Blog Huddle - All Posts

An update on SB Nation site performance

2013-05-17T01:43:48Z

As SB Nation users, you have certainly noticed the significant performance drop across the network this week. The SB Nation team and all of Vox Media sincerely apologize for the site performance problems affecting your experience on our sites and communities over the past few days. We understand how frustrating it is for you. Given the nature of the issue, it is taking several days to fully restore performance completely. We have been working around the clock, taking incremental and comprehensive measures, to restore performance to normal levels.

Our approach to correcting the issues affecting the network has been two pronged: 1) improve performance as much as possible incrementally and 2) restore long-term stability to the system.

The first prong has been focused on improving the performance of logged-in users as these users have experienced the biggest drop in performance. Some of the improvements that we have pushed out to this point include:

Page load performance for logged-in users, including lower error rates

Commenting performance

Logging-in

Publishing content, including Fanposts and Fanshots

Some of these errors, specifically for logged-in users, may appear intermittently until we complete the necessary infrastructure work, but performance should be greatly improved from Tuesday evening and Wednesday.

We have all hands on deck to complete this work and will be performing maintenance after hours this weekend to restore full service to the network. Of course, we would like to do this work sooner, but we need to be extra careful and thorough in making these changes, so as to not risk new problems.

Again, we completely understand the frustration our users have felt over the past few days and will continue to do everything in our power to restore full service to the network and ease your frustration. We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding as we've worked through these issues and bring long term stability to the network. Thank you for your dedication to and support of SB Nation and Vox Media.

SB Nation teams up with Google for full Google+ integration

2013-05-15T00:23:42Z

We're proud to announce that Vox Media (the parent company for SB Nation) is one of the 120 partners in 2013's Developer Sandbox at Google I/O. As part of this partnership, the Vox Product Team and Google have teamed up to bring you a brand new way to read and share your favorite SB Nation stories through full Google+ integration — including Google+ Sign-In.

What does this mean?

New users can sign up for an SB Nation account using their Google+ account, and existing users can link Google+ to their current account to make signing in easier than ever.

To link your SB Nation account to Google+, simply go to your profile page and click on Account & Settings:

Next, click "Connect with Google+". Depending on your current Google login state, you'll either be asked to login to Google or your account will sync immediately. After you do that, you'll be able to login directly through Google+ Sign-In.

We've also made it easier to share SB Nation stories through Google+ with a distinct share button on every article, feature and review. The button will only show once you've authorized your Google+ account.

You can see in the screenshots that if you're sharing on a team blog, the name of the team is included on the button. Clicking this button will reveal a modal that will allow you to add a comment and select a particular circle or circles before sharing.

We're proud to give SB Nation users another convenient way to sign into the network and share the stories they love. We hope you'll find Google+ integration useful. We're also very excited to be partnering with Google and demoing this new functionality in the Google+ sandbox at Google I/O 2013. Let us know if you have any questions below and, as always, please let us know if you see any trouble with this new functionality by emailing support@sbnation.com.

Defending Big D: How A Hockey Team Helped A Fan Deal With Illness

2013-05-02T13:53:04Z

For most sports fan, our love for our team is a break from our regular lives. We celebrate with them when they are winning, we complain and vent when they are losing. Sure, it may seem like the most important thing in the world at times, but generally it is just a diversion.

Then there is the case of Erin Bolen, a fan of the Dallas Stars and a member of Defending Big D, SBN's Stars blog. She is a Stars fan and in many ways her fandom is like the rest of ours, except for one major difference. Erin has Asperger Syndrome, and for those not familiar with that, I'll let her words describe it.

Asperger Syndrome is a type of Autism Spectrum Disorders at the higher-functioning end of the scale. Given that it's the end of Autism Awareness Month, here are the basics.

What it means in practice is that like all people with an ASD, someone with AS processes the world in a markedly different way. Almost all people with AS struggle with the unwritten social cues and language most people understand intuitively. There is often a lack of or severely misplaced empathy (the term I like to use for myself is ruthlessly pragmatic, with an emphasis on the ruthless). This leads to great difficulty in forming social relationships. Even if the person with AS is interested in being friends, they may be off-putting to others, and they have difficulty understanding how to invite oneself into a group of friends or read the subtle signs that someone is interested.

People with AS also develop obsessive interests, and you get one guess as to what mine is. Along these lines, people with AS tend to be overly anxious about changes in patterns and routines, and they tend to be very literal, getting hung up on semantics and missing sarcasm.

Finally, people with AS tend to have sensory issues, though it's unclear whether this is due to simply being more sensitive than average or if the brain lacks the ability to tune out background signals. I call these my "Spidey senses," and when it's bad, I swear I hear every conversation in the room at once.

Knowing that, you may wonder what this has to with the Dallas Stars. According to Erin, becoming a fan of the Stars has allowed her to make social connections she never would have had otherwise. Going to Stars games has helped her overcome her problems with sensory overload. In short, her obsession with the Stars has helped her deal with the wiring of her brain.

So how, then, did the Stars open so many doors to me? They gave me an outlet for that obsessive interest that then translated into so many positive things, from social connections to employment opportunities. Because I became so interested in the Stars, I was able to unconsciously push myself to develop coping strategies that have trickled over into other areas of my life.

She goes on to laud the Stars for their open policies towards their fanbase, and gives examples of how they have given back to their community.

I suggest you jump over to Defending Big D and read Erin's story in its entirety. It's an inspiring read and helps put things in perspective.

SB Nation sites and communities are virtual homes for sports fans to connect about their favorite teams. They are generally conceived to be an outlet for our sports obsessions. But when they help someone like Erin deal with her illness, we are grateful and proud.

Editable Comments are Live!

2013-04-18T18:12:55Z

We told you earlier this week that they were coming and now they are here: Editable Comments are now live on all SB Nation sites. Try it out here or on your favorite SB Nation site. To read more about it, check out the post from Tuesday.

If you notice any bugs with the new capabilities, please send a note to support@sbnation.com and be sure to include your system specs: hardware, OS, browser, etc. We'll work to address them as quickly as possible.

UPDATE: Editable Comments are live on all SB Nation sites!

2013-04-16T13:00:06Z

UPDATE: They are now live on all SB Nation sites!

Last month, we released a new set of commenting code on SB Nation. At the time, there were very few changes to the functionality within comments; we were just using a new type of javascript to power the comments to help performance. This upgrade in javascript also set us up to more easily change and upgrade the commenting system moving forward. The first of those upgrades is here and it is exciting: comments on SB Nation will now be editable.

Once this update is released later this week, when you post a comment you will then have 90 seconds to edit that comment. You'll see a countdown timer and a progress bar that scrolls from right to left indicating how much time you have left on the edit. Editing the comment does not reset the timer, but you can edit multiple times in the 90 second window. This behavior has been live on both of Vox Media's other verticals, The Verge and Polygon for the past few months and it's been very successful and users have embraced it.

In addition to adding comment editing, this release would also enable a new system for collapsing comments. Collapsing a top level comment collapses all of its replies (something that is currently happening now), but the collapsed replies will no longer be shown as titles only. They will now be completely hidden beneath the parent comment (which will show as collapsed comments do today). This allows users to hide sub-threads they're not interested in and skip further down the page without scrolling. Additionally, comments will no longer need titles to be collapsed. Any comment can be collapsed. This cuts down on folks having trouble collapsing large images or GIFs because the poster forgot a title. Users will also have the option to set how they want comments to load by default.

Both of these new functions will work on mobile as well when we go live. In addition to the previously released mobile touch controls for comment navigation, this makes mobile functionality really robust on SB Nation.

We're really excited about this new functionality and we're confident you will be, too. This has long been the most-requested functionality on SB Nation and we're thrilled to have found a workable and elegant solution to finally fulfill that request. We're targeting later this week for the release and I will post an update here once we're nailed down the exact date. Get excited.

The Good Phight: Standing Up To Bullying

2013-04-12T16:18:21Z

Bailey O'Neill, and his father Robert, were Phillies fans. The last game they went to together was back in August 2012. Bailey was 11 years old then and had a whole life ahead of him. Now, he'll never get to see another game, he died in March of this year. A life cut short by bullying.

Bailey was punched by another student on a school playground, a victim of a bully. He started suffering seizures after the attack, had to be put in a medically induced coma, then finally died on March 3rd after being taken off life support.

Robert Bailey wanted the Philadelphia Phillies to dedicate a home game to Bailey to raise awareness about bullying. He started a petition on Change.org for that purpose and it was just announced the the Phillies will indeed honor Bailey on May 29th.

The Good Phight is the SB Nation blog covering the Phillies. When they heard about the petition they jumped at the chance to help. One of their writers contacted Robert O'Neill that resulted in a phone interview. It's a story of one father talking to another about the hazards of bullying. It stands as a testament to Bailey's life, and lets everybody know that The Good Phight would also like to raise awareness about bullying. They are honoring Bailey by telling the world his story, and the story of a father who has to go on without his son, the story of a family suffering a grievous loss.

Bailey O'Neill was in sixth grade. He loved math, science, and history, and he was a student who had earned distinguished honors. He clearly made his father proud, no more so than when he excelled at math, doing better than his dad ever did. - The Good Phight

It's not a sports story, even though a love of the Phillies runs through its core. It's a human story, a human tragedy, one that is plaguing schools around this country. Bullying, and its sometimes tragic results, need to be exposed. That's the only way we can hope to stop it.

Bailey O'Neill represents kids around the country. His father represents the grieving relatives left behind. He also represents the best of people, when they reach out through their own tragedy in an effort to help others. This is worthy of recognition. The Phillies and The Good Phight are to be commended for helping Robert honor his son, Bailey.

Blazer's Edge: Trail Blazers Site Sending Underprivileged Kids To An NBA Game

2013-04-10T16:00:47Z

For years, when SB Nation wanted to show how community interaction on a site was one one of our top priorities, we pointed to Blazer's Edge, and its editor, Dave Deckard. In this new medium of sports publishing, interacting with readers and creating a virtual community is a vital component. One that Mr. Deckard has mastered.

Not only does Blazer's Edge enjoy one of SBN's most vibrant communities online, but they venture into the offline arena, too. Take their most recent project - get as many underprivileged kids as possible, along with their chaperons, to a Trail Blazers game. This isn't a one-time lark, they've been doing it for years, but this year that ended up with spectacular results. When the call from Mr. Deckard went out to the community to donate tickets to the game, they responded.

This event has grown every year. Starting from a modest donation of three tickets we immediately blossomed to 50. The next year it was 100. And then to the moon. We've also uncovered plenty of need in the community. Teachers and principals and all kinds of folks who work with all kinds of kids have written and called. Requests for tickets this year came immediately and stayed strong.

We were almost afraid it was more than we could cope with. When I put out the plea on March 11th we had 350 tickets bought. That was only 70% of the requests we had in at that point and was about half of our maximum allotment.

It took one day--less that 24 hours--for you to help us max out the lot. In fact we went over. Our ticket agent told us we had completely bought out the tickets still available at our price level, and this after she had scraped together every last extra seat in response to your generosity.

The final number came in last Friday. 750 kids and chaperons are going to the April 17th game versus the Warriors because of you. 750 times we were able to say yes to people who are looking forward to being able to do something special for the deserving kids in their lives. 750 pairs of hands and feet will be clapping and stomping in the Rose Garden that night because of you.

Simply phenomenal. We salute Blazer's Edge and Dave Deckard for their efforts to make a difference in a child's life. Creating strong communities online can translate into charitable efforts offline. SB Nation believes that, and Blazer's Edge proves it.

Sports fans, we have some sad news: Pick 6 has gone into early retirement

2013-04-01T20:17:15Z

Pick 6 came to SB Nation last year, and many of us worked long hours to develop the best possible daily fantasy experience. We continued to support it throughout the baseball season and even released a football version of Pick 6 for NFL fans.

The developers on the Vox product team poured our collective energy into this game, which is why it is so difficult to make this announcement: Pick 6 is going into retirement. We did not take this decision lightly, and we regret any disappointment this has caused for our loyal fans.