New Features, More Info About Pool Groups

If you received the email newsletter last week, or read the prior blog post, you should know the latest big news out of MyOfficePool.ca.

The first is, our World Cup 2010 Pool is up and running! World Cup starts June 11th! Woo-hoo!

The second thing is, you can create your own pool group, essentially allowing you to run your own World Cup Pool by inviting people you know to your group. If your group wants to play for some money, then by all means, do so. If not, that’s fine too. It is your group after all. We’ll do the heavy lifting actually recording the picks and updating the pool for you, from start to finish of the World Cup, and we’ll do it all for free too.

This all sounds fine and good, but a couple small issues spun off from our good intentions, which is what I want to address here.

Unofficial MOP $20 Poolies Group

With regards to the pool itself, some guys and gals who were used to just heading over here, joining my pool, dropping $20 and hoping and praying (some more hoping and praying than others), were like, “huh?” “What is going on?”

In short, yes, you can still play for $20 if you like. I started my own pool group, right here at this website I found (ha). So, if you are used to playing in my pool, go ahead and join my pool group, send me $20 before the start of the World Cup, and we’re good. Here are the key points as to what is a little different than in the past:

• there is no official MyOfficePool.ca play for money pool
• join my pool group called, Unofficial MOP $20 Poolies (yes, I changed the name)
• to make things easier, you are automatically invited to join my pool group when you join the overall pool
• of course, you don’t have to accept this invite, if you are creating your own or joining another pool group
• the website will not automatically prompt you to submit payment, since the money is not running through MOP anymore, but me personally
• I’ll send an email to everyone who joins my group later on explaining how to send me the money, and what the prizes will be – likely 60%/30%/10% for 1st/2nd/3rd

If you have any questions, then by all means drop me an email at mike@myofficepool.ca.

New Pool Group Features

The next thing I realized after putting in the first batch of pool group features was that, these could be a lot better. And better they now are. Yesterday I uploaded a bunch of improvements for our pool group admins to make their jobs a whole lot easier managing everyone in their pool group. Here is a rundown of the new features:

• your pool group invite list is now broken up between who has joined your group and who hasn’t
• you can mark each person who joined your pool group as having paid, or not paid
• you can remove any person from your pool group if desired (they will still be in the overall pool)
• you can uninvite any person who hasn’t joined your pool group yet
• there is a text box of email addresses you can copy and then paste into your email to send a note just to people who joined your pool group
• there is a text box of email addresses you can copy and then paste into your email to send a note just to people you invited to your pool group but haven’t joined yet, to send them a reminder perhaps

The one thing we don’t have is an alternate way to invite people to a pool group, short of the pool group administrator (the person who created it), sending individual invites through their admin panel. There were thoughts of using a unique sign up link and/or password system, but after discussing it with a couple people who created new pool groups, there was no consensus on what would work the best.

What I’m going to do is leave it as is for the World Cup Pool. As above, only the admin can invite people to their pool group through the website. However, if you do have a large group of people who you want to invite to your pool group, then send me an email, and I’ll see what I can do on the backend to make things easier, such as inserting all the invites into the database and the admin then emailing their group of poolies all at once.

All right, that is enough of the admin stuff. Have fun recruiting for your pool group, and enjoy the World Cup! We’re getting there, just three and a half weeks away!