Tournr Tips #8 – PayPal

IMPORTANT NOTE!! This tip is now out of date – please see PayPal Integration to integrate PayPal.

The description part of a competition allows you to embed most things you can find on the internet. Handily this also applies to PayPal, quite often these days competitions like to take money via PayPal – there are lots of reasons, competitors can use credit cards or bank accounts to make payments and in a safe way. It also allows an organiser to manage the payments, issue refunds without having to post off a cheque. Not having to deal with Cheques is a big plus point in itself!

Generally – PayPal has 2 ways to send payments, the first is you put an email address in and ‘send’ your payment via that address, the downside to that scenario is that someone can easily mistype an email – not everyone can copy/paste (for example, reading from a phone screen whilst typing into a webpage), and some characters 0 and O (that’s ‘zero’ and the letter ‘o’) can easily be mixed up.

The second way generally seen is via the PayPal button – which is ace, as you can even go the whole hog and create a cart system.

Tournr will work equally well with both, but in this post I’m just going to show how to do the button code, as typing an email address is easy, and you already know how to do that!

To use buttons, you do need to have Premier or Business account with PayPal. This allows you to accept credit cards etc, I believe (and it’s been a long time since I’ve done it) you need to verify your account, PayPal is very good at helping you with this, so I’ll leave it to them.

If you have a premier or business account already, then we’re good to go, and we want to go to the button factory – (that link takes you to the UK version, but I imagine it will redirect to the region you are in). You have a choice of 5 button types, In principle you can embed any of them, but we’re only really interested in the ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Add To Cart’ buttons. You can use either for doing most of the cases you’re going to be looking at, with you needing to do slightly more to use the ‘Cart’ button, but we’ll cross that bridge a little further down.

Buy Now

Buy Now is most appropriate for a competition with one class, or just a set entrance fee. It’s a simple one click payment option. You can also use it for multiple classes if you have a simple set up.

From the ‘button factory’ select the Create your button now link, if you’re not logged in you will be asked to.

Here you can choose a different button type (if you’ve changed your mind), but we’ll stick with the current one. The next thing to fill in is the ‘Item name’, generally, to make life easier, it’s best to stick in the name of your competition. If you regularly run the ‘British Open’ it’s worth putting the name as something like ‘British Open 2014’ so you can distinguish it from the next time you run it – you can use the Item ID for this as well, so something like BO2014 might be appropriate.

If you have only one entry, then add in the price (and choose your currency), then press Create Button. If you have more than one type of entry, let’s do some customising!

We have 2 options, a drop-down with or without prices. You’d use the without prices option if you’re looking at a single price, but multiple options – i.e. a competitor can only take part in one class. Most likely you’re looking for the option with prices.

Just fill in the payment details, and this is entirely up to you. Let’s say we allow competitors to enter up to 3 classes, the first class we charge at £10, and each subsequent class is only £5 we might setup our button to look like this:

Which results in a button like:

Next we can skip the 2nd and 3rd steps of the button factory (by all means look at them and see if there is anything you want to do – one thing that can be handy is to restrict the number of entries allowed using the ‘Track Inventory’ option).

We want to press the ‘Create Button’ button now:

Now you are taken to a page called ‘Add your button code to your webpage’ which is handy, as that’s what we want to do. You’ll see a box with a ‘Website’ tab, what you want to do is copy that code and paste it into your ‘Description’ of your competition:

(Where the red arrow is)

Which when you save will give you this on your competition page:

The competitor can now press the ‘Buy Now’ button, and PayPal deals with the rest.

Add To Cart

Add To Cart is most appropriate for a multiple-class competition, where competitors can enter in multiple classes, or where you need to have optional extras such as ‘day insurance’.

It’s a very similar process to the one above, you can decide to have one button per price point, so you might have a ‘First Class’ button where the price is £10 then a second button for subsequent classes, which is set at £5, the choice as they say is yours (though please email me if you want advice on what to do, I’ll be more than happy to help!).

In this case – you’ll add multiple buttons using the same approach as you would for the ‘Buy Now’ button. The only extra thing you need to do is create a ‘View Cart’ button, which you can see as an option at the bottom of the page when you ‘Create’ your cart button:

This doesn’t really have any options, and is a straight copy/paste job.

Tournr Tips #7 – Embedding things

The description part of a competition can be more than plain text, it actually uses a type of text entry called ‘MarkDown’ (you can find out more about that by clicking on that link), which is becoming a standard in forums and messaging boards. It allows you to put bullets, headings etc, but without having to learn HTML.

One of the nice things about that is that you aren’t restricted to just text, you can embed other things, such as YouTube videos, Vimeo.

How?

This demo is with YouTube, but the same principle exists for pretty much all the media sites, if you have difficulty, please feel free to email me via the site and I’ll get you working!

First, let’s find the video we want to embed, for demo purposes I’ve gone with the Shoreline Triathlon (see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCHwieXHhrY). What we need is the embed code. To get that, go to the video page, and click on the ‘Share’ link:

Next, choose the ‘Embed’ option:

Below this, you have some options you can play around with, I’d stick with the default settings, but feel free to play around with the video size.

When you’re all happy, select the code in the text box (it should begin <iframe), right click on it (or whatever the equivalent is in the Mac world) and select ‘Copy’:

Go to your Competition on Tournr, and Select Edit:

In the ‘description’ field, paste the code you just copied from YouTube.

Save your tournament:

And now you have your video in the competition!

Recap

Look for the ‘Share’ link on a page you want to show in Tournr, look for the Embed code and copy and paste it into the description field of your Competition.

By the way – this will also work for Groups, Terms and Conditions etc, which is pretty cool!

Introducing Basic Ranking

So, Tournr has been adding bits here and there, mostly in a lead up to this change – the ability to automatically work out rankings for a given group.

Word of warning – there are some caveats to use ranking in it’s current form (they will be ironed out soon) – I’ll list them at the bottom, but first let me show you the what.

Ranking wise, I’ve initially developed a Basic Ranking system based on the 1998 BCU rules (kindly supplied by Peter Blenkinsop) – I’m sure there is a better name, but this is what I’m going with now.

How is the ranking calculated?

The maximum number of points available to any given competitor is 100, so 1st place will always get 100 points. From here on in, each subsequent competitor earns using the following formula:

So in a competition of 2 people, the scores would look like:

Position	Score
1	100
2	(100/2) * (2-2+1) = (50 * 1) = 50

For 3:

Position	Score
1	100
2	(100/3) * (3-2+1) = (33.3 * 2) = 67 (rounded)
3	(100/3) * (3-3+1) = (33.3 * 1) = 33 (rounded)

You get the idea. The scores from the competitions are added together, and the highest total is 1st overall, the lowest is last.

Over the course of 5 competitions (for example) typically, you pick your best N competitions (with the BCU this is 3), this allows you to a) discount a bad day (we all have them) and b) not have to attend all the competitions in a given year, which if they are over a disparate locations, or indeed you just happen to be on holiday – is a good thing.

It also encourages you to take part in more than one competition, as turning up and taking part can get you a higher rank than just doing well in one competition (bold indicates the ‘best’ 3 scores):

Name	Comp1	Comp2	Comp3	Comp4	Comp5	Total	Rank
Andy	1st/100	–	–	1st/100	–	200	3
Bruce	3rd/50	2nd/67	1st/100	4th/25	1st/100	267	1
Charlotte	2nd/75	1st/100	3rd/33	3rd/50	2nd/67	242	2
Danielle	4th/25	3rd/33	2nd/67	2nd/75	3rd/33	175	4

Andy wins all the competitions he’s in, but both Bruce and Charlotte get a higher overall ranking as they have a third score which adds to their total.

The system works when there are draws, as you simply give two people the same ranking, so if both Andy and Charlotte have the same score, then they share the rank, with Bruce and Danielle following:

Name	Score	Rank
Andy	250	1
Bruce	175	4
Charlotte	250	1
Danielle	205	3

How do I use this?

First, you need to have a group, a group in Tournr has rankings, as a group is the only way to group together competitions. Once you have your group you need to add your competitions (see Tips #6), then we enter new territory.

Setting the Ranking

Not every competition is ranked, and we need to be able to deal with that, by default when you add a competition to your group it’s not ranked, so first we need to click on the ‘details’ button of our added tournament:

Once on the details page, we can see the competition is not ranked,

to change that, we click on the ‘Not ranked’ button and get a new ‘Ranked’ button.

(You can simply click the Ranked button again to change it back to being not ranked). When we go ‘Back to Group’ we can see our competition is now ranked.

Once you’ve done that for all your competitions, the next stage is to add a some Ranking details. Here you decide the period of time to rank for and how many competitions to select for the top ‘N’.

First, click on the ‘Add a ranking’ button

As an example, for a ranking for all of 2014 with only the top 3 results counting, you would put in:

That’s it, now your ranking will show up.

Clicking on the name of the ranking will take you to the ranking page:

Clicking on ‘how is this worked out’ link will take you to a page describing the ranking process:

One thing to note (if you get no results) you might need to finalise (see Tip #4) your competitions for the rankings to take effect, this is so Tournr knows the results have been set.

The Future

Ranking wise – this is the beginning, I’ve primarily done the Basic system as this is the area I’m most comfortable with, I plan on implementing other systems (Elo for example) over time, and depending on what people want most. Please contact me directly if you have an idea or something is awry!

The caveats

So, as I said up top, there are some caveats (at the time of writing) to using the ranking, they’re not to onerous, and they will be solved shortly, but I wanted to get a version out sooner rather than later.

Class Names:

At present, you will need to name your classes the same across all the ranked competitions, so if in one competition the Open is called Super-Open, it won’t be matched to another competition which has the Open called Open. I’m working on a solution to allow an administrator to define the classes that are ranked, and then allow them to map a competition specific class to a ranking class.

Competitors:

If you’re a registered competitor on Tournr, then there are no problems, your rank will be correct, the problem lies with anonymous users, or specifically, users an organiser has added themselves. The trouble is whether John Smith in one competition is the same John Smith in another competition. I’ve made a judgement call for the time being that YES, if two people in two competitions are called the same, then they are the same person from the point of view of ranking – this does take into account any ‘Alias’ you might have assigned someone. So, as with the Class Names above – if the names differ, I can’t tell if they are supposed to be the same person, for example:

Competition 1 – Open Class – John Smith
Competition 2 – Open Class – Jon Smith

As far as the system is concerned they are different people, and so will be ranked differently.

Tournr

Your competitions, your way

Month: August 2014