The sports betting system is now ready for use here.

Some of the changes:

1. Uopdated to work with IPB 3.

2. Skinning changes in various places. Mainly just tweaks other than the main changes necessary to ahbve it match IPB 3.0 default skin.

3. Validates in xhtml strict, just as the review system.

4. Many bug fixes.

5. ENTIRE system overhauled. And I mean overhauled. It took me hours of work to simply get our old rows in this site's database to be arranged properly to work with this new version. These changes make the system faster, saves some space, and is set up in a more ideal way.

6. Coding optimized throughout.

7. Finished the sorting setup where you can narrow down which of your bet history you want to look at and you can also order it by what you won or lost.

8. Now ALL teams can have better than 1:1 payout, all teams can have a logo, et5c... Basically in the past any matchup with more than 2 teams/opponents was held to different standards. It could not have logos for any team, only one team could have more than a 1:1 payout, andno team could be designated a home team.

9. Win/Loss records. Now the teams' betting win/loss record for this site is shown on the betting page.

10. Dropdowns. Now teams are added via dropdowns when I add them to a matchup. This is good and bad. It's good because this is how I can keep up with team records in the bet histories and it's bad because I have tons of dropdowns on the forms. I am going to have to separate the form out and change some things at some point.

11. Green arrows on the contest tables on the front page so you can get to the pages to see past contests also.

Probably other things I am forgetting. I also set things up with the future in mind. In the future I can code in a way to allow different types of contests and add features in a way which won't mean me needing to redo the database drastically yet again.

The system is just a lot smoother now and more ideal. I combined some tables which used to be multiple tables, the code is more efficient, etc...

Really what made this such a long process is that I had to redo practically everything AND I set it up where other sites can use it if I decide to sell this. So I had to make settings, an installer, and many other things which would allow for the system to be used by others.

This has NOT been thoroughly tested. I think I have fixed any major issues, but we'll see.

Edit: I noticed that there are some issues here and there. I don't have a bug tracker right now so I am just keeping them in mind. First of all on matchup pages it does not tell how much the winner won by. Secondly the "no categories" sentence on the front page is not really a good explanation, etc...

Also as time goes by I am going to rename teams to include both their city and nickname. I also plan to add tie breaker questions for contests, a contest page which allows you to quick pick all of them instead of doing each one individually, and I may do a win/loss record for brackets too where you can see how teams have done in brackets. That is harder for me to retroactively add for our past rows, but I already have records for matchups for all teams.

I need to re-skin many things because I am unhappy with a lot of it.

Just a note to myself: I noticed that me and Aaron's contest points total displayed on our stats pages are 500 less points than it should be. I'm going by the totals listed on the contest pages individually which add up to 500 more points than the total displayed on the stats page. I assume we got paid properly, but for some reason it was not added to that total. I've got to watch that closely once I fix it and be sure it stays correct or else there is a bug I am overlooking.

Also as far as this system, a few concerns:

1. The dropdowns are huge on the add form.

2. Deciding whether the add forms should even be on the public side at all. I may move them to the ACP.

3. I am probably going to go ahead and add functionality for brackets/tournaments with 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 teams within the next day.

4. I will probably wait before adding the other features I want, including picking the top 3 in horse races and a tie breaker for tourneys. So I hope to be able to finally rest from this project soon.

I've almost finished the NBA style bracket setup, so although the NBA playoffs are almost to the finals I will add a bracket anyway to test it and you will just get free points for those first rounds.

What's cool is I just noticed that the NHL playoff system is set up exactly like the NBA one. So now it will be possible to do ncaa basketball 65 teams, ncaa basketball 64 teams, nfl, nba, and nhl bracket contests with this system.

All i need to do for the nhl one is do a little tweak where the final round is called the stanley cup instead of nba finals and the rest of it is exactly like the nba.

Hopefully someone will join this just to help me out.

Man I worked hard for a long time, but I've just got to get some sleep. I've basically finished the setup for the NBA and NHL bracket games, but since I was rushing I really ened to check my work later today and also I wanted to add one more feature and then call it finished for a while.

I would really appreciate if someone would enter it despite it being so late in the playoffs. It will still offer some points and it will be easy since you already know the teams who won the first few rounds. But since I worked this hard on it, I would like to test it in a real environment like this.

I guess I'll wait until late tonight to add the nhl and nba bracket contests.

I worked hard to get it finished in time to use it today, but since Aaron can't fill it out today and plus me being so tired I hate to set them up since I'm too tired to pay close attention to whether it's working properly.

Disappointing that I didn't get done until late in the playoffs, but better thna not having it at all.

I really should just call this 4.0.1 since I keep adding things, but since it's for RC forum software I am still calling it 4.0.0

I finished the payout setup for the tie breaker questions. So there is one other thing I want to add and then may consider it finished for a while.

One thing I did not address is whether to give points in the hockey contest if you pick the wrong matchups and then you pick the right teams to move on, but from wrong matchups.

I guess we'll see when I pay out if the tie breaker works properly. I used abs() so it doesn't matter if you're over or under.

Good thing I did that homerun contest. There is obviously some bug because it says Prince Fielder's bet record is 0.02 when it should say 1-0.

edit: Fixed it. Didn't test, but it was an easy fix so I assume it's fine. For some odd reason in the code I had it increase matchups twice instead of once for the winner and I had it set it as a winner if nobody won... so everything was messed up except for the losing teams.