Sports Reference » Olympics at S-R

Follow us on Twitter to Win a Free Baseball-Reference.com Play Index Subscription

admin — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:13:49 +0000

Every Monday, for the rest of the year, we'll be randomly selecting one twitter user who follows any three of our five Sports Reference Twitter accounts to receive a free Baseball-Reference.com Play Index account. If you are already a subscriber, we'll extend you for a year.

Sports Reference uses twitter to tweet out nuggets of information we find, notify users of new features, make occasional commercial messages, and generally enjoy ourselves. Here are the five Sports Reference twitter feeds:

@baseball_ref: Baseball-Reference.com
@bball_ref: Basketball-Reference.com
@pfref: Pro-Football-Reference.com
@hockey_ref: Hockey-Reference.com
@sports_ref: CFB, CBB, Olympics, and Announcements for All Sites

Brief Downtime (for new db server) Monday, Feb 18, 2:30 PM ET

admin — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:51:41 +0000

We are spinning up a new database server (transitioning from unitas => rice (Jerry)) and will have what I expect to be a minute or so of downtime as we make the switch. I expect to flip the switch at 2:30 pm.

Hockey-Reference Play Index

Neil — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:28:44 +0000

With the NHL starting back up after the lockout, here's a reminder that we offer our familiar Play Index tools for hockey, too:

Player Game Finder
Search through NHL regular season and playoff game logs spanning from 1987-88 to today for games that match your criteria.

Player Season Finder
Search through NHL regular season statistics spanning from 1917-18 to today for single seasons or combined seasons that match your criteria.

Player Playoff Finder
Search through NHL playoff statistics spanning from 1918 to today for single years or combined years that match your criteria.

Our Apologies For the Very Annoying Ads You’ve Seen on our Site

admin — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:37:28 +0000

First, let me say the buck stops here and we apologize for the very annoying ads that have been running on some parts of the site over the last 4-5 days. The pages load and then a minute or two later you are blasted with audio that can't be muted. Very annoying. We've taken all of the steps we can to get them taken down short of foregoing all ad revenue. If you want to understand why this happens, please continue reading.

About 75% of our revenue comes from display (i.e. graphical banner) ads. We don't sell any ads ourselves and contract with USAT Sports Media who sells ads that we run and also handles the relationships with remnant ad sellers.

When you come to a page we ping an ad server that first looks for an ad sold by USAT Sports Media and if none has been sold, then moves through progressive layers of potential remnant ads looking for the highest grossing ad for us. This might involve 5 or more different ad providers all of whom are serving ads in an automated way.

What happened last week is that one of the vendors either through incompetence or malice did not properly have the sound settings set properly for some of their flash ads, so it would have a video running for a bit and then after a minute or two the badly designed ad would come up blaring out of your speakers.

USAT has assured me they are removing this remnant from the rotation until the issue is fixed, so I'm hoping the problem is fixed.

A note about economics, we make about one-twentieth of a penny when a user is served one of those ads, so we would never on purpose do something that caused $20 of annoyance to a user. We do, as best we are able, to keep our ads quiet and non-intrusive.

At some point, we may sell ad-free access. We've got to get some infrastructure built to handle that, but it may get done at some point. If you don't like ads I hope you'll consider supporting the site in this way.

New Server for Basketball-Reference.com and improved CFB, OLY and CBB speeds

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 18:15:54 +0000

BBR has been moved from it's old server (called mikan internally at s-r hq) and now is running on a new server (named lebron, don't blame me, it was Neil's turn to name the new machine). This is a much better machine with more RAM and CPU's, so things should now run much faster and more smoothly than they have in the past. Please let us know if you come across any quirks or problems.

One benefit of this is that CFB, CBB and Olympics sites no longer have to share a server with basketball, hockey and football, so they should see their performance improve as well.

Wayne Gretzky and Sidney Crosby

Olympics at Sports-Reference

Neil — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:09:51 +0000

Just a friendly reminder to check out our Olympics site, which is being updated daily throughout the London games.

Wanted: Pro-Football-Reference Usability Testers

Neil — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:01:38 +0000

Attention readers in the Philly area -- we need users like you to come in and help us improve our sites!

If you're in the vicinity -- our HQ is located in the Mt. Airy section of northwest Philadelphia -- and can spare an hour next week to help us test out some PFR Play Index features (we'll even pay you $50 for your time), please email me your name and a contact phone number.

We are looking for 3 testers, so we may not be able to use everyone. Please remember testing will be done in Philadelphia only.

Thanks for your help!

Sports-Reference.com Widgets – Our Stats, Your Site

admin — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:33:38 +0000

Sports-Reference.com Widgets - Our Stats, Your Site

We've just launched the first stage of our new Sports Reference Widget tool. By clicking the "Embed" tooltip just above any stats table on the site you can now get the code to add our daily updated stats to your site.

See the widgets page for a description of the various features.

We've always had this option with our "Share" tool, but the widgets have the advantage that they'll update daily as our stats pages update.

In the future, we expect to launch additional widgets, like milestone countdowns, division standings, team and league leaders and more. Any suggestions will certainly be considered.

Programming Internships at Sports Reference

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:30:07 +0000

Programming Internships @ Sports Reference

If you are a student with an interest in sports and programming or know someone who is, please check out our advertisement for summer internships.

Why We Oppose #SOPA

admin — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:50:55 +0000

Baseball-Reference.com is blacking out our logo today to make you aware of a law that will soon be before Congress that could dramatically affect innovation and freedom on the internet. SOPA and PIPA will soon be before Congress and these laws will dramatically alter the current balance of power between copyright holders and the rights of users and website creators.

Sports Reference believes that intellectual property should be protected (our livelihoods depend on it), but these proposed laws go way, way, way too far in trying to stop piracy. A sane, reasoned approach to piracy is what is needed, and these laws proposed by the Movie and Recording Industry would reduce innovation on the internet. They want to return to the 1980's. Do you want sports statistics information to return to the 1980's?

How could SOPA and PIPA hurt Sports Reference LLC?

SOPA and PIPA are a threat to Sports Reference in many ways. For example, in its current form, SOPA would require Sports Reference to actively monitor every site we link to, to ensure it doesn't host infringing content. Even a link to an infringing site could put us in jeopardy of being forced offline.

Links to more information and steps you can take to oppose these laws from Google and Wikipedia.