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 – 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.

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.

Tournr Tips #9 – Payment without PayPal

I recently wrote about how to add PayPal to Tournr, but what if you don’t want to use PayPal? Prefer cheques? Prefer BACS? – Of course we can do that!

First things first – we’ve got to be logged in, then let’s head to our tournament and edit it:

Scroll to the ‘Add Payment Details’ section, and select ‘Add payment details’:

Add in your information in the ‘Notes’ field (you can use MarkDown if you want):

Lastly, ensure that the ‘Use PayPal’ check box is left off.

Then press ‘Save’

Then on the tournament page you will have a payment section:

Just a quick couple of tips for formatting the text as above, when editing your text, to get each bit on a new line put 2 spaces at the end of the preceding line. To get italics, surround what you want to be italicised with single ‘*’ characters (like *this*). To get bold, use 2 ‘*’ characters (like **this**).

Paypal and YouTube/Vimeo integration

Turns out that letting anyone embed whatever they want into a webpage is a bit of a security risk, whilst it’s super handy to embed youtube / paypal etc, there is too much risk. So, as of 1pm today Tournr stopped allowing you to embed YouTube / Paypal in the way I’d previously shown.

But it’s too important to be able to use PayPal and YouTube to not have it there. So there is a solution to the problem, and hopefully it’s way better than before anyhow :) We’ll start with the two simple things, YouTube and Vimeo.

Embedding YouTube

To embed a YouTube video all you need is the identifier of the video, you can get this from the address bar of your browser when you’re looking at the video:

The bit surrounded by red in the picture, you copy that exactly (case does matter in this instance) and add it to your description by wrapping it with the tags: [yt]

For example:

[yt]kFsZo-xw9Dk[yt]

will display as:

Embedding Vimeo

Pretty much the same deal as YouTube above, the main difference is the tags are [vim] instead. The Vimeo ID is a number at the end of the url, again, in the address bar of your browser:

So,

[vim]113311298[vim]

will display as:

PayPal Integration

This is the biggest change, in the past I’ve suggested going to the PayPal website and generating a button then pasting that button into the Description field. It’s a bit of a disconnect to have to jump to PayPal to generate a button, then back to Tournr. So now, as part of competition creation (or indeed editing) you can add payment details and Tournr will automagically generate the button code for you.

So, when you come to edit or create a competition you’ll see a checkbox entitled ‘Add payment details?’, by default this is not selected, and if you don’t add any (or if you uncheck this at a later date) no payment details will be displayed on the site.

If you do check the box, all the options for payment will appear:

So let’s take this field by field:

Notes: This is text that appears above the button, allowing you to specify instructions, or (indeed if you’re not using PayPal) how to pay.

Email address for payments: The email address PayPal will send to. If you get this wrong paypal won’t accept a payment, if you get someone else’s email address – then someone else will get the payment, be extra careful with this!

Item Name / Item Code: These are codes for you to see what someone has paid for, if you leave them empty, they will be set to defaults of ‘<your competition name> Registration’

Number of classes to show: The number of classes to allow registration for on the button, if competitors can register for only 2 classes, set this to 2.

Currency: 3 options, £, € or $

Cost of registering for one class: This is the first class cost

Cost of registering for another class: This is for subsequent classes, if you leave this blank, the price of the first class will be used.

Show additional class option: This allows the paypal button to have one more option of ‘Additional Class’ which will be at the cost of registering for another class.

Additional Text Field: Use this if you want some extra detail from paying competitors (T-Shirt size for example)

Visible to unregistered competitors?: If checked, then you don’t have to be registered to be able to see the pay button.

The example picture above results in the following button:

and:

if I change the number of classes to ‘10’, I end up with this:

This removes the need to go to PayPal and generate buttons, and creates a specific ‘Payment Details’ section on your competition page, making it clearer to competitors how to pay.

New Feature – Skills – How

I recently added a new feature to Tournr – Skills Rating, you’ll notice it by a number that will appear after your name when you register, or when the results are in.

I’m going to do some more posts on how this is calculated, but in brief, everyone starts at 1000, and ratings go up/down depending on what position you come, and (most importantly) who you are competing against at the time. If you compete against a high score person and beat them, then your score will go up a larger amount than if you have a high score and beat someone with a low score.

As I said, I’ll explain it all properly on subsequent posts, but for now, this will cover how to make sure you tournament has it.

How to get Skills Ratings

First and most important is the type of the class, you need to have this set so the ratings can be calculated, your rating is on a type by type basis, so you might be an amazing chess player, but rubbish at draughts.

Here I’ve set the type to ‘Swan Peddalo Surfing’, now all I need to do is add the results for the competition:

Enter the scores (the ratings will not be calculated for anonymous competitors, nor if there is only one competitor):

The actual ratings are only calculated when the organiser finalises the competition:

The organiser confirms they want it finalised and your scores are calculated.

Here, because I was first, my rating is above 1000, the 2nd place is below 1000 (again, I will explain this better later on)

Things to note:

1. This rating will take at least 3 competitions to start to normalise to your actual rating, if you’ve only taken part in one competition, the rating will be inaccurate and won’t reflect your actual rating.

2. You need to specify a competition type.

3. Ratings are only calculated if there are 2 or more registered members, anonymous members can’t be rated mainly because of note ‘1’, we need a set of results to be able to be accurate, and we could never do that with anonymous competitors.

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