New notification features and ads

I hope everyone enjoyed the Civil War. It was definitely great to see it in person in Autzen!

Notifications
I've been busily working on some new features. The most exciting new feature is notifications.

You can now sign up to receive notifications when certain things happen at OSUBeaverSports.com.
You can get notifications when someone replies to

1. A message you posted
2. An article you submitted
3. An event you submitted
4. A thread you started
   

If you sign up to be notified when any of these events occur, you will receive an email. In the near future we will be adding RSS feeds as well as a way to get notifications in a profile page. We will also be expanding the number of things for which you can receive notifications. For example, if you just want to watch one particular thread or be notified every time there is a new article in one particular subject, we will have that soon.

Speaking of profiles - we will have a more fully featured profile system in the future. If you are familiar with FaceBook or MySpace, the profile page will be familiar to you. It is basically a place where you can see everything that applies to you. Right now we have a lot of that stuff in the account settings area. We will be breaking out the profile as its own distinct page. You will be able to upload an avatar (picture) and we will have user-to-user private messages.


How do I get notifications?
It's a simple two step process: confirm your email and select your notifications.
First you will need to confirm your email address with the system. You can do that by going to http://www.osubeaversports.com/requestEmailConfirmation.do
You can also get there by going to the account settings page and clicking on the "confirm" link near your email address. New users to the site will automatically receive an email confirmation when they sign up. Since you all already have accounts, you will need to just do this confirmation step now.

Next you just go to the notifications page and choose which notifications you wish to have. You can get there by going through the account settings page or here: http://www.osubeaversports.com/notificationSettings.do
By default all of the notifications are turned off. I didn't want to spam you. You can turn on all of them or none of them.

Under the covers
Under the covers I've added some new security features. I was hesitant to publicize the site too much before, because I knew that it was vulnerable to being overrun with spam. I now have some stuff in place that, should it become necessary, will make it very annoying for someone to post much spam. I will be getting the word out more aggressively now to get more people to join in. Please keep inviting your friends and family to the site.

Ads
One final update - we will have ads soon. The ads will be provided by Google. The way it works is that Google checks the content of each page and places an ad that is appropriate for the page. Ideally, we will get ads for things like OSU merchandise, football tickets, etc. Hopefully we won't get ads for Duck gear or stuff that just comes out of left field. I have the ability to filter out certain ads based on the site that they come from. Please let me know if you see anything inappropriate. You can either email me, or post to the "bad ads" thread in the feedback forum. See http://www.osubeaversports.com/viewThread.do?threadId=524
Make sure to include the URL (address) of the ad. That is what I use to filter them out.


Keep posting, keep rating
Thanks to everyone for your participation. All of your posts and ratings have really added up. Last month we had 214 articles submitted, 322 article moderations and 250 messages posted. Our collective efforts are creating the best OSU sports site on the web and we're just getting started!

Thanks,
Nick