Howdy all, as you all will have noticed, there has been quite a significant change to the place over the off-season. So Im thinking its probably a good idea to walk you through exactly whats new and how to get the most out of your new login.

So, the first step is to register a new login. Youll need to do this as part of the upgrade involved blowing away the old logins. To register, simply click over on the Register button just right over here. You don’t have to register to have a look around but to get the most out of the new features and the site, you really need an account. It’s free and awesome so get on it.

Now for the new features. We’ve added a lot to both the community and social side of the site so we’ll attack the social side first.

More on that though, over the break.
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Social Features
We’ve got a really good thing going here with our community so we really wanted to offer some more avenues for you guys to be able to talk about the games or just shoot the breeze.

We’ve got a shiny new forum linked at the top of the page where you can chat about AFL (or other sports) in general, offtopic stuff or go further in depth with a conversation that started up in the comments on the blog.

We also have a couple of ways to interact directly with each other- either through private messages when you ‘Friend’ someone or by posting on someones public board. Messages can only be sent to someone on your friend list, so if someone is being nasty, report them to me and drop them as a friend. If they are posting nasty things on your message board- again, its a public space and we’ll be exercising the banhammer if needs be (although, as per usual, we’d prefer not to so behave peoples! ). I want this place to stay intelligent and friendly, so dont feel like youre bothering me if someone is being an ass.

We’re also launching into three years ago by actually having a Twitter page and Facebook Fan page that we’ll be using. Join in the fun by following us on either or both.

Your Profile Page
After you’ve logged in, you can check out your personal profile page. Youll find that a link to your profile page is now where the login used to be. It’s here that you’ll be able to jump in with the social side of the site with your message board, PM’s and Friends list amongst other things.

You can also update your preferences for the site here. Most of it the is standard fare of name, age, location that kind of thing, but you can also set your preferred competition so that TooSerious knows which competition you want to go to when you first log in. It is also where you can set up and update your watchlists and enter in your teams once the competitions open.

Teams and watchlists are much the same thing around the place, however, teams have the added ability to be sourced directly from the Supercoach/DT websites. Follow the directions to have your teams directly updated and it’ll mean that everything stays in synch and really reduces the hassle for you. Your information is completely private and won’t be used anywhere for anything outside of the competitions if you want to opt in so there are no concerns there. It’s purely for your ease of use.

The Ticker and live scoring pages will be coming soon and your teams and watchlists will intergrate with them.

To add a team or a watchlist, its as simple as clicking add new, giving it a name and a colour and clicking save. The rest of the stuff will be more important once the games actually open.

As an example, Im going to create a couple of teams- My Team, which will be Blue and The Wives Team, which will be Orange. Ill also make a few watchlists- Falling Premiums in Green and Injury Prone in Red.

Now that thats said, lets move onto the stats page.

Stats Page
As you can see here, all the old functionality that you know and love is still here- stats, salary predictions, injury reports and breakevens. What is new however is the ability to display or hide a wider variety of different stats by clicking on the Select stats to display button. You can save your settings for future use, or if youre just wanting to muck around, can just save them for just this session- so that they revert back to what they were the next time you log in. Also, there is a big difference between the advanced stats and the basic ones- so be sure to check that out.

Next, if you roll your mouse over the "manage", youll have the ability to add/remove players to your various teams and watchlists. Well play with Sydney, because Ive noticed a few of their players have had their profiles updated. Here we can add maybe Goodes and Jack to my team, Goodes, Grundy and Mumford to my wifes team (Though Ill add Goodes as a Mid in her team) - and while Im here, put Bird onto the injury prone list. Just cause he seems to have a knack for it.

Player Profile Pages
Alright- now lets look into Kieren Jack, so just click on him. Youll be brought to his profile page. Here, youll find some basic stats about him and then a number of user generated features. These include:
Any nicknames for the player that are fully searchable once I turn that feature on. Currently you can give this a test by entering this into your browser- http://tooserious.net/stats.php?sname=god - This will search for anyone that has the nickname God, or have God in their name.
We have a user generated profile- Which as we can see in the case of Kieren Jack, was kindly generated by our user Stew. Great job mate, youre well on the way to Donor status.
We have one of our new competitions which you can play over the preseason. I hear the winner gets their choice of an xBox, Wii or Playstation package- but thats for another post. Maybe tomorrow.

User generated news reports will become a fantastic way to track news reports about a player. With people dropping in and out over the offseason, the ability to see a list of key events that happened to a player over the offseason will every handy. Again though- this runs on user participation, so if youve read something on a player- add in a link and the first couple of sentences of the article and get it in there! (Though any links that are inappropriate will be dealt with quickly and harshly. I cant stress that enough- yes, it might seem funny to rickroll (or worse) someone but theres a time and place, and this aint either of them. We really want these user generated fields to add value – not become a place to surprise people with links to porn.)

Comments are there for users to add in a quick blurb about the player with a focus on fantasy football – who they are, how they go, club movements etc.

And finally, theres an injury history for a player. This is only reporting on games missed due to injury, so it wont detail any off-season issues.

Player Stats Pages
Next, we have the stats page. Much as it was last year, expect this year you can display all of a players years on the one page by clicking on a year to expand or collapse it. Again, you can choose to display and hide whatever stats we have available and you can opt to display averages or totals.

Graphs
Next, we have the graphs. These are pretty powerful- first of all, you can choose which year you want to display. Then you can choose to hide their SuperCoach or DreamTeam scores. Finally, you can add additional players (Or years) to the same graph. So I could add Captain Kirks 2010 season, along with Adam Goodes to see what effect it has on Jack. You can also track this down to the specific statistics, so that you can see why a particular player scored a good game. Round 19 Jack scored a 178, you can see that his contested possession count was well above the norm, and so were his handballs. Using the same chart you can see a fairly direct link between Brett Kirks tackling count and his SuperCoach score.

Salary Prediction
Finally we have the Salary Prediction. As with last year, you enter in the scores you believe a player will get- and youll get yourself a handy chart of which way that player will go. As an added benefit, we supply the players average, their average at the ground theyre playing at- and also their average against the team they are playing against. All these averages are based on their last three encounters. As an added bonus, you also have the ability to track a players salary over the past two years, so if youre looking for someone who starts the season slow or want to see is a player traditionally drops off towards the end of the season to get your timing right- this is the tool for you.

Competitions Page
We’ll be running the best of the competitions from last year and perhaps a couple of new ones here and there (We’re looking for sponsors so if you have a business to promote or just want to give back to the community, this is your chance!). This page is where you can have a look at what’s going on and join in. The competitions are a heap of fun and who doesn’t like winning stuff? So get in there!

Anyways, its a load of changes all of which should make your TS experience better than ever.

As always – let me know if there’s anything you’d like tweaked or added in or if there’s anything that’s unclear.