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.

ECheque Tips

PayPal has a system called ‘eCheques’ – basically – they allow payment to come from someone’s bank account if they don’t have a debit / credit card – this can be a good thing, but can also be bad.

From Tournr’s point of view, if you take payment by eCheque – the competitor will not be registered until the cheque has cleared which can take up to 14 days according to PayPal. This is problematic if you take payment on the weekend before your competition and payment hasn’t cleared by the start. Even worse is that the payment doesn’t clear!

Solutions

There are a couple of solutions – the first is to set the last registration date to be 14 days before your competition. This means you can take any form of payment, but does mean your competitors have to be super on it.

The second solution is to not accept eCheques. To do that – you need to go to your PayPal account and click on ‘Seller Preferences’

Once there, click on the ‘update’ button of ‘Block Payments’:

And then select the check box to block eCheques:

Finally – press ‘Save’ and you’re done:

New Feature: Calendar

Tournr has always been developed according to what people ask for – so if you ask for something – generally you’ll get it!

To that end someone asked if we could get a calendar into Tournr – to put things other than just competitions. Well – now you can!

Calendars are based around Organisations – so first you need an organisation, luckily – I have one!

https://tournr.com/organisation/tournr

On there, you’ll now see a link to ‘our calendar’:

Off we go…

Oh dear. No events :(

Let’s add one!

You get the usual form to fill in for an event, you can set the date and the Name, location etc:

and you can set the type of event:

If the event you’re adding is on Tournr, you can skip all this and select the check box at the top:

Then you enter the ID of the competition:

So for example, I’ve added ‘406’ – which is the Shoreline Handicap Surf Classic competition, this is then added to the calendar like this:

And if you click on it you get taken to:

You can then add it to you calendar:

Which will go into your preferred calendar option!

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–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 – 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).

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 #4 – Finalising

Fina-what?

Finalising is when you tell Tournr that your competition is finished. It is reversible, and you can ‘reopen’ your competition.

What happens?

Tournr will mark your competition as ‘finished’ and send an email out to all the registered members containing the results.

How do I finalise?

1. Log in to your competition and select the ‘cog’ at the top:

2. This will do one of two things, if you’ve already entered all your results, you’ll see:

If you’ve not put in all the results you’ll see:

then you’ll be taken to the ‘Are you sure’ screen.

3. Once you’ve finalised, you get taken to your competition page, with a ‘finished’ sub headline:

4. On your competitions page:

Your competition will now appear in your ‘Finished’ section – as an organiser you’ll see it in the ‘Organising’ section, competitors will see it in the ‘Finished/Competing’ section.

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: