Line break formatting is now preserved; you'll notice when you view your application again. Thanks!

Good call. Having context sensitive league/format/division selections is near the top of my backlog for this site, but I'll add the format preservation too.

It's possible you saw the last site I put together for this purpose. Something like this definitely faces the catch 22 of no one will seriously use it until enough people use it to make it useful. I'm going to put more effort into community awareness this time, though, so hopefully the number of applications will reach critical mass and it will become self-sustaining. I'd love to hear any ideas you have on that.

So I can move away from free hosting at some point.

Thanks. Made that change on the live version but don't notice much difference in my browsers. What browser are you using?

Nevermind, that error was from an internationalization issue. Fixed now. Thanks!

That's interesting. Thanks for mentioning. Out of curiosity, is your steam profile private?

http://teambuilder.tf2.cc/

Think of it as a dating service that matches players with teams looking for players; perfect for players new to competitive TF2 or who don't have the social connections required to find players/teams without doing a ton of legwork themselves. I introduced a beta version to the community last year and people really liked the idea but the site wasn't ready yet. Well, I've made a ton of improvements, added some new features (like instant notifications when new applications are submitted that match your search or automatic creation of most of your application) and I think it's ready for community use.

For those of you who want a preview without visiting the link, here are a few screenshots:
Searching for applications matching your team's requirements: http://i.imgur.com/6nSzkVN.png
Submitting an application: http://i.imgur.com/Kvt0nvv.png
Viewing application details: http://i.imgur.com/y0gBtbI.png

As always, I encourage suggestions, questions, and feedback so I can improve the site and make it a more effective way to build teams and introduce people to competitive TF2. This am still actively developing the site, so there is a very good chance that suggestions you have will make their way into the live version in a short period of time. If you want to keep up to date with changes and announcements after this post becomes stale, here is the steam group: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/TF2-TeamBuilder.

This is an interesting idea. Would you care to elaborate a bit on what you think such an integration would look like so I have a better understanding of what you mean?

As a result of some of the feedback I've received from you all, I've replaced the youtube embedded video feature with a pov demo linking feature. Youtube videos can still be added in the description, but they are no longer part of the standard application definition.

I received some interesting feedback through a friend from misterslin on hein's steam yesterday/this morning with regards to the search view. The general sentiment was it was too cumbersome to set all the search options and the resulting searches would be so specific that they would include only a few applications. While most of the parameters have a generic catch-all option, I am considering making a filterable application browsing view which shows all applications by default but allows for some filtering so that users who are used to browsing forum threads would still get a forum-esque experience but would still benefit from the efficiency of this site. The question then becomes whether the application browsing view replaces the existing search view or not. What do you guys think about all this?

Thanks again for your feedback so far. It's giving me the best opportunity I can get to deliver something that is useful to the TF2 community.

Yes, I can allow just links to demos (which I will probably end up doing to save space), but that can get a little hairy. It allows the potential for spam links, complete survey/view ad to download links, and expired links since the content becomes out of my control. I may end up using that option for the short term, though. I have to do some testing and calculations to see if I can apply any sort of rdbms backed compression algorithm on the demo files to make it manageable.

As a side note, do demos recorded with prec or "record demo" have the same trouble that the default replay system has with updates/models/etc that break them? If not, then I'll get rid of youtube integration entirely and swap in demo upload/linking. A user can always put a youtube link in the description if they really want.

I think I'll add in the demo integration first, then commenting, and then a new idea I have for a team organizer to help people who are looking to fill more than just a single spot. Something that allows associating applications with certain primary/backup class slots in your team organizer view, aggregating a team schedule, and the like.

Thank you so much for the feedback so far! This is some really valuable stuff. I'm going to implement some of these suggestions tonight and see how things work out.

Ah, the actual .dem files. Those would be easier to deal with than youtube videos, but that would increase the space requirement on the server by a few orders of magnitude. I'll add look into that in hopes of swapping the youtube feature with an attached demos feature (I'm assuming they shouldn't coexist unless some users want to upload voice commentaries or something). Thanks!

Comments are on my todo list. Thanks for the idea.
The purpose of the youtube video spots was for POV videos (not 360 no scope stuff, although they may be used like that occasionally). Are you talking about a way to link the videos to a specific class?

Thanks for the feedback so far.

If the youtube videos are extraneous, they can always be removed from the submission process. Did you see any other information that was unnecessary or missing?

Thanks for mentioning that. I searched for a while without finding anything like that. I think there should be enough differentiation between the sites to make it work, though.