Weekly Fixes & Polish (Aug 11-18)

This week's 11 bug fixes and polish improvements touched the following areas of the site:

Other — Both sites got lighter on their feet. Every page request was quietly hauling around twenty years of archived league feeds — every roster, every box score, every player list back to 2004 — loaded fresh whether you were looking at last Sunday or the Bush administration. It was 165 megabytes of luggage, and the worst part is we were carrying two copies of it: the pages that show old seasons already have their own, so the second set was along for the ride and nothing more. The site had grown so heavy it had actually stopped being able to deploy. Now only the last three seasons ride along and the archives are pulled up when something actually asks for them, which cut the whole thing roughly in half. Nothing you can see has changed — every season is still there, still complete — it just gets there faster. Schefter stopped chewing holes in his own tips. To keep him from naming a team he's not allowed to name, every tip gets scrubbed before he reads it — any franchise name in the text is swapped out for "[a team]." Trouble is, the list of names he watches for includes short ones that are also just... words. "Dead Cap Walking" goes by DEAD in the standings and spent six seasons as Heavy Chevy, so a tip reading "deal is dead, but he's a heavy favorite to be cut" reached him as "deal is [a team], but he's a [a team] favorite." Worse than gibberish: he's under orders to make sure the substance of a tip survives the scrub, so he'd go hunting for the team that wasn't there and write one into the story. Retired names and standings abbreviations now go through untouched when they're plainly being used as words — lowercase, in the middle of a sentence. Nicknames anybody still uses are a different matter and stay locked down, so "put out feelers" is still going to come back fuzzed. Titsburgh Feelers will live. Roger's links in the group chat work again. When he ended a sentence with a link — "Review your plan at theleague.us/rosters." — GroupMe grabbed the period along with the address and sent everyone who tapped it to a page that doesn't exist. The roster-cutdown reminder is the one owners actually noticed, since it's the message telling seven teams to go log in and fix their roster. Two fixes, because one wasn't enough: every bot message now gets the trailing period trimmed off the link on the way out, and the site itself now catches a link that arrives with a period stuck to it and quietly sends you to the right page instead of a dead end. That second half matters, because the messages already sitting in the chat can't be edited — and it works for links you paste into a text message or an email too. The Mariachi Ninjas get a proper dark-mode crest, and both leagues share it. The site can trace a thin ring around a dark logo to keep it readable at night, which is a fine safety net and never as good as artwork drawn for the job — so the green ring got drawn into the logo itself instead of being painted on at the last second by a stylesheet. The old dark file was the ordinary crest with a white line around it and is gone. Both leagues wear the identical new one, so the Ninjas finally look the same on either side after dark. Your phone was occasionally serving you a page from a previous visit and passing it off as live. The site keeps an offline copy of pages so there's something to show when you're in a dead zone — but it was reaching for that copy any time a request didn't complete cleanly, including the extremely normal case of tapping a second link before the first one finished loading. The saved copy could be days old and still point at a stylesheet that no longer exists, which is how a page could come up looking half-built and then quietly right itself a few taps later. Now the offline copy is only used when you're actually offline, it's ignored once it's more than twelve hours old, and images and logos refresh themselves in the background instead of being kept forever.

Rankings — Schefter's headshot on The Pecking Order stopped floating out in the margin. The little round photo beside the "The Pecking Order" heading was parked in the gutter to the left of the page on purpose — the idea being that the heading text would then line up dead even with the headline, the breadcrumbs and the ranking cards below it. Nice idea, wrong measurement: the page's column has about 19 pixels of room on that side and the photo needed 50, so on any screen wide enough to show it at all, it sat outside the layout entirely — a disembodied head hovering off in the left margin with nothing above or below it. It's back in the heading now, starting on the same left edge as everything else and reading like a byline. It also shows up on phones, which it never did before: the old version hid itself on anything under 1300 pixels wide, because below that there was no margin left to hide in.

Schefter Report — Schefter learned that a team keeps its old names. He'd been told to name one team per rumor and no more, and he was following it — right up until a tipster typed a name the team doesn't wear anymore. The list he checks against only had everybody's current names on it, so last year's names walked straight through, which is how a rumor about Balls Deep ended up dragging a former Cock Gobbler front office into it. Every name every franchise has ever answered to is on the list now, nicknames included. The callback itself survives, because it's funny: when a team's rename is still fresh, Schefter can nod at the old name — but he has to say the new one in the same breath, and he stops bringing it up entirely three weeks into the season. Dead Cap Walking will be hearing about Heavy Chevy until then. Every link Roger and Schefter drop in the group chat said the league's name twice. theleague.us/theleague/calendar. afl-fantasy.com/afl-fantasy/news. They worked — a redirect quietly cleaned it up on the way through — but you were reading the ugly version, and every tap paid for a round trip it didn't need. The folder name only exists so both leagues can share one site; on your own league's domain it's noise. Roger's countdowns, Schefter's Trade Builder invites, the Cut Watch and Gauntlet links, and the cutdown-deadline nags now all point straight at the clean address. The links also got pinned to the same address you actually browse, so they should stop occasionally opening you logged out.

Homepage — The standings cards on both homepages swapped team names for team logos. On a phone the team column was eating half the row to spell out names you already know by their crest, which squeezed the numbers you actually came for. Now it's the logo, and the records and points get room to breathe. Dark mode got the harder half of this problem: a good chunk of the league wears a black or near-black logo, and once the crest is the only thing naming the row, a black logo on a black card names nothing. Every crest was measured against the dark card, and the ones that failed now get a thin white outline traced around the logo itself — so Badd Boys and Da Dangsters and the rest stay readable at night without anybody having to redraw them. Teams that already have a proper dark-mode logo still just switch to it. Screen readers still read the team name, and if a logo ever fails to load the name comes back in its place.

Standings — Settled a tiebreaker argument nobody knew we were having. Both rulebooks list 'Most Points Allowed' near the bottom of the standings tiebreakers — the idea being that if you're dead even with someone and you had to survive a tougher schedule of beatings, that should work in your favor. The code read it backwards and quietly rewarded the team that gave up FEWER points. Now a team that allowed more points wins that step, which means both the better spot in the standings and the earlier draft pick. Fair warning: this has never actually decided anything. In 76 seasons of TheLeague divisions and 106 of the AFL's, no tie has ever made it that far down the list. It's fixed for the day one finally does.

Free Agents — Ashton Dulin went to Malone University, a school so small ESPN doesn't keep a logo for it — and instead of shrugging, the Free Agents table rendered a broken-image icon and the school's full name, inflating his row to twice the height of everyone else's. Small-school players now get a tidy dash in the college column (the name's still there on hover). Bonus find while we were in there: the Ragin' Cajuns' logo had been pointing at Louisiana Christian University — a school with no logo either — since forever, so Louisiana products like Elijah Mitchell finally wear the actual fleur-de-lis.