL schedule as well.

Again, I’m sorry that this happened. Feel free to leave comments or contact me if you have any questions.

[Edit - August 1, 2011]: The site has been moved off of Amazon’s EBS technology and off of Amazon’s hosting completely.  It’s now on Linode.  See the blog post about the migration here.

If you’re one of the lucky people out there who owns an iPad, you’ll be happy to hear that you can do a mock draft your iPad.  It doesn’t require any special apps either.  Just sign up for a draft normally on the mock draft page, and you can use the same draft room as non-magical computers would.

There is one tricky part though.  The iPad has different touch controls for navigating lists, so to scroll through the list of players, you need to scroll with two fingers, not just one.  See the picture below for how it’s done:

It takes a little adjustment at first, but it soon gets pretty easy.

The Draft Calculator got two big improvements in the past few days.  You can now enter the name for every team in the draft, and also undo draft picks.

Enter All Team Names

This was a highly requested feature, and now your draftboard is even easier to follow.  Enter the name for every team in your draft so that you can remember who is at each draft spot.

Undo Last Pick

Another requested feature was the ability to undo the last pick.  Sometimes fat fingers cause incorrect picks when you have to enter every one, and now you can undo your mistake.

For those of you who are premium members, you have access to this now.  If you’re not yet a premium member, you’ve now got two more reasons to upgrade. You can sign up by going to the membership page.

PPR Mock Drafts are finally here!  Just head on to the mock draft page, and click on the PPR/Flex tab to see drafts that are being offered in that format.

It’s been by far the most requested addition, and you can rest now that it’s officially part of the site.

The scoring format for the PPR drafts also include a change to the starting lineup.  Instead of 3 WRs, it’s now 2 WRs and a RB/WR flex.  That kind of format seems to be one of the most popular, and fits well with the one point per reception.

The rankings for the PPR drafts are nearly identical to the standard drafts at the moment.  However, as more PPR drafts are conducted, the rankings for the PPR drafts will eventually reflect more accurate PPR rankings over the course of the next few days.

Also, the ADP page will show average draft positions for PPR/Flex drafts after a few days worth of data have been built up.

Lastly, premium members have the new PPR/Flex option in the Draft Calculator and Draft Simulator as well.  If you have one of those formats for your main league, you’ll now be able to more accurately practice with that draft format.

Have fun mocking!

This morning, the site was upgraded to bigger, faster servers.  You may have noticed the site being sluggish lately, and that’s because traffic is higher at this point in the year than it ever has been before.  It seems like everyone wants to get a head-start with their mock drafts for 2010.

Since traffic varies so much over the course of a year, the site always gets a hardware upgrade just before the big draft season starts, and moves back to smaller hardware in the off-season.

The upgrade is complete now, and you can knock yourselves out with all the drafts that you want.  Feel free to contact me if you notice any issues or problems with the site.

Starting at about 9:30 PM EST, the mock draft frequency will double from one every five minutes to one every 2:30.  There’s an emphasis on the 10 and 12-team drafts which have been filling up pretty quickly.

Also, just about all of the drafted rookies from the first few rounds have been entered and assigned to their respective teams.  Ryan Matthews is already a fifth round pick, and he may be on his way up higher.  Get your mock on and get ready for 2010!