New Feature: Multiple User Registration

A looong time ago, Tournr got the ability to have multiple users – but, the way to register more than one person at a time was always, well, let’s face it painful.

You would have to first register one person, then go through the whole process again straight away, and given the way PayPal works – that made everything longer and drawn out.

The New Competitor Selection Screen

The process has now been streamlined – so you can pay for multiple competitors at the same time. When you first click on ‘Pay Now’ you’ll be taken to the new Competitor Selection Screen (like below):

Here you can select either an existing competitor (the ‘Grey background’):

By saying firstly that you want to register them, and (importantly) that you have their permission to register.

If you want to add another competitor, you click on the ‘Add another individual’ button:

Then simply type the name into the fields that pop up.

When you’ve added as many as you want, press the ‘Continue to Registration’ button, and you can fill in the registration for the people you’ve selected:

Each competitor will be listed one after another – you can ‘minimise’ them once you are happy with it, and then proceed to pay as you used to:

Hopefully this will speed up registration of multiple users – as always please let me know if you have any issues!

New Feature: Dates Per Class

One of the things that Tournr has missed for a while is the ability to set the date a particular class will run on, this has typically been OK, but can be a bit confusing. Particularly if you register for a class that takes place on a Sunday, but the competition as a whole is running over the entire weekend.

From today, an organiser can now set the date for a given class. In both adding or editing a class you can now set the date:

There are a couple of rules:

the date of the class has to be on or after the start date of your competition
the date of the class has to be on or before the end date of your competition

Once you’ve done this, the competitor (or potential competitor) will be able to see the date on the class, and also in the email they get for a successful registration. Which will look like this:

In this example, I didn’t set the date for the 1.5Km class, hence no date showing. I would recommend you set the date for all your classes if you need to, to avoid confusion.

ECheque Tips

PayPal has a system called ‘eCheques’ – basically – they allow payment to come from someone’s bank account if they don’t have a debit / credit card – this can be a good thing, but can also be bad.

From Tournr’s point of view, if you take payment by eCheque – the competitor will not be registered until the cheque has cleared which can take up to 14 days according to PayPal. This is problematic if you take payment on the weekend before your competition and payment hasn’t cleared by the start. Even worse is that the payment doesn’t clear!

Solutions

There are a couple of solutions – the first is to set the last registration date to be 14 days before your competition. This means you can take any form of payment, but does mean your competitors have to be super on it.

The second solution is to not accept eCheques. To do that – you need to go to your PayPal account and click on ‘Seller Preferences’

Once there, click on the ‘update’ button of ‘Block Payments’:

And then select the check box to block eCheques:

Finally – press ‘Save’ and you’re done:

Tournr–Donating

I’ve had some people ask if they can donate to Tournr, which was super kind and I thank you very much for it! Obviously it’d be great to get some help paying the bills, and Tournr does have bills – servers, databases etc.

To that end, I’ve added donating to Tournr! From the off this should be clear – it is a donation – you don’t have to do it, you get the same features for free as you do if you donate. The only side benefit you get to donating is a badge on your competition so that people know you’re supporting Tournr, and that warm feeling of doing good :)

How do you donate?

Only organisers can donate, and it’s a case of donating a percent of the fee you’re charging. If you’re running the competition for free – then you can’t donate.

To donate, you first have to edit your payment details for your competition.

Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see the donating to Tournr section:

By default this is unchecked and set at 0%. You can choose whatever % you want to go with. Once saved, you should see a badge to let the world know you are a donator:

Which also pops up on the list of tournaments:

When a competitor goes to pay, you will see the ‘donator’ information banner:

And when paying a competitor will see:

Badges

You can get one of the following badges for donating:

Bronze, for donations less than 0.5%

Silver, for donations of 1% or less

and Gold for donations larger than 1%

What do I need to know?

There are some things you should be aware of.

Refunds

Because of the way payments happen, to refund a competitor you who has paid the donation, you either need to add the donation to their payment (which will cost you) or let me know and I will also refund the payment. Example: You will receive a payment of £9.90 (for example) so to fully refund a competitor you would need to refund £10, thereby costing you 10p, or email me and I will refund the 10p as well (thereby costing you nothing, but adding another step Sad smile )

Limits

Tournr will only take donations that are above the minimum transaction limits of PayPal, so for GBP – that’s 1p, for USD that’s 2 cents – you can see the limits on PayPal itself here.

More Information

You can read more about it on the Tournr help page (https://www.tournr.com/Help/Donating)

Obviously please email me if you have any questions at all!

New Feature: Calendar

Tournr has always been developed according to what people ask for – so if you ask for something – generally you’ll get it!

To that end someone asked if we could get a calendar into Tournr – to put things other than just competitions. Well – now you can!

Calendars are based around Organisations – so first you need an organisation, luckily – I have one!

https://tournr.com/organisation/tournr

On there, you’ll now see a link to ‘our calendar’:

Off we go…

Oh dear. No events :(

Let’s add one!

You get the usual form to fill in for an event, you can set the date and the Name, location etc:

and you can set the type of event:

If the event you’re adding is on Tournr, you can skip all this and select the check box at the top:

Then you enter the ID of the competition:

So for example, I’ve added ‘406’ – which is the Shoreline Handicap Surf Classic competition, this is then added to the calendar like this:

And if you click on it you get taken to:

You can then add it to you calendar:

Which will go into your preferred calendar option!

New Feature – Copying and Moving Competitors

Copying or moving competitors is something that Tournr (until now) has lacked, there are actually a lot of reasons why you might want to:

Someone registered for the wrong class by accident (Move)
On the day someone actually decided to take part in another class as well (Copy)
A class with multiple ‘sub classes’ might want to be split out to give individual positions

We’ll focus on the last case, as it covers the others as well.

I’ve recently run a Handicap class in my competition:

The class had a mixture of men and women taking part, but I’d not provided a way for Men and Women to take part in separate classes. At the time, I didn’t think I’d get enough people to justify separate classes. However, I’ve got the handicap scores, and I’ve worked out that I can provide a Men’s and Women’s individual ranking.

First off, I add two new classes – Ladies and Mens

The old solution to this would be to press the ‘Add Competitor’ buttons to add the names of the competitors, which would provide the position information to anyone looking at the page – but the problem with that is that as a competitor, when you log on to Tournr you can’t see your positions, and Tournr itself can’t apply rankings as it doesn’t know who the anonymous competitors actually are.

The new and much better approach is to use the competitor menu:

and select ‘Copy to another class’, this will open another page to allow you to copy the selected competitor (and others) to a new class:

Once ‘Copy’ is pressed you can see Alice and Charlotte are now in both Ladies and Handicap.

Not only does this mean the positions are correctly attributed to the right people, but it also saves a lot of typing, and the same deal for the men:

Results in:

New Feature – Teams

This has been a major update to Tournr, it’s required some hefty changes and I think it’s for the better, but really that’s for you to decide!

Firstly, a brief overview – Tournr has always run individual based competitions – and done so relatively well, an individual competitor can register, unregister and well, keep track of their scores. What you couldn’t do was register a team. Up until recently, this wasn’t a huge issue as no-one was running a team based event, but I noticed one competition running an individuals weekend event on Tournr, and a teams based event via a PDF and PayPal!

So – the goal was to remove that PDF and get everything onto Tournr, to be able to make it one place to go to register rather than two.

I’m pleased to announce (as you might have guessed from the title) that Tournr now has this. So without further ado:

Adding a Team Class

This is done in exactly the same way as adding an individual class, the difference being you check the ‘Do you want this to be a Team class?’ checkbox:

and you’ll get some extra options pop up:

Size of team – this is the maximum size of a given team (not including any reserves).
Number of reserves – this is the number of reserves – this plus the ‘size of team’ gives you the full size.
Extra restrictions – a place for you to note if there are any extra restrictions for your class
Age Restriction checkbox – allows you to set an age restriction on a team class (this will be coming to normal classes soon!)

So if you have a juniors class, you can restrict entry to people who are aged 18 or under on the 1st of January 2017 like so:

Setting your prices

This is one of the major changes to current Tournr methods – Payment details are now edited on a separate page from the normal setup pages.

Please read this post: Payments Update to get more information on what you can set!

Registering a team

First choose to register a team!

This will take you to the team registration page, where you fill in the general things your team needs:

And then you fill in the classes you want to register for – because this is a juniors class and we set the age restriction – we have to set the date of birth for these competitors:

Once that’s all filled in, pressing ‘Register’ will register the team (if you need to pay you’ll get taken to the PayPal page), you will then see the team registered on the page:

Tournr – Payments Updates

Partly to do the Teams feature addition, and partly to simplify things, the payments setup has been moved to another page, you can get there in a few ways –

One – by selecting ‘Edit payment details’ from the cog in the top right of the page:

Two – pressing the ‘edit’ icon next to the Payment details:

or three, from the normal ‘Edit’ page you can press the ‘Edit the payment details’ button:

When you first get there, you will have the option to make the competition free, or say you want to charge:

Selecting ‘Charge’ will open up a whole new set of options.

Basic Details

Use the notes field as before to put any details in (address for cheques etc) – bear in mind – this is publicly available information, so be careful with what you put there!

PayPal Setup

Selecting ‘I want to use PayPal to take payments’ will provide you with the paypal setup fields, the most important is the email address. NB: I’ve made it so that you can only use PayPal with ‘Register on Payment’ – so you can’t use PayPal buttons anymore.

Individual Entrants Setup

Here you decide whether or not to charge for individual entrant classes. If you do decide to charge, you get the usual options from before:

Additional Items

If you’re adding things like T-Shirts, or meals you can add them here, so they are available for a competitor to select at checkout:

Team Entrants Setup

You can charge entry for teams in one of two ways – firstly by charging for each class entered (as individuals are charged):

Or a single flat rate fee which means one team can enter multiple classes:

Early Bird Prices

Early bird pricing works as before, but you now have the option to set for teams or individuals (or both):

Discount Codes

Discount codes also now have the option to set for Team or Individuals.

Early Bird Prices!

No – don’t worry – Tournr isn’t charging anyone – but what it does now allow is for Organisers to be able to set Early Bird Prices.

Eh?

An early bird price is a price that is lower than the normal full price, it’s a way to get more people to your competition, and earlier.

Ok, how?

As with most things – the Cog is your friend – click on that and select ‘Edit’

Scroll down to the Payment Details Section – (I’m going to make an assumption here that you’ve got payments setup, if not please see the older posts about that)

Just after the settings for the costs you’ll see a new checkbox (Include Early Bird Prices):

If you select this you’ll be able to add as many prices as you want – if you want different prices for each day – go for it!

Like so:

Scroll to the bottom and Save. All done!

What does it do?

You get a new panel showing the Early Bird Prices:

And the ‘Classes’ drop down will reflect the current early bird deal:

New Feature–PayPal Carts!

Up until now, Tournr has let organisers use PayPal for registration costs, so 1 class, 2 classes – all the way to n classes, with an additional class option thrown in for good measure, and that works for a lot of the time. But sometimes you want just a little more, maybe you’re needing to add an ‘Insurance for the day’ type option, or an ‘Extra Meal Ticket’. Tournr didn’t help you with that :( but now – it does!

You can now use a cart based system instead, so you can have as many extra items on as you want, plus the registration costs. How does it work? Let me show you.

The technique is the same for either editing an existing Tournament, or creating a new one, when you’re on the create/edit page, make sure you have the ‘Add payment details’ check box selected:

Then select ‘Use PayPal’

and then select ‘Use a PayPal Cart`:

Now you can start to add Cart Items, as many as you want:

You can add new items by pressing the ‘Add another item’ button, or remove them by pressing the red ‘X’ next to each row. Fill in all the other details as you would for a normal PayPal buy now button (see the previous post if you need help there) and ‘Save’ the competition.

When you scroll down to your new/edited competitions ‘Payment details’ section, you’ll see:

Competitors can add each item to the cart and when ready, ‘View Cart’ to pay.

Tournr

Your competitions, your way

Author: tournr