Below is an extended note about the draft rooms. The first part is just some basic info. The second, longer part details the procedure for running a reserve draft after an auction.

GENERAL NOTES

First, during the height of Covid, we defaulted everyone to having access to the draft software. Now that leagues are drafting in-person again, we have turned that default off. If you want to use an On-line draft and you don't see the set-up page for it, go to the Misc Section of the set-up, and say 'yes' in response to the first question.

The draft rooms were designed to run on desktops, laptops and tablets (someone once drafted on a very old iPad with an iffy WiFi connection from Maui). The scrolling on tablets can be cumbersome, though.

The rooms will run on Smart Phones, but they aren't designed for it, and scrolling is even harder, and there can be some display crunching in auctions. UPDATE -- we have seen a recent report of the display being crunched on newer iPads running auctions -- snake drafts are still okay. So if you are participating in an auction, best not to use an iPad for now.

Once a draft is set up in your league, on your Team Pages Nav you'll see 3 new links. One for the draft center, which is where you go to set your pre-draft player rankings. It's also where the link to "Enter the Draft" will appear 15 minutes minutes prior to the scheduled start of your draft. That link takes you to the actual draft room, which is separate from the rest of the site.

The other two links you'll see are "Check Draft Set-up" -- that's very important for everyone, not just the commissioner -- and is described below. The other link is "Player Draft Eligibility", which shows where players will be eligible at your draft. You can't alter eligibility after the rooms launch, so make sure that pages shows all the correct positions before you start.

SOME DRAFT ROOM SET-UP BASICS

First, during the We support both auctions and rotation drafts (snake or otherwise), keeper or redrafts. If you have keepers, the number of rounds should be the total number of players on a roster after the draft. So if you have 23 active players and 6 keepers, you would still set the draft up for 23 rounds.

If you are running and auction, every player currently on an active roster on the site is automatically assumed to be part of the auction. Their salaries are automatically deducted from a team's auction budget. Reserve players are stored so that they can't be drafted, but their salaries are not automatically deducted. So make sure all players who count in an auction are active, and not reserved. A handful of leagues include reserve players as part of auction. If you generally have 23 active players and set the total number of rounds in an auction to more than 23, then reserve players must be purchased during the auction.

If you run a draft and have keepers, all the keepers on a team need to be assigned a specific round in the draft. There's a link on the draft room set-up page to do this. We recommend doing one team at a time so there are no mistakes.

We strongly recommend running practice/test drafts. At the very top of the draft set up there's a checkbox for designating a draft as a test. The only tricky part here is that if you want to run a test auction before you have finalized your keepers, your rosters may be too big -- more than 23 players. If you start an auction with a full team, it won't work because there won't be any room to add new players. You can either wait until you've made your cuts, or temporarily change the setting on the Line-ups and Rosters set-up page to make the league a redraft league.

MAKE SURE TO CHECK OVER YOUR SETUP

First -- everyone please make sure to review the Check Draft Set-up page VERY CAREFULLY. People are assuming they have set up their drafts correctly and fibbing to us about reviewing the set-up, and then running into problems.

We review every non-practice draft to make sure the specs are valid, but we don't know what your order was supposed to be, or auction budgets, or snake vs. non-snake, etc. So please check.

Related to the above: since we do try to check every draft beforehand, please set up your real draft as far in advance as possible, so that we have a chance to vet the set-up and get a hold of you if we see any issues.

Also related: the draft initialization is a two step process -- the first takes about 2 seconds, and each scheduled draft has to wait in line for this. The second part (when the room is setting up its private database), takes 10 seconds (AL/NL only with only active MLB players) to 20 seconds (full MLB player pool). If you schedule your draft at a very popular time, such as noon on a Saturday, it could take 45-60 minutes to initialize. So perhaps schedule it for 11:45 or 12:15 and beat the crowd.

SOME NOTES ONCE THE DRAFT STARTS

Commissioners see a drop-down with draft room tools near the top of their draft uses. Use those options to pause/resume the draft, reverse picks, change auction winners and/or salaries, and change the clock times.

On the Draft Center page before the draft, teams can rank their players. Once the draft starts, you can further rank players by loading them from your general rankings to your draft queue. Click on the + sign next to the player's name on the left side to move him into your queue. Players will be loaded from your queue first, when it's your turn, if you run out of time to nominate a player.

In order to nominate or draft a player, you must make room for him on your roster. Click and hold on the 3 bars to right of a player's name on your roster to move them around.

If you allow different mixes of hitters and pitchers (such as 14/9 OR 13/10), MAKE SURE TO LEAVE YOUR SWING POSITION (such as the UT/P slot) OPEN. You have to clear a spot to nominate a player, and if you have an OF slot open but an OF in your UT, the room will not let you nominate or bid on a pitcher. So keep the UT open. (Note that this is not true for just hitters -- in the OF at UT example, if all your corners are filled and a corner is nominated, the room will allow you to bid on the corner, and will then automatically move your UT to OF and slot the corner at UT. It just doesn't do that for pitchers at UT.)

PROCEDURE FOR RUNNING A RESERVE DRAFT AFTER AN AUCTION

1. As soon as the final player is purchased, pause the post-draft countdown clock.
2. If you have just 5 or 6 reserve rounds, it's not worth it to set up a new draft. Just keep the post draft-paused, conduct the reserve draft in the chat area, and enter the players on the New Team by Team Initial Roster page as they are purchased. Or write them down outside of the draft chat area.
3. Hit the 'reset clock' button. This will reduce the post-draft countdown to your nomination time. Then hit 'resume.'
4. As soon as the post-draft count-down hits 0:00, the draft server will shut down and your rosters will be loaded onto the site.
5. If you did your reserve draft in the chat area and have entered the picks or otherwise written them down, you are done.
6. If you need to draft a bunch of reserves, it's now time to set up the reserve draft.
   1. If you are not usually a keeper league, you need to be for the reserve draft. Go to the Line-ups and Rosters set-up page and change the setting -- it's about 2/3 of the way down.
   2. Go to the draft set-up page and schedule a DRAFT for the next time which is greater than 15 minutes from the current time. If the current time in 9:23, the next available time will be 9:45, not 9:30.
   3. Set the number of rounds to the number of active players you just drafted plus the number of reserve rounds. If you're an old style 40-man Ultra league, you would select 40.
   4. You next need to assign the currently rostered players to rounds in the draft. Click on the link on the Draft Set-up Page for that -- the link will show after you've scheduled the draft time.
   5. The active players just purchased will default to rounds 1-23 (or however many active players you have). If any teams have keeper reserves, they will default to later rounds. You may need to change these rounds on that Keeper round set-up page. Depending on your league rules, these reserve keepers may need to be assigned to any round from 24-40 (assuming a standard Ultra league). For example, if someone's first reserve keeper needs to be slotted into the first reserve round, you would put him in round 24.
   6. This is the only tricky part. If you run a snake reserve draft, you need to make sure that the auction keepers are loaded into even numbered final round. To continue the Ultra example, put the active keepers into rounds 1-22 and 40. Then the snake will start at the right place, and the reserve rounds will be 23-39. If you don't use a snake for your reserves, forget you read this.
7. Your reserve draft is set up now. Continuing with our example, if it was scheduled for 9:45, it will load at 9:30. Load takes 30-60 seconds.
8. When the draft loads, we're going to do that reset trick again. Pause the pre-draft countdown, and reset the clock. It will drop to a minute or two. Resume when everyone is ready.
9. So the total time this will take should be around 15 minutes, because of that reset trick.

Thanks again to everyone for your comments and suggestions, and please contact us at support@onroto.com for any questions or support issues.