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 – 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).

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: Groups

It’s been a little while since I added anything to Tournr, but I’ve been busy working away to get this out, and it’s a big change, a lot has been added setting Tournr up nicely for going forward.

What is a group?

A group is just that, a collection of people it could be an official association (British Canoe Union) a club (Bude Canoe Club), a work group (Tournr Wave Skiers) just a group of friends (Chris’ Mates), anything that can have members!

A group allows you to put all your competitions in one place, so a group can keep track of the competitions it’s running / part of.

What’s in a group?

There are two types of members in a group:

Administrators
- Administer the group, they can add/remove members, tournaments, make new admins, invite people etc
Members
- The people who are in the group, they can suggest tournaments and get access to any of the groups tournaments.

Why bother?

It allows you to group all your tournaments together
It shows that a tournament that is approved by a group meets the standards of that group (i.e. competitors have to wear a helmet, first aid must be provided)
You can create private competitions for your group and all members are granted access to it without needing to invite them in

Future plans

All documents (rules and regulations, score sheets etc) can be uploaded and made available to all your members
Groups will be able to show rankings from their competitions, by aggregating the scores and dynamically showing them, so when you’re next competition is finished, the rankings are automatically updated

Get grouping!

So – go make your group made now: https://www.tournr.com/groups/

New Feature – Multiple Organisers

Tournr has always had the ability to have multiple organisers, but up until now you’ve needed to ask me to set it up for you, which – let’s face it – is not ideal. Well, no longer!

It works in the same way as inviting does, you invite people (via email address) to your competition, but the form has changed and now allows you to ‘Invite as an organiser’

The recipient will get a link to click on that will register them as an organiser (they do need to have an account and be logged on).

The new organiser will have exactly the same permissions as you do, they can edit the competition how they want, they can add new competitors, add results, even delete the competition, so be careful!

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!

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