New Feature: Make and track your Oscar picks

Hello MoFos.

As you all know, our Oscar Chats have proven to be quite popular, and we'll be holding our 3rd Annual LIVE Oscar Chat in less than a month (March 7th). And since we're all competitive jerks who like to toot our own horns (okay, maybe just me), I thought: why not make it easier to do so?

Oscar Picks

"The winner will be showered with praise, and the loser[s] will be taunted and booed until my throat is sore!"

The area should be pretty self-explanatory: just make your picks, and then check back on Oscar night to scope out the leaderboard, which I'll be updating throughout the night. The best scores will be on the main page, and we'll have updates above them with the latest award announced, as well as the percentage of users who got it right. I'll be providing the numbers in the chat room itself, as well.

Feel free to pick now, too, because you can always go back and update your choices, right up until the evening of the ceremony.

There's also (and this is the part that took the longest) a way for non-MoFos to create Oscar Picks pools and invite their friends to participate without being registered. Hopefully this will help attract people to the site, as well as give people a place to track their picks, now that sites like Yahoo! have stopped offering Oscar Picks trackers.

Enjoy.

Couple quick notes:

1. Technically, registered users can make picks as part of a custom pool, but I don't anticipate this happening much. The pool system is basically there for people who aren't registered and are just looking for a site to let them play against their friends.
2. Though it's basically seasonal right now, we'll probably expand this area at some point to include more Oscar history. This will be revisited at some point, but for now it's all about making and tracking the picks.
3. The page will look different come Oscar night, when it stops accepting new picks/pools, and is replaced with the Leaderboard.

If you notice any bugs, please report them ASAP. The fundamentals of the system should be fine, but if we find any issue that would interfere with how the picks are saved, it's important that we find it and fix it right away, so that as few people as possible have to do something annoying, like submitting their picks again.

That said, I've tested the major functions many times, so any issues should be of the fairly minor, behind-the-scenes variety.

Very nice work, and loads of it, too. Thanks for all the hard work you've put into this. This will be our best Oscar night, yet.

Except for Mr. King of the World.

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Thanks for helping to test it, Lisa.

Yeah, it ended up being far more work than I'd expected, probably because I wanted it to look fairly decent, and I kept thinking of improvements as I went along. The main thing was deciding to allow unregistered users to not only make picks, but create pools and invite people to participate. That probably more than doubled the amount of time and effort required. Don't know if that many non-users will even use it, but I think it's a good first step either way and a good foundation for next year, too.

I think we used Yahoo a few years ago, but they inexplicably stopped offering their Oscar pool tracking, and I really couldn't find any decent alternatives, so it seemed like a void worth filling, even if it's mostly just for us this year.

This isn't related to Oscar picks, but didn't want to start a new thread for it - the 'newest posts' bar on the right hand side of the index that tells you the most recent posts has been showing '5 hours' as the last updated time for every post for me for a while now. Is this a bug or something? Not really an important problem but thought I'd ask anyway in case it's something you want to fix.

Yeah, it's based on time zone differences, I believe. I'm looking into it but haven't managed to find time for it yet.

When we tested it, I needed to fill in the entire thing/make all of my choices before submitting it. Do we have to do that now that it's finished, or can I submit what I know? Then I'll add to it as I check other things out. That will give me a chance to get a few votes in before it's too late.

I had to clear the test data out before launching it, so you can just enter your picks whenever you're ready. I should point out that it won't let you submit it unless you select something for each category, though.

That's what I was asking, actually. Bummers, but OK. I'm taking too long to check everything out, so I doubt I get to it, unless I mark some with random guesses.

Yeah, I think almost everyone has to guess on a few.

That's what the Academy do

OK. I was wanting to check into everything, but I think we all know I'm dreaming there.

I heard that.

Good work Yods thanks

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Thanks nebs.

Just a quick reminder to everyone: you've got until just before 8:00 PM ET tonight, when I close things down. Get 'em in! It'll be fine, I promise. And if you're already logged in, you can just go right to making your picks without any email confirmation or anything:

http://www.movieforums.com/oscars

Nice job with all this, Yoda.

Thanks. I'm really just hoping for a modest success with it this year; next year I really want to tweak and improve it and use it to attract a lot of new users. If I hadn't been moving simultaneously with the development of the section, I would've setup some more features and contests for it and the like. Next year it should be a bit more elaborate and feature a few giveaways for the winners and all that.

is there a way to print out our picks?

Nothing beyond just printing the page itself out. But if you'd really like one I can probably whip up something without the header and footer. Quick-and-dirty, but it would probably do the trick.

that's okay... I'll just try and print out the page. I don't want you to go extra trouble. Thanks!

I'm hoping I can pop into the chat for a bit, too.

Okay, it's not perfect, but for 10 minutes it's not too bad. Lemme know if this works better:

http://www.movieforums.com/oscars/pi...5.html?print=1