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:

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: 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**).

New Feature – Attachments!

Tournr is designed to allow an organiser to organise a competition and have all the bits & bobs that go with it easy to fill in and then display to the competitor. But sometimes you just need that bit extra, maybe a Menu for that post competition meal, maybe a handicap form – really the options on that front are limitless!

Until now, an organiser has been limited to either copying the text of a doc and putting it into the description field, or saying something like ‘Email me for the form’. Neither of which is a good solution, as it means the organiser has to still be involved and may as well drop back to the traditional spreadsheet & email option. So let me introduce…

Attachments!

As an organiser you can now add any number of attachments to your tournament, you can make each attachment visible to everyone, competitors or even just organisers. Let me show you how.

First step is to login and go to your competition, once there, scroll down below the Description section, and you should see an Attachments section.

Pressing the ‘+’ button will take you to the ‘Add Attachment’ page:

Press ‘Browse’ and select the file you want, this will then display in the box:

You can type any description you want, this will appear next to the attachment (for those in the know – you can use MarkDown here if you want)

The next two options are who (other than the Organisers) can see the attachment:

Visible to anyone
If this is set, anyone can see the attachment. They don’t need to be logged in or a competitor.
Visible to competitors
If this is set and Visible to anyone isn’t set, then only competitors and organisers can see the attachment.

If neither of the options is selected, then only organisers can see the attachments.

We hit ‘Save’ and now we can see the attachment in the tournament:

As I’m an organiser – I can delete the attachment (using the ‘bin’ icon), and all anyone else has to is click on the name to download the file.

Limitations

File size is currently limited to 2Mb, let me know if this is an issue or you need to upload bigger.
File types are limited – this means you can’t upload .exe, .bat, .cmd etc files (and the rest of the usual suspects).

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!

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.

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!