Collaborative Boards

Now You Rank With Your Friends

In the recent post-war room update, snuck into that release was the enablement of collaborative draft boards. Prior to this release, the model was a simple one board to one user setup. However, similar to how War Room takes the modern mock draft tool idea and turns it on its head (i.e. 1 user to 1 team --> multiple users to 1 team), collaborative boards do the same thing. The current mock draft sites that do support custom big boards, which are not many, all stick to the 1 user 1 board model, and up until yesterday, this was true for MockingBoard. However, draft boards are inherently collaborative. Whether they are being built by an NFL team or a media outlet, it is a rare sight to see a big board truly built by one person. Those that are built this way (shoutout Dane Brugler's The Beast) are remarkable achievements that should be admired, and MockingBoard has all the tools you need to support you if you want to go down that path.

For the rest of us, draft boards are something we do with friends. Maybe we split by position group, or by schools, or just by vibes. For an NFL team, this is the same thing. Those boards are months to years long projects that have contributions from area scouts to the head coach and GM. And so, it is with great excitement that I can now say that MockingBoard supports this model of work as well.

Can I add people to an old draft board?

I am so glad you asked this, theoretical user. The answer is yes. You don't need to do anything special or weird to make this happen either. No starting a new board if you don't want to. You can, today, go into an existing draft board that you own, and begin to add people to it. I know there is already one draft board on the site that this applies to.

Is there a difference between Free and Pro users?

Yes, and it's important to break down the differences so you know what you're getting at each level. Let me first note: the differences between Free and Pro only apply to boards that you personally own. All users can be invited to and collaborate on as many boards as they want. So, what are the differences?

First, Free and Pro users have a limit on the number of people that can collaborate on a board at any time. For a Free user, you can have up to 5 people on a board you own. For a Pro user, this limit rises to 10. I will be working on improvements in how data is managed on these boards to increase limits for both Free and Pro tier users. Think of the current values as our starting point, not the final version.

Second, the other main difference is that a Pro user can make a collaborative board private, where a Free user cannot do so. Free users can still make their own personal boards private as much as they want. However, in order to collaborate with others, you will need to make that public.

What are the future plans for collaborative boards?

There are two main future goals I have for collaborative boards. First, I want to increase those collaborator limits as I mentioned. Second, I want to extend this collaboration ability for Pro users into their positional rankings pages. Of course, as user count grows and feedback does with it, I'm sure there will be more changes or updates to this feature that I can't personally anticipate.

That's all for now, see you guys in the next one!