ESPN.com has gotten pretty aggressive with it’s Insider program. First of all, they invalidated my username/password combo, which I’d had since 1996, when I was their first fantasy columnist–they published my projections in 1995 with the first week of launching, Ask Rotoman originated in 1996, and I wrote a series of 30 stories from 30 spring training camps in 30 days for a few years.
I can’t blame them for that.
Then they moved Rob Neyer behind the wall, which may be good business but doesn’t feel like it is. I visited to read Neyer, but if I want to pay to read him I’ll buy his books. His column is fun but way to slight to make me want to pay for it.
But old habits die hard and even though I “watch” the games at mlb and have come to like much of the fantasy services at Yahoo, when I’m just looking for news my fingers usually type ESPN.
But now the smart guys there have decided to default auto refresh of pages to on, meaning that I can’t sit on a page and read the box score without having the page redraw every 30 seconds. If I press the off button it stops, but if I jump to another page and then come back, the refresh is set at 30 seconds again. Even at a time like now, when all the major league action is done for the day.
If I was an insider, I’m sure, the site would recognize me and adapt my preferences, which would be no refresh (I can hit the button myself when I want to). It’s hard to begrudge the folks at Disney their money, though if they hadn’t blown all that money on the cartoon with Roseanne Barr playing a bossy cow maybe they wouldn’t have had to be so bossy themselves.