I've opened up the challenging system now so you can issue one-on-one challenges for PPVs against anyone on your friends list.

I'll say right away that it's not PERFECT and there will still be improvements and additions coming.  So please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Here's how it works - go to your Friends list, click the Challenge link next to a friend.  On the next page, you'll see a list of any upcoming PPVs.  Click the link to send the challenge.

Note that you can issue as many challenges as you want, but AS SOON AS any of your friends accept that challenge, no one else can accept a challenge for that PPV from you, and you cannot send more challenges.  You can only be in one challenge per PPV.  That also means if you accept a challenge from someone, you won't be able to send any for that PPV.

Once the PPV is scored, you'll see who won, along with being able to compare scores per match and question.

My plan is to not have challenges reset every season, but instead every year.

This is step 1 of being able to put images in your posts.  You can now have user profile photos appear.

To do it, use this code in your post:

::profile-[USERNAME]::

Replace [USERNAME] with the person's username.  (don't include the brackets)

To control the size of the image, you can add -s, -m, -l, or -xl to the code.

ie, ::profile-[USERNAME]-s::

Right now you don't have much control over the placement, but I will work on a way so you can try to position the image a little better. 

I've made some updates to the Help/FAQ section to try to make sure everything there is accurate. A lot of changes had happened to the site since the guides had last been updated.  Please let me know if there is anything you would like for me to cover in the guides.

Also, due to popular request, I've decided to include fantasy blog posts in the Recent Blogs on the right.  Since the addition of the Top Blogs, which lets me highlight posts that may have useful information, it makes sense to go ahead and include the fantasy posts now.  The reasoning behind not doing it before was that there were so many and they would push important blog posts that I wanted users to have a chance to see off the list!  But now that is not a problem.  And people love the fantasy blogs, so it just makes sense!

And if anyone out there would be willing and able to help out as a 4-UP Admin and enter data for shows, we can always use an extra hand!  Just let me know if you'd be interested.  I can enable it for you so you can see what is involved with it, and if you decide it's too much work, no problem!

Let me know if the site seems faster to anyone.  I made a ton of database improvements today.  It took the PPV prediction game page from taking 5 seconds to generate to less than 1 second, so it should be pretty noticeable there.

I've started working on a friends list, so you will be able to add other players on the site as friends. 

I always shied away from this since I felt leagues were where friends should be connected, but I can see lots of people here are friends that are not in the same league - so I want to get something going.

The idea will eventually evolve to work like this:

- You will be able to do challenges with people on your friends list - a challenge at a PPV (eventually a 4-UP week, too, but PPVs first).  I'll track everyone's win/loss record at challenges.  You'll only be able to challenge one person per PPV.  I won't be making the challenge win/loss record a big component of the site but I will have a place where you can see who has the best record.

- You'll be able to see what you and your friends would rank if you were in a league together.  So the top 15 scorers in your friends list for each PPV would have their scores totalled and you'd be presented with a comparison to show where you would have been ranked against the top leagues.

Not sure what else but these are the two big things I want to accomplish with it.

Plan on working on this tomorrow, may have something up by Sunday night!

This was requested quite a bit over the past few months, and I said I'd do it and then it completely slipped my mind..

But it's here now!

There's a new Chat Room link on the left that will take you to the main page for the room - it has quite a large bit of space for it there.

I've also added it into the footer of the site, so you can see what's being said no matter where you are on the site.

I really haven't tested this out much so please let me know if there are any problems, or if it's doing anything that is negatively impacting your experience here.

I'm going to try and look for one (or find out if there's a way to do it with Meebo - what I'm using currently) that would let me have control over the nicknames so that registered players are assigned their username at the site, and anyone not signed in would get a guest name.  But I thought this would be a good way to test the waters and see how you guys like this.

This is something I've always stayed away from, but I thought I'd go ahead and ask everyone what y'all think.

It'd be relatively simple for me to add in a feature so that you can have the site automatically make a random pick for a PPV for you if you forgot to get your picks in.  The reason why I've never done this is because I've always felt if you want to compete, you need to actually come and make your picks. 

But I know how frustrating it is when a TNA PPV comes and goes and you forgot to get your picks in for it.  Now you have a much smaller chance of competing in the season.

Not that a Random Pick on a PPV would usually earn you tons of points - though many times it does with TNA - but at least you're not getting a huge 0 points.

So what do y'all think?  Would you like to be able to have the site automatically Random Pick a PPV for you if you forget?

What I will do is make it actually track when picks are done this way, though - you will be excluded from winning the prize for the PPV if the random pick is done automatically for you.  (however if you manually come to the site and do random pick, you still can win the prize)

Since blogs are getting posted so quickly these days, I thought it would be nice if there was a way to feature specific blog posts - whether they're important blogs about the site/season or blogs that people really enjoy.

So here's what determines if a blog appears there:

1. We (steinersaysuhhh and myself) can specifically flag a blog post to be shown in the top blogs area.  This is mainly so we can flag site news and season news manually.  But if you feel like there is a blog post that is seeing a lot of activity that isn't showing up, you can shoot us a message and we may flag it.

2. If a blog is rated highly enough by enough people, it will automatically display.  So you should vote the blogs you enjoy!

Well, I think it is..  this is the first test.

WWE Beta Hall of Fame 101

Also I think I have it where when you enter an invalid user/league, it won't show up with the @/# codes.  Let's test it out! 

Okay that didn't work. More testing!

Let me make sure this still works.. cletus42o

I've updated both the "4DOWN SUPERSTARS" and "4DOWN HALL OF FAME" (found at the bottom of every page) sections to show leagues now in addition to users.

So you can see what leagues were ranked #1 for each item based on either points or average player score.