New Portal Review

[MubbleFubbles 1,290]

So the new portal just dropped and I’m a fan. Overall, I think Will and Josh have done a terrific job with the portal and I look forward to seeing what more will come down the line. For this article, I’ll break it down into three sections: Likes, Dislikes and Things To Fix (Dislikes will more focus on design choices that I would prefer a difference to whereas Things To Fix is more focused on problems that currently occur).

 

Likes

 

Dark Mode - I’m a frequent dark mode user wherever possible, so the dark mode implementation in the VHL has gone done very well with me. As I’ll mention later, there’s only one place where I found it a bit of a problem, but otherwise, very happy with the addition.

 

Standings - Nice addition putting the logos of each team on the standings and I also like how playoff standings are no longer cluttered with teams that didn’t make playoffs.

 

New Player/User Search Bar - It’s cool to now get Seasons and Usernames for players directly from typing in the name, can see this being a good timesaver. 

 

Ability to see Free Agency offers - So I don’t know if this is new or not (I don’t recall seeing it in the past), but being able to view what contracts were offered by each team by clicking on their name is cool. 

 

Schedule Link bug fix - This may well have been fixed before this update, but I remember from my time as M GM it was a bit of a pain clicking link on the schedule, because it would always go to a broken link. This has now been fixed to go to the correct place.

 

Additions to Team Pages - It’s nice to see current scoring come up on the team’s page now as, even as someone who is quite well-versed with the portal, I’d still sometimes come to the team page looking for it only to be denied. As someone who is semi-frequently doing a podcast series on best and worst draft picks of the Season 80’s, the draft history is also a big timesaver and cool for keeping team’s history.

 

Dislikes

 

Light mode is sometimes too light - I don’t often view light mode now, but I would say I’m not a fan of changing the headers from black background to white background as in some situations the headers don’t pop like they should. E.g. Team Roster. 

 

Update log on dark mode - One of the things we have to do as updaters is keep an eye on how much capped TPE someone has earned in the week, but in this dark mode, I wish the background on the bits that are the weeks (e.g. Week Ending June 2nd) were not dark themselves and more like the colour of the VHL/VHLE/VHLM button in dark mode to clearer split the difference between two weeks.

 

Missing E - It still feels like the E is quite a way behind on the portal compared with the other leagues. As someone who recently set a record in the E that is not tracked by the index (most game winning goals), it would be nice to have that information easier to find instead of comparing every index.

 

Underlines on GM names in Teams Page - This could just be an accidental addition, but I find the underlined GM names to look worse than they did before the change without the underline. 

 

Things to Fix

 

Sorting in Team Scoring - So sometimes this works, sometimes this doesn’t, but there’s times if you flick between the different teams and different seasons that you can’t do an ascending sort. It’s not a huge thing because there’s very little occasions outside of PIMs that an ascending sort would be useful, but just something I caught.

 

HOF Career Stats - One thing I did notice was that the HOF Career Stats appear to be stuck on showing every single player in the portals systems rather than breaking it up into pages, and the sorts don’t work even if you use filters to narrow down the number of results, so the page isn’t of much use as it stands. 

 

Combining Stats After Trades/Fixing Stats after Position Changes - Maybe this is something that has been fixed and will take effect in later seasons, but it would be nice for trades and position changes to no longer affect the stats pages on the portal as I know there’s been a few players in the past that have been initially missed off of ballots due to trades. In addition, position changes lead to producing some unintentional bad stats that can lead to new users incorrectly interpreting information. E.g. Left Alone being the best defenseman on S90 and S91 when they’ve only just moved to defenseman.