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.

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:

Do you come from a Country?

Good news if you do! Tournr now lets you select a country and that country’s flag will then appear next to your name!

How do you do it?

First log in to your account on Tournr.

Then go to the ‘All your settings’ page (from the top ‘Account’ menu):

Edit your personal details:

Select your country from the list:

You can pick things like Wales, Scotland, England if you want to be specific! Once you press ‘Save’ you should see your flag next to your name on the account page:

All the competitions you’ve entered will have the flag updated as well!

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.

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!

Registration with Extra Details

Tournr has recently helped with the registration for the Ride Surf Kayak British Championships which has been a baptism of fire in many respects. As it stands there are 100 entries over 9 classes of competition, which is far and away the biggest event Tournr has been used for so far.

In doing so there were a couple of additions the guys at Ride wanted to be added for Tournr to be useful for them, so I’m going to introduce them to you.

Extra Registration Detail

They wanted the ability to record the BCU / CANI / WCA etc membership number of each competitor, (for the insurance of the event), Tournr initially didn’t cope with this as I’d only added email, phone and address as fields a competitor could have. The problem is that a football / scrabble / other competition isn’t going to want to have a BCU field, (they may have their own governing body though), and I didn’t want to have to restrict it to being just a ‘Governing body membership number’ field. So now we have an ‘Extra detail’ field. This can be anything you want:

When you set up your competition to have this field a competitor will see this when they register:

Which, by pressing the ‘eye’ () icon next to their name will show you all the details:

At the moment, there is only one dynamic registration field like this, there will be more at a later date.

Classes Button

Simple and should have been there from the start, but a quick way to get to the classes you want to register for is now provided by the ‘Classes’ button, to be found just under the title:

Documents

I’ve not really documented (ha!) much about these yet, as they primarily help Organisers a bit later on in the day, but in essence they provide an Excel (or plain CSV) file giving all the details of the competitors, useful for printing sign in sheets etc. I’ve also added the number of classes each competitor has entered to the ‘All Competitors List’.

New Feature – Private Competitions & Inviting

Tournr is proud to add a new feature:

Private Competitions

There are a few reasons why you might want private competitions, firstly you might want to play around with a competition (or the site!) but not have your efforts viewable to everyone, or you might just want to have a competition with your friends.

How to set the privacy

First off, you need to create a competition (or indeed edit an existing one), you’ll notice the checkbox under the competition name:

Simply, if checked – then it’ll be private, if left blank then it’ll be public. It’s the same if you’re editing an existing tournament:

Obviously, unchecking the box will make your tournament public.

What does it mean?

Your tournament will not be searchable, or get-to-able by anyone you personally haven’t invited. When you look at your competition it will say ‘private’ next to the name:

On the home page, you will see a padlock next to your private competitions:

If someone goes to your competition, and they are not allowed in (or aren’t logged in) they will see this page:

Inviting

A competition of 1 does not make for a lot of fun (although you do win all the time, so there is an upside!) – so you’ll want to invite people.

You invite via the ‘cog’ menu in the top right hand corner:

You fill in the form that pops up:

NB. It’s a semi-colon (;) delimited list of email addresses.

Press the ‘Send Invites’ button and away you go. The invitees will get an email asking them to come along and see the competition. Invitees do have to have an account on the site to see your competition, and the invite code they get is a one-time-use code, once they’ve used it no-one else can use it.

When you have invited people you can see who you’ve invited on your competition page (only organisers can see this):

The numbers mean I have sent 1 invite, and I’ve had 0 people accept.

I have two choices with the invite, the ‘resend’ button will resend the original invite, the ‘delete’ button will delete the invitation – so if the invitee does click on the link in the email – they still won’t be able to see the competition (useful if you put the wrong email address in by accident).

If someone accepts an invitation to a private competition all it means is that they can see the competition, they are not automatically registered to compete or anything, so you can quite easily invite people just to spectate the competition, or maybe just to view it to give you feedback before you make it public.

You can see who has accepted via the ‘Invites’ section of the Tournament Page:

Invitation Side Effect (or plus point)

One of the nice things about the invitation system is that it will also work for non-private competitions, so you can invite people to see your competition via the ‘cog’ menu in exactly the same way as above.

The main difference is that users will be sent just a link to your competition as no invite code is needed.

What if I want to go Private from Public?

Good question – Anyone who is registered to compete will still be able to see the competition, as will any organisers. People who have just looked at the competition in the past will not be able to see the competition anymore without and invite.

Questions?

As always – just ask either email or comment and I will be happy to help!

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: