To our OfficePoolStop managers (and players),

As many of you know, our site has had some growing pains since the switch to our new look and software. First and foremost, we value your time and the responsibility you carry to keep your leagues running smoothly. Thank you for sticking with us while we work through the bumps.

Why this is happening (brief context)

OfficePoolStop began as my side project in 2012 so I could run my own pool without spreadsheets. By 2024, it grew to ~50,000 active users and ~250,000 accounts—largely a one-person effort (while I also worked full-time at Micron), with occasional help from my kids and my brother on the Help Desk.

In early 2025, seeing the site’s potential, my daughter left her software engineering role at a major pharmaceutical company to team up with me full-time to modernize from our legacy stack to Microsoft Blazor and move to AWS for flexibility and growth. The new site is materially faster (roughly 4×+) and sets us up for future features like a mobile app. Then came a perfect storm: new software + new servers + 200%+ new users after the influx from Splash. Even with both of us full-time on development, that surge, combined with the learning curve of the new platform, has stretched us thin between triaging database issues, rolling out fixes, and responding to tickets.

We’re going to address this by simplifying, focusing, and communicating clearly.

Our plan for the next two weeks (through September 22, 2025)

1) Help Desk changes

• We’ll treat the Help Desk primarily as a place to report problems.  In many cases we simply won't have the bandwidth to respond. For now, Laurence will handle login and “how-to” questions.

  When you file a ticket, if its a critical problem (pick page, standings accuracy, manager console) please label it like this:

  • PICK SHEET: your problem description

  • STANDINGS: your standings issue

  • MANAGER CONSOLE: manager-critical functions, e.g., Roster page, submit picks for player
    

  • All others as normal
    

• We’ll keep the Updates page current as best we can with high-priority items. When you open the support portal at support.officepoolstop.com, it’s the pinned community post.

• Please don't send “Is the site down?” messages—we receive automated outage alerts.

2) Temporarily removing the GameDay page

We will be pulling the GameDay page (for now). Why:

1. It requires maintaining a separate logic path for standings accuracy.

2. It confuses some players who expect full league standings there.

3. It undermines our original goal to reduce heavy load on the main standings page.
   

4. Introduced on the legacy site last year, GameDay has proven high-maintenance for a non-critical feature. We’re shelving it for now and will reassess once core stability is locked in.

This lets us focus on one source of truth and speed up fixes where they matter most.

3) Focus on high-priority items

Our immediate priorities are stability, correctness (picks/standings), and manager-critical workflows. We’ll provide code fixes in that order.

Options for managers

Option 1 — Full refund for Premium Services
If you have Premium and you’d rather not ride out the current growing pains, we understand.

• Please file a ticket with REFUND in the title.

• We’ll begin processing these starting Week 3. It’s a manual two-step (issuance through our payment processor, then disabling your league’s Premium mode), so thank you for your patience. Your site will be downgraded to Standard so will still be operational but with ads and 3 clones max.

Option 2 — Run on our legacy site for this season
We’ll keep legacy.officepoolstop.com online through the end of football season. If you purchased Plus/Premium and prefer to run your league there (e.g., starting Week 2), tell us and we’ll transfer your Plus/Premium subscription to legacy. NOTE: We cannot transfer you league which would be too enormous an undertaking, we can only transfer your subscription. Your easiest course would be to start your pool Week 2.  There is an 'Edit Standings' feature if you wanted to populate a week 1, but that would be a fair amount of work for you.

• Heads-up: the legacy site is stable but much slower (already ~4× slower than the new site), and we’ve downgraded the servers. We also won’t be making changes to legacy.

I will personally continue to respond to a list of long-time managers who’ve I've gotten to know over the years, who send clear, actionable reports. We’re confident the foundation we’ve laid (Blazor + AWS) will pay off quickly as we tighten things up.

— Fred Williams, Founder
(on behalf of the OfficePoolStop team)

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• Support portal & Updates page: support.officepoolstop.com

• Legacy site (temporary option): legacy.officepoolstop.com