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: 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 #8 – PayPal

The description part of a competition allows you to embed most things you can find on the internet. Handily this also applies to PayPal, quite often these days competitions like to take money via PayPal – there are lots of reasons, competitors can use credit cards or bank accounts to make payments and in a safe way. It also allows an organiser to manage the payments, issue refunds without having to post off a cheque. Not having to deal with Cheques is a big plus point in itself!

Generally – PayPal has 2 ways to send payments, the first is you put an email address in and ‘send’ your payment via that address, the downside to that scenario is that someone can easily mistype an email – not everyone can copy/paste (for example, reading from a phone screen whilst typing into a webpage), and some characters 0 and O (that’s ‘zero’ and the letter ‘o’) can easily be mixed up.

The second way generally seen is via the PayPal button – which is ace, as you can even go the whole hog and create a cart system.

Tournr will work equally well with both, but in this post I’m just going to show how to do the button code, as typing an email address is easy, and you already know how to do that!

To use buttons, you do need to have Premier or Business account with PayPal. This allows you to accept credit cards etc, I believe (and it’s been a long time since I’ve done it) you need to verify your account, PayPal is very good at helping you with this, so I’ll leave it to them.

If you have a premier or business account already, then we’re good to go, and we want to go to the button factory – (that link takes you to the UK version, but I imagine it will redirect to the region you are in). You have a choice of 5 button types, In principle you can embed any of them, but we’re only really interested in the ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Add To Cart’ buttons. You can use either for doing most of the cases you’re going to be looking at, with you needing to do slightly more to use the ‘Cart’ button, but we’ll cross that bridge a little further down.

Buy Now

Buy Now is most appropriate for a competition with one class, or just a set entrance fee. It’s a simple one click payment option. You can also use it for multiple classes if you have a simple set up.

From the ‘button factory’ select the Create your button now link, if you’re not logged in you will be asked to.

Here you can choose a different button type (if you’ve changed your mind), but we’ll stick with the current one. The next thing to fill in is the ‘Item name’, generally, to make life easier, it’s best to stick in the name of your competition. If you regularly run the ‘British Open’ it’s worth putting the name as something like ‘British Open 2014’ so you can distinguish it from the next time you run it – you can use the Item ID for this as well, so something like BO2014 might be appropriate.

If you have only one entry, then add in the price (and choose your currency), then press Create Button. If you have more than one type of entry, let’s do some customising!

We have 2 options, a drop-down with or without prices. You’d use the without prices option if you’re looking at a single price, but multiple options – i.e. a competitor can only take part in one class. Most likely you’re looking for the option with prices.

Just fill in the payment details, and this is entirely up to you. Let’s say we allow competitors to enter up to 3 classes, the first class we charge at £10, and each subsequent class is only £5 we might setup our button to look like this:

Which results in a button like:

Next we can skip the 2nd and 3rd steps of the button factory (by all means look at them and see if there is anything you want to do – one thing that can be handy is to restrict the number of entries allowed using the ‘Track Inventory’ option).

We want to press the ‘Create Button’ button now:

Now you are taken to a page called ‘Add your button code to your webpage’ which is handy, as that’s what we want to do. You’ll see a box with a ‘Website’ tab, what you want to do is copy that code and paste it into your ‘Description’ of your competition:

(Where the red arrow is)

Which when you save will give you this on your competition page:

The competitor can now press the ‘Buy Now’ button, and PayPal deals with the rest.

Add To Cart

Add To Cart is most appropriate for a multiple-class competition, where competitors can enter in multiple classes, or where you need to have optional extras such as ‘day insurance’.

It’s a very similar process to the one above, you can decide to have one button per price point, so you might have a ‘First Class’ button where the price is £10 then a second button for subsequent classes, which is set at £5, the choice as they say is yours (though please email me if you want advice on what to do, I’ll be more than happy to help!).

In this case – you’ll add multiple buttons using the same approach as you would for the ‘Buy Now’ button. The only extra thing you need to do is create a ‘View Cart’ button, which you can see as an option at the bottom of the page when you ‘Create’ your cart button:

This doesn’t really have any options, and is a straight copy/paste job.

Tournr Tips #7 – Embedding things

The description part of a competition can be more than plain text, it actually uses a type of text entry called ‘MarkDown’ (you can find out more about that by clicking on that link), which is becoming a standard in forums and messaging boards. It allows you to put bullets, headings etc, but without having to learn HTML.

One of the nice things about that is that you aren’t restricted to just text, you can embed other things, such as YouTube videos, Vimeo.

How?

This demo is with YouTube, but the same principle exists for pretty much all the media sites, if you have difficulty, please feel free to email me via the site and I’ll get you working!

First, let’s find the video we want to embed, for demo purposes I’ve gone with the Shoreline Triathlon (see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCHwieXHhrY). What we need is the embed code. To get that, go to the video page, and click on the ‘Share’ link:

Next, choose the ‘Embed’ option:

Below this, you have some options you can play around with, I’d stick with the default settings, but feel free to play around with the video size.

When you’re all happy, select the code in the text box (it should begin <iframe), right click on it (or whatever the equivalent is in the Mac world) and select ‘Copy’:

Go to your Competition on Tournr, and Select Edit:

In the ‘description’ field, paste the code you just copied from YouTube.

Save your tournament:

And now you have your video in the competition!

Recap

Look for the ‘Share’ link on a page you want to show in Tournr, look for the Embed code and copy and paste it into the description field of your Competition.

By the way – this will also work for Groups, Terms and Conditions etc, which is pretty cool!

Introducing Basic Ranking

So, Tournr has been adding bits here and there, mostly in a lead up to this change – the ability to automatically work out rankings for a given group.

Word of warning – there are some caveats to use ranking in it’s current form (they will be ironed out soon) – I’ll list them at the bottom, but first let me show you the what.

Ranking wise, I’ve initially developed a Basic Ranking system based on the 1998 BCU rules (kindly supplied by Peter Blenkinsop) – I’m sure there is a better name, but this is what I’m going with now.

How is the ranking calculated?

The maximum number of points available to any given competitor is 100, so 1st place will always get 100 points. From here on in, each subsequent competitor earns using the following formula:

So in a competition of 2 people, the scores would look like:

Position	Score
1	100
2	(100/2) * (2-2+1) = (50 * 1) = 50

For 3:

Position	Score
1	100
2	(100/3) * (3-2+1) = (33.3 * 2) = 67 (rounded)
3	(100/3) * (3-3+1) = (33.3 * 1) = 33 (rounded)

You get the idea. The scores from the competitions are added together, and the highest total is 1st overall, the lowest is last.

Over the course of 5 competitions (for example) typically, you pick your best N competitions (with the BCU this is 3), this allows you to a) discount a bad day (we all have them) and b) not have to attend all the competitions in a given year, which if they are over a disparate locations, or indeed you just happen to be on holiday – is a good thing.

It also encourages you to take part in more than one competition, as turning up and taking part can get you a higher rank than just doing well in one competition (bold indicates the ‘best’ 3 scores):

Name	Comp1	Comp2	Comp3	Comp4	Comp5	Total	Rank
Andy	1st/100	–	–	1st/100	–	200	3
Bruce	3rd/50	2nd/67	1st/100	4th/25	1st/100	267	1
Charlotte	2nd/75	1st/100	3rd/33	3rd/50	2nd/67	242	2
Danielle	4th/25	3rd/33	2nd/67	2nd/75	3rd/33	175	4

Andy wins all the competitions he’s in, but both Bruce and Charlotte get a higher overall ranking as they have a third score which adds to their total.

The system works when there are draws, as you simply give two people the same ranking,  so if both Andy and Charlotte have the same score, then they share the rank, with Bruce and Danielle following:

Name	Score	Rank
Andy	250	1
Bruce	175	4
Charlotte	250	1
Danielle	205	3

How do I use this?

First, you need to have a group, a group in Tournr has rankings, as a group is the only way to group together competitions. Once you have your group you need to add your competitions (see Tips #6), then we enter new territory.

Setting the Ranking

Not every competition is ranked, and we need to be able to deal with that, by default when you add a competition to your group it’s not ranked, so first we need to click on the ‘details’ button of our added tournament:

Once on the details page, we can see the competition is not ranked,

to change that, we click on the ‘Not ranked’ button and get a new ‘Ranked’ button.

(You can simply click the Ranked button again to change it back to being not ranked). When we go ‘Back to Group’ we can see our competition is now ranked.

Once you’ve done that for all your competitions, the next stage is to add a some Ranking details. Here you decide the period of time to rank for and how many competitions to select for the top ‘N’.

First, click on the ‘Add a ranking’ button

As an example, for a ranking for all of 2014 with only the top 3 results counting, you would put in:

That’s it, now your ranking will show up.

Clicking on the name of the ranking will take you to the ranking page:

Clicking on ‘how is this worked out’ link will take you to a page describing the ranking process:

One thing to note (if you get no results) you might need to finalise (see Tip #4) your competitions for the rankings to take effect, this is so Tournr knows the results have been set.

The Future

Ranking wise – this is the beginning, I’ve primarily done the Basic system as this is the area I’m most comfortable with, I plan on implementing other systems (Elo for example) over time, and depending on what people want most. Please contact me directly if you have an idea or something is awry!

The caveats

So, as I said up top, there are some caveats (at the time of writing) to using the ranking, they’re not to onerous, and they will be solved shortly, but I wanted to get a version out sooner rather than later.

Class Names:

At present, you will need to name your classes the same across all the ranked competitions, so if in one competition the Open is called Super-Open, it won’t be matched to another competition which has the Open called Open. I’m working on a solution to allow an administrator to define the classes that are ranked, and then allow them to map a competition specific class to a ranking class.

Competitors:

If you’re a registered competitor on Tournr, then there are no problems, your rank will be correct, the problem lies with anonymous users, or specifically, users an organiser has added themselves. The trouble is whether John Smith in one competition is the same John Smith in another competition. I’ve made a judgement call for the time being that YES, if two people in two competitions are called the same, then they are the same person from the point of view of ranking – this does take into account any ‘Alias’ you might have assigned someone. So, as with the Class Names above – if the names differ, I can’t tell if they are supposed to be the same person, for example:

Competition 1 – Open Class – John Smith
Competition 2 – Open Class – Jon Smith

As far as the system is concerned they are different people, and so will be ranked differently.

Tournr Tips #6 – Adding a Tournament to a Group

One of the biggest changes to Tournr since launch was the addition of Groups, I wrote about that a little while ago, but due to not wanting to write one massive post, I eschewed explaining every bit of it, and so I’m going to start to rectify that with the next few tips explaining how to do groupy / tournamenty stuff!

So you have your group and you want to add an existing tournament to it.

First go to your groups page, you can do this from the homepage:

or from the ‘My Groups’ page:

Scroll to the bottom of your groups page and expand the ‘Add a tournament to the group’ panel:

Then press the ‘Add my tournament’ button

You will then be presented with a form with 2 fields to fill in (you only need to fill in the Tournament ID / URL though:

In this case I’ve put in the whole URL (from the top of your web browser):

But I could just have easily put in just ‘97’.

Now, there are two different things that can happen, and that depends on whether you are an administrator of the group, or a member. As an administrator, the tournament is automatically approved, and will show up as a tournament on the group page:

As a member, your tournament will be added to a ‘pending’ queue that only the administrators can see (soon you will be able to see  your own submissions too!).

Administrators can then look at the details of the competition:

Where they can approve/deny the request, or send a message to the submitter to get more details:

Which is then saved with the request, so all administrators can see what has been asked, (and the suggester as well)

So the suggester can reply and get their tournament approved:

We’re happy with this so we approve the tournament and the view changes:

We can go Back to the group and see our tournament there.

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/

Tournr Tips #5 – Facebook

Tournr is designed to help the Organisers and Competitors of competitions, and the primary way it achieves this is via Email, so – whenever an Organiser changes a competition (location, time etc) if the ‘Send an email with the changes’ check box is selected:

an email is sent to everyone who has registered with the competition (competitors added by the Organiser aren’t – I can’t guarantee the email address is correct).

There is another communication method as well, Facebook – you only see this if you have set up your account to use Facebook and this is how:

Link your account

1. Login to Tournr and go to your ‘Change settings’ page:

2. Click on the ‘Facebook’ link:

3. Login to facebook, and you’ll get this Window:

This is the bare minimum Tournr can ask for.

4. If you press ‘OK’ to this, you’ll be presented with:

By default, Tournr would only post privately so only you can see it, you can choose to change how Tournr will post by selecting from the drop down on the side.

5. If you press OK to that, you’ll be taken back to Tournr, and should see:

Sending a Facebook Post

When you edit your Tournament now, you can now create a Facebook post:

Which when saved should put a post like this to your timeline:

Unlink my account

To unlink, simply press the ‘Unlink’ button on the ‘Change your settings’ page.

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.