HappyTC: Info

You can now let your fans in on your team schedule, without letting them change anything!

This way you can post a public-access link to your team schedule.

Just click your normal schedule link (in an email), and then click the “fans” link in the top right corner:

Other things included in this release:

1. Added a way captains can regenerate all players’ schedule links (in case players have posted their links all over the place, allowing miscreants to muck with the schedule). It’s under “Team Settings” on the new “advanced” tab.
2. The automatic daily iCalendar schedule synchronizer no longer sends an email to the captain if the league’s schedule is empty, and no changes were made to the HappyTC schedule.
3. Various under-the-hood maintenance and enhancements.

We’ve made a minor addition to the HappyTC Privacy Policy to accommodate Google’s new practices that take effect April 8, 2009.

Essentially, Google (which produces the ads shown on HappyTC — which, when clicked, generate revenue — just like on zillions of other sites around the web) uses cookies in order to show more “relevant” ads, based on other sites you have visited.

You can opt out of Google’s cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy and clicking the big blue “opt out” button.

Minor update: captains and empowered co-captains can now delete bulletins — just click the “delete” link in each post. Thanks to EK for the original prodding to implement this.

Also, for those using a “league branded” HappyTC: the option to switch to a vanilla HappyTC should now work in all cases (click the “HappyTC” link in the page footer).

Facebook has acknowledged a problem with receiving feed updates from applications (such as HappyTC).

Facebook is apparently working on fixing it. (These feed updates are “nice to have” and not critical in any way to HappyTC… would be nice for FB to fix them, though.)

We’ve conformed to Facebook’s changes, so feeds should work again — you’ll get game reminders in your Facebook news feeds. (Facebook certainly doesn’t make things easy for outside applications… )

You can also once again show your HappyTC teams on your Facebook profile (you have the option of either putting them on your “Wall and Info Tab” (aka profile) or your “Boxes Tab”. Open the HappyTC app on Facebook, and click “Add to Profile“:

Add your teams to your Facebook profile!

Another minor update (oft-requested): bulletins — those little notes you can post on your team schedule at the right hand side — now expire after three months. (That is the default; it can be configured differently for each team.)

And: take our quick survey! (Should we add Twitter feeds to HappyTC??)

Accompanying yesterday’s update, when creating a new team you can specify the team’s sport.

(This is optional, and has no effect on how HappyTC works… just means that the ads you see when using HappyTC — which, when clicked, help support HappyTC operations — will be more relevant to your sport.)

Also, we’re trying out sending system status and “what’s new” updates via Twitter (bandwagon jumpers that we are).

Each team’s sport is now recorded… there’s no difference in how HappyTC works (still the same simple, what-you-see-is-what-you-get HappyTC as always). But certain ads will now be more relevant to your sport — if you’re a pro underwater basket weaver, last thing you want to see is ads targeting co-ed naked jello wrestlers. (Last thing anyone wants to see, come to think of it

HappyTC has been moved to the new, beefed up server. Everything is running smoothly.

The HappyTC server is being upgraded today, as we speak. We’re being moved to a bigger, faster, more powerful machine: yay.

There may be a brief period of unavailability as a result. We’re actively monitoring, and expect to have service restored very quickly.

In early October Facebook made some changes to how other sites (like HappyTC) can send updates to the “Friend Feed” etc. As a result certain HappyTC actions that used to produce a Facebook update no longer do.

We have looked into the changes required to use Facebook’s new method, and frankly at the moment it isn’t worth the effort. As well, Facebook will probably change the method again anyway. Those Facebook updates are not a critical part of HappyTC, so we trust that most HappyTC/Facebook users will not even notice.