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.

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:

New Feature: Handicap Classes

Most of the competitions Tournr helps to run are straight forward class registration, and by that I mean you register for a class and accept the T&C’s and you’re in (subject to payment etc.) but there is one type of class Tournr didn’t really deal with very well until now – Handicap Classes.

What was the problem?

Well – for a handicap class as an organiser you want to know the handicap score for each user. To get this, you generally have a set of questions and the answers to these give you a score. The main problem was that Tournr didn’t give you anywhere to put the score. Another side problem was that generally, you’d put the questions into the description which gave a disconnect between registering and working out your score (you might click ‘register’ and then have to close the form to read the questions, then re-open the form), which wasn’t good for competitors.

What’s the solution?

You can now set the class (when adding, or editing) to be a handicap class, and add in the questions (if you want to). Now when a competitor registers, they have to provide a handicap score.

Show me!

On the ‘add/edit’ screens for a class, you now have a ‘Handicap class’ checkbox:

Tick it and you get the option to add questions:

After adding the questions (if you want) save the class and when someone comes to register for it, they will see the following form:

(If you as the organiser have asked for more information, that will be there as well!) The competitor can click the ‘see questions’ link to see the handicap questions:

Then fill in their score and press ‘Register’

As an organiser – you can see the handicap score in two ways, first is by pressing the ‘View’ icon:

The second way is to download the ‘Competitors by Class’ document:

(CSV or XLS will be the same), when you open the file you will see the competitors with Handicap score (where applicable):

The ‘open’ class in this example doesn’t have a handicap, so no score entered.

Introducing Multi-User (or Tournr for Families)

Some things you only learn from doing, and Tournr’s development is no different, today I’m pleased to introduce a feature I hadn’t even thought about until Tournr was used to help with the running of the Ride Surf Kayak British Championships. Multiple Users, or Tournr for families.

The problem

This first appeared when a parent tried to register two members of their family for the same competition. They created an account on Tournr and set the name to one of their children, registered them, and then ran into a wall of no-functionality. At which point they emailed me and I added them as a Non-registered competitor (see tip #1). But that is a terrible flow, it puts a mental jump between simply pressing ‘Register’ and having to now have a conversation and tell someone else the details needed to register.

Subsequently, another case arrived which was slightly different where we had one person registering a collection of others on behalf of a group / organisation.

The solution

Tournr now supports both cases with the Multi-user feature, to use it first you need to turn it on, this is as simple as logging into your account and selecting the ‘All Your Settings’ option from the Account menu:

Once there, simply press the ‘Turn ON’ button, next to the Turn on Multi-user message:

A new section will appear:

And you can add as many other users to your account as you want by pressing the ‘+ Another User’ button:

You can also edit their names, delete them from here too.

When you register for a class you get the option to now select which user you want to use:

And from here you fill in the details you need to as required by the competition. As a default the values are prefilled with the Primary users details (e.g. the parent), and the email address will always be the primary users.

Benefits

The prime benefit of doing the accounts this way, over using the ‘non-members’ approach is that the stats / positions / ranks etc are all linkable together, giving you the ability to see (soon) a history of positions, all the competitions taken part in for every user. So in 10 years time, you can look back and see how well you did.

Another benefit is that if the other user decides they want their own account, you’ll be able to migrate all of this information to their account so they don’t lose their data.

Any questions or problems, please let me know via the feedback!

New Feature: Types

Tournr has never really cared about the type of your competition, it’s quite happy to run anything with you and that is still the case today. But! If you want to give your classes types, well now you can!

This isn’t a huge feature, but it’s needed for a couple of things that are coming up that I promise you will be very nifty indeed. So, on to the show and tell.

What is a Type?

A type is a classification of your class, by the sport or game type, it can be a broad classification (e.g. Kayak) to specific (e.g. K-1 Sprint 500m) though ideally, the more concise the better.

How do I set a Type?

As always, login and go to your tournament. In there go down to your classes, and click on ‘edit’ to change the class you want to add a type to:

There is a new text box called ‘Type’, click in there and type in the name of the type you want to classify your class as.

You’ll get a loading indicator whilst Tournr searches for valid matches, and if it finds any, it will show them to you on the screen:

When you save and go back to your classes you’ll see the type next to the class name:

To remove your type, simply edit the class again and delete the type then save!

Now, of course Tournr hasn’t got every sport, not even close (in fact at the time of writing, we’ve got the Olympic Kayak / Canoe and surf classes), so what happens if the class you want isn’t listed?

Just type it in, Tournr might give you suggestion as to what it thinks you mean, but you are free to ignore it!

Results in:

These custom entries won’t show up in the Tournr suggestions initially as they need to be approved by an administrator of the site. If we’ve missed something please feel free to use the feedback link to let us know!

Why do this?

I hinted at a couple of things that I can do when I have this information, firstly (and I think pretty importantly) I’d like to be able to search by sport / game type, to be able to filter all the tournaments by type would be very handy for competitors, once you have that you can do some other things (one of which will be very soon and I don’t want to ruin the surprise).

Just to make it clear: You don’t have to set this at all, you can leave all classes without types and Tournr will work just fine, but I think it will help in the long run.

Tournr Tips #3 – Results

Tournr doesn’t just allow you to record entrants, but record their scores as well.

Adding Results

So, your competition has run and you’ve got results to enter

1. Go to the class you want to add the results for

2. Click on the ‘add results’ button:

3. You then get the ‘Add results’ page:

4. Fill it in as per your results:

Yes, you can use the same number for multiple people, as happens in some competitions.

5. You have the option of publishing now, if you check the ‘publish the results’ box:

the results will appear on your competition’s page. If you don’t then the results are saved, but they won’t be visible on your page – you can then go back to the ‘Set Results’ page and change the publish status later.

6. Saving takes you back to the main page, which (if you did publish the results) will look like:

Tournr Tips #2 – Messaging

Organisers! You want to send a message to your competitors? Everyone! You want to send a message to the organisers? No problem, Tournr has you covered.

One of the problems of running a competition is keeping in contact with everyone, sure a webpage is nice as long as people can get to it and check it regularly. But what happens when you want to ask a question, or just let a group of people know something?

Organisers

1. When logged in to your competition look to the top right hand side of the navigation bar and click on the ‘envelope’ icon:

2. Select who you want to send the message to:

Note, you can message all, a particular class (in this case the open) or a particular competitor (me). If you have more classes, you’d have more options, equally the same for competitors.

3. Send the message and you’ll get a message sent notification:

4. Everyone will receive a message in their email like so:

Everyone

Sending a message to the organisers is super easy – you don’t even need to be logged in!

1. Scroll down the competition page to the ‘Organisers’ section:

2. Press the ‘contact’ button

if you’re not logged in, the Name and Email address fields will be blank, ideally you want to fill in at least the email address so you can get a reply.

3. Again, ‘Sending’ the message will get you a success notification

4. The organisers will get the following message: