Yahoo fantasy baseball players won't have to worry about this until next year, but I've been tooling around with my 2010 Yahoo fantasy football league site today and the new design they've implemented for individual league message boards is terrible. The simplicity of the old design has been replaced by a busy graphics-based board that tries to combine messages, smack talk, commish notes, commish changes and something new called "team slogans" into one annoying mishmash. The way it's set up, messages are visible from the league home page (without having to click on a message header), however they're displayed in a tiny font that is dwarfed by a Yahoo-automated header that says, "Bob (team name here) posted to the message board." Well, no shit, Sherlock. That seems obvious by the fact that the message showed up. So why is it so important that you point it out in text that's bigger than the actual message?

Smack talk updates and team slogan changes are also topped by these auto-generated headers, and the whole thing is put inside a big white box that features your avatar or team logo on the left. If you post a four-word message or smack talk, there ends up being a lot of wasted white space. Yahoo does give you the option to sort by category, but if you do so, you need to once again scroll back down the page past your league standings (and past the commish note-specific box, which has nonsensically been moved above the message board, which also displays commish notes) to get to what you want to look at.

And while I'm ranting, do we really need the ability to post messages and smack talk and team slogans?! It reeks heavily of trying to draw new users with catchy but useless features. I'd rather see the whole system streamlined.

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