We have completely rewritten FunOfficePools, making it faster, easier to use, and more modern. Significant improvements include:

• Completely responsive design - works well on phones and tablets now
• Better placement of ads - no longer in the middle of picks, standings etc. Ads are on the side or below content making it clearer what is an ad and less obtrusive to play your pools
• Streamlined and more modern interfaces making it a much nicer and easier to use site
• The Your Pools page has been completely changed - much more useful to look at current and past pools.
• New premium features - we've maintained all the free features we've had for 20 years and the site is still free to use, but in addition to elimination of ads, people who donate (now called premium members) will get new features that will enhance their experience on the site. Some of the new features include:
  • Enhanced messaging - include the standings and other info with a couple of clicks
  • Color coded picks page and enhanced who picked who
  • Color themes as well as dark mode
  • Enhanced football match up stats
  • Automatic AI Inquiries - get help from your favorite AI in your picks
  Check out the premium tab to see all the features available.

We hope you enjoy the new FunOfficePools. Kevin and Jim are still running the site (with some help from Claude - ok, a lot of help from Claude), and a complete rewrite was long overdue.

FunOfficePools has always been free to use for playing and running pools. We have been fighting a losing battle with ads as we find them to be less and less effective and more and more obtrusive. Our ad revenue has dropped significantly while our page impressions have grown We've been playing whack-a-mole with ads that are deceptive and have fooled people into thinking the ad is part of our site. So in our redesign we tried to tackle this in two ways:

1. We now have put all the ads outside of any main content areas (picks, standings, etc.) The ads are generally on the right side and left side of the pages and/or below the content (think ads in a U-shaped pattern). Hopefully this completely eliminates the confusion of what is an ad and what is FunOfficePools. If you think it is still confusing, send us a contact us with specific suggestions, or take a screen shot and send it to admin@funofficepools.com. We hope the new ad layout works better for everyone - we've been testing it and it definitely looks much better than it used to.

2. We are increasing the benefits for those who donate. See the Premium tab for all the details. We are not taking any existing features away - in fact we've added a very significant redesign of the site making it work on phones and tablets for the first time ever included in the free version. We've also completely rewritten the Your Pools page making it much more functional and much quicker to load. We are adding some new features that will make the site nicer to use and some new pool manager tools that add enhanced features in running a pool. None of the premium features are necessary to use the site and the site still has all the features we've had for 20 years and they remain free. We do intend to continue adding new enhancements for premium users (and we'll continue to update the site for free users). So the site will still be as usable as it has ever been for free users - we are just adding some niceties for those who donate. A donation is only $10 a year and gets rid of all ads and enables our new enhancements - with our drop in ad revenue we greatly appreciate any donation you can make. Our expenses have gone up so any donation helps cover them. Donations have grown every year and we thank all those who have been able to support us. We will continue to welcome free users and as most of them have found out, contact us if you need help - we'll be happy to help you out if we can whether you donate or not.