A few days ago, we announced our new partnership with Getty Images that will give all writers full access to the world’s best photographs.

Today, we are rolling out a new feature that will capture the full power of those images — Slideshows.

Many of you have noticed a few of these Slideshows around the site in recent weeks. This was part of a pilot process to see if readers would take to a new, more visually-focused approach to articles. The response has been strong, and countless members have sent me messages requesting the ability to create them.

With Getty Images fully integrated into our Slideshow creator, we are ready to give it to everyone.

The Bleacher Report community has been thrilled with the continued increase in article quality over the last year, but we also realized that there is a visual aspect to sports that is, well…priceless. Until today, we had not found the right way to combine great writing with amazing photo-journalism.

This week’s tag-team release of Getty Images and Slideshows will be a huge step in that direction.

Today marks a new chapter in Bleacher Report’s commitment to giving fans the finest possible writing experience.

Effective immediately, the Open Source Sports Network has partnered with the world’s premier provider of high-quality photographs: Getty Images.

Bleacher Report writers will now have instant access to a massive library of images across every major sport—both American and international—including photos from games that have just concluded.

It is more evident than ever that the editorial content being produced at Bleacher Report is second to none. And by partnering with a major photo provider like Getty Images, we are proud to support the outstanding efforts of our writers.

Today we rolled out the new MyB/R navigation system to help put great articles within one click of all Bleacher Report users.

The new black toolbar at the top of the screen now sports a drop-down of your favorite topics, with the latest articles displayed in whichever way you want to read them (top rated, newest, most read, most commented).

Your favorite articles are now one click away from you at all times.

Additionally, the Bleacher Report team has retired the old “Lineup” page and updated it with a much more organized and snappy design. Once again, users will be able to control how content is displayed.

Finally, observant users may notice a small but important feature we have added to comment threads. Users can now delete their comments, in the event that something goes wrong, or edit them, if the need should present itself.

Look for more changes to come in the weeks ahead, as the Bleacher Report team is eager to distribute some Christmas Presents to our awesome community of users.

Bleacher Creatures have probably already noticed, but we’ve launched a new design for all league, team, player, and subject pages. The new design features way more articles than the previous one, and also does a better job of dividing the articles into categories to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

We’ve also made the right column of the new design all about the community that drives that page. Right now you’ll see stats on how many people are in the community as well as a selection of the members. The right column is also where Community Leaders in each community will be listed. Clicking “Join Now” in the Community Column adds that tag to your Lineup and makes you a member of that community so you can get updates and participate in all current and future community-specific features.

We’re working on more updates to the site for later this fall that will continue to improve the B/R experience. As always, any and all feedback is appreciated, so feel free to comment below with your thoughts.

UPDATE:

Thanks to B/R rock star developer Axel Molina, writer rankings are back up and running correctly.

Remember, these are the newly calculated rankings that put a lot more weight on qualitative factors as opposed to just the quantity of articles you’ve written. That said, we feel they are a lot more accurate and hope you’ll agree. We’ll keep working to improve them, so if you have any feedback please let us know.

Thanks,

The B/R Team

Today we have freshened up the look of articles on Bleacher Report.

Every month, millions of people flock to the site to read sports articles, and we wanted to give them an even better experience. Most notably, we want our readers to be exposed to more articles they might enjoy; our community features so many fantastic writers, and allowing them to more prominently showcase their talents is sure to increase the number of visitors sticking around to join the debate.

Pick of the Day has also experienced an improvement and received a small facelift.

The Community has been taking advantage of this feature increasingly more frequently, and many of you have expressed a desire to give greater recognition to articles they read and enjoy. Effective today, members of the Community can award a personal pick to any article they like—the article receiving the most MyPicks votes at the end of each day will still receive Pick of the Day placement on the front page.

In addition, we will soon be announcing our first contest related to the new MyPicks feature. More details on this front will emerge in the coming weeks.

As always, we welcome any feedback on either (or both) of these new developments—feel free to leave comments below.

Remember: you may have to reload your browser once or twice before the new page shows up properly!

Hey guys,

So as I’m sure you’ve already noticed, we’ve made some adjustments to the way that Writer Rankings are calculated.

Before I begin responding to all of your individual inquiries, I thought I would address the Bleacher Report Community at large and explain the nature of the changes that were made and the reasons for these alterations.

We strongly believe that these tweaks have the best interest of the network in mind, and hope you understand that even if you fall a couple spots in the rankings that this is more than made up for by the fact that you will be part of a fairer, more credible community of fan journalists.

Let’s also not forget that the rankings are dynamic!  With a little bit of extra effort in areas where you’re weaker than your peers, you can skyrocket yourself past where you were previously.

Without further ado, the changes:

Change #1: Breaking up the article count monopoly

We’ve been receiving feedback for some time that too much weight is given to the number of articles written in determining the site’s Top Writers.

While we’ve always felt that the number of articles a member writes is quite a telling statistic, there are others that are also highly reflective of the value that a given contributor adds to the network but which before now were underrepresented.

You know the old saying: it’s not quantity, it’s quality.

Well in this case, it’s quantity, quality, and popularity of your contributions that will determine your fate in the Writer Rankings from here on out.

The average star rating that your peers assign your articles now plays a significant role in your ranking, as does the number of fans you accumulate throughout your Bleacher Report tenure.  The number of comments you write has also risen in significance.

Your article total still counts enormously towards your ranking, but it no longer monopolizes it the way it used too.  We’re sharing the wealth, so to speak—allowing the network’s most popular writers and active commenters to have a legitimate chance at the top slots.

Change #2: New restrictions on who is eligible to be displayed as a Top Writer

Bleacher Report has always been a meritocracy—the members that add the most value to the Community earn the site’s top honors.  After taking a cold hard look at the overall site rankings and league/team based rankings, it was clear that all too often highly valued contributors were being knocked down the list in favor of less deserving candidates.

Before now, a blogger who syndicated their feed onto the site but hadn’t logged in or participated directly in the Community for an extended period of time was still eligible for a top slot in the overall site rankings.  Their high article count would then elevate them over members who contribute regularly to the Community.

We’ve thus added some eligibility criteria to being included in the team, league, and overall site rankings.

For league and team pages, members who have not logged into the site or written in over a week will temporarily fall off of the Writer Rankings.  As soon as that member logs in or writes again, he will appear on the list again in his rightful place.

The same goes for the overall site rankings—inactive contributors will no longer be displayed as Top Writers until they are active again.  In addition, members who have written fewer than 10 articles or fewer than 20 comments will be similarly ineligible for ranking until they have passed these milestones.

As always, we encourage you to provide general feedback on the new changes in the comments section below.  If you have questions about your specific situation or believe you have spotted an error, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me directly.

Thanks as always to all of you for making Bleacher Report the groundbreaking sports network that it is today.

Several members have asked us what happened to the quick links to their Lineup that used to be housed in the “More” dropdown menu.

The answer?

We’ve put them into the Lineup tab on our new Navigation. Now they have their own home, and we can fit more of your favorite leagues into the default header.

Let us know in the comments if you like this change or if you’d like to see a return of the “More” dropdown.

Bleacher Report is pleased to announce out our new Navigation system, for your viewing pleasure.

As you probably noticed when you first loaded the new site, the header has been changed and is now more sleek and effective. Getting around the site should be simpler, and options should be clearer and easier to find.

The new Navigation system will also make it possible for us to feature more sports leagues as Bleacher Report’s coverage expands to new horizons.

Another major change can be found in the network’s Tag Selection interface when submitting an article.

We have this process a lot cleaner while also instituting measures to prevent people from going crazy with tags. There has been a lot of feedback from the Community about the positive aspects of implementing these limitations, but we realize that some writers may have mixed feelings.

We encourage all writers to remember that for every one person who comes to Bleacher Report to publish articles, there are hundreds who come just to read. When a reader find Dallas Cowboys articles on the front of the NHL page, or opinions about Barry Bonds atop the Manchester United section, this drastically impedes upon their positive experience.

In summary: these new changes will make it easier for people to navigate Bleacher Report, and when they arrive at a page that interests them, the content will be far more relevant due to proper tagging.

Feel free to post any feedback below in the comments—we’d love to hear it.

Per usual, we continue to get great feedback from the community on things that they like about the site, but also things that they would like to see improved. Thanks to Joe W. for his most recent post.

Here are some updates on our priorities right now for making the site better:

1) People keep telling us that they are having serious concerns regarding Tags.

Some writers are putting too many tags on their articles so that they can appear on every page—and we’re working on a way to prevent this practice.

We realize that this may frustrate writers who want their article to appear on the NFL, MLB, and NBA page (in addition to about twenty or thirty team pages). But we have a responsibility to our readers to make sure that all articles are RELEVANT to the pages on which they appear.

Later this month, we are going to roll out a new tag-selector interface that will require writers to carefully pick which leagues and teams BEST fit their article, asking them to carefully adhere to some limitations that will lead to a much better Bleacher Report reading experience.

We also really like the idea of having a page for “Multi-Sports,” where people can post articles like “10 Favorite Sports Memories,” which don’t have a clear league page. We are now accepting recommendations for what to call this page, so feel free to put in an idea.

2) For a few months now, we have been asking users what TYPE of article they are writing (i.e. Editorial or Preview or Satire). We do this because more and more of the community is starting to care about the nature of what is being written.

Soon we will make it so that we are separating these out on the site. That way, if you really only want to read Editorial pieces, you can look in the Editorials column. If you want News stories, you can look on that part of the page. As such, Bleacher Report will better fit your preferences.

3) The “More Statistics” feature is coming!

We want to make it as awesome as possible, and our programmers have found it to be a little more difficult than planned. But we haven’t forgotten!

Anything we missed? Let us know in the comments.