Christmas present from askFRED.net

[peet]

Hi Everyone-

FRED has a present for you: A new version, with lots of cool new stuff! This version is not a huge leap forward in any one area, but an incremental step forward in many areas. Still, I think everyone will find something in it to be happy about.

New stuff:

• Provisional compatibility with Fencing Time 2.0
  FRED will now take uploads of all FT 2.0 results files. Display of certain round results types (repechage, all places fenced, etc.) is not yet supported, but the data is stored nonetheless, so when display routines are finished, previously stored repechage round results will be shown.
• Partial FT results uploads
  FT 2.0 users can export and upload results at any time during a tournament, and events that are finished at that time will send their results. (nice for nightly posting of results from multi-day tournaments)
• Upload results from more than one computer
  Large tournaments that use more than one computer to run different events can now upload multiple results files directly to the website, whereas previously Dan or myself had to merge them manually. FRED now provides an "Event Sync" step that allows this.
• Partial Engarde Integration
  FRED now serves preregistration files for import into EnGarde versions 8.12 or later. EG support is experimental. Please provide feedback as you try out those files. Results upload from EG is not yet supported.
• RSS Feeds
  An often requested feature: RSS 2.0 feeds of upcoming events, past events, and recently posted results, with aggregate feeds for the whole FRED db, and separate feeds for each USFA section. I admit, I'm not much of an RSS user, so feedback is especially welcome on this.
• Better tournament location: City and state stored separately
  City and state are now their own fields, allowing better indications on many pages as to where the tournements in a list are located.
• Google Maps links
  Woohoo! Googlemaps are cool. Tournament organizers who enter (optional) full venue address into their tournaments get google maps links, via which fencers can get driving directions, satellite pictures of the venue (), etc.
• Search upcoming events by division, predicted event rating, and size
  Another often requested feature. You can now filter the list of upcoming events by the event rating as predicted by the ratings of the people currently preregistered.
• Search past events (results) by division, event rating, event size
  Just like the upcoming events.
• Sort preregistration lists by fencers' ratings, or club affiliation
  You can finally sort by rating, to quickly see who the big guns are at your next tournament!
• Smoothed out the look
  Slightly quieter page design.
• Quick-find a fencer in large round results pages
  Having a hard time finding your pool? No idea what bracket the 157th seed is in? Use the alphabetical dropdown list at the top, and FRED highlights your name and jumps to your part of the page.
• Seeding lists
  Initial seeding and final seeding lists displayed linked from round results.
• Club abbreviation tooltips
  Hover on a club abbreviation, and the club's full name and division come up. No more "what the **** club is XXXFC???".
• Fees for user-defined prereg fields
  FRED has long let tournment organizers add their own fields to the preregistration form, but now they can also attach fees to those fields. Perfect for pre-ordering t-shirts, etc.
• Dropdown list user-defined prereg fields
  Organizers can now add dropdown lists to their prereg forms.
• BC gets email notification of results post
  For organizers: results uploads from Fencing Time are still processed in the background, but now FRED sends you an email when they are done. If there is an error, you get an error report email.
• Other stuff for the organizer:
  
  • Fee payment summary includes past settlements, amounts due.
  • Email the preregistrants, the participants (in results), or both.
  • Oh hell, that's about all I can remember right now.

As always, feedback and bug reports are most enthusiastically welcome:

peet@askfred.net

cheers!

-p

[daveappr]

And this isn't a full time job for you? I can't imagine why the powers that be haven't snatched you up to do their bidding. That would make too much sense I guess. As always nice job

[peet]

And this isn't a full time job for you?

Full time job? yes. Full time pay? no.

I can't imagine why the powers that be haven't snatched you up to do their bidding. That would make too much sense I guess. As always nice job

Thanks for the vote of confidence!

-p

[Goldgar]

Incredible! You're good, kid. Real good.

[fencergal33]

OMG. You never cease to amaze me. You are awesome. Thanks again, Peet.

[Mauler]

Thank you and good work, Peet.

Hey, how 'bout integrating PayPal payments for referees? I have been known to charge my services (refereeing, lessons, etc) electronically from time to time.... In this day and age of direct deposit, some find the act of collecting and taking physical checks to a bank be somewhat cumbersome.

It would be nice for the net-savvy clients to have all their tournament management points in one place, too!. Easier for record keeping and all.

[D+F+P=Hadouken!]

Maybe you should start requiring LOC's to pay you like 25 cents for every entry. Its a small fee, but with all the tournaments, you could make a tidy little sum.

[dberke]

[*]Provisional compatibility with Fencing Time 2.0
FRED will now take uploads of all FT 2.0 results files. Display of certain round results types (repechage, all places fenced, etc.) is not yet supported, but the data is stored nonetheless, so when display routines are finished, previously stored repechage round results will be shown.

In case anyone was wondering, Fencing Time 2.0 is scheduled to be released next week... stay tuned!

Dan

[Craig]

Peet - Used the RSS feeds to pull postings into the Tournaments and Results forums to populate them with the FRED listings.

This is very much what I had in mind when we first talked about integration so long ago! The next thing is for me to be able to parse the dates over to the Calendar app that the forum uses. (Anyone familiar with VBulletin and PHP want to take a crack at it?)

One other thing that could be useful is a hidden profile field here for a users FRED ID, then they could track their recent results right from Fencing.Net (and make public if they so choose).

Craig

[oso97]

As usual Peet, a fanastic piece of work!

How about XSeed integration (Kludgy that it may be, its still the de-facto standard for the USFA National BC).

[peet]

Hey, how 'bout integrating PayPal payments for referees?

You mean for organizers to pay referees? I'm not sure what FRED's role in this would be. Can you elaborate?

It would be nice for the net-savvy clients to have all their tournament management points in one place, too!. Easier for record keeping and all.

Also not sure what you mean by "tournament management points". More elaboration perhaps?

Maybe you should start requiring LOC's to pay you like 25 cents for every entry. Its a small fee, but with all the tournaments, you could make a tidy little sum

Thanks for the idea, but I'm doing my best not to charge for services that I'm already providing for free. I am, however, trying to figure out additional services that people might be willing to pay for, like some kind of "premium" membership, various special "extra" services for tournament organizers, direct access to the bout data for the stats hungry, and of course ad space.

Peet - Used the RSS feeds to pull postings into the Tournaments and Results forums to populate them with the FRED listings.

Awesome. I did not konw that the forum can read RSS feeds and automatically create threads from them. Maybe you told me that at some point, but i don't remember. I should be able to put together a "discuss this tournament at f.net" link now, because thread creation was always the hardest part of that feature. Are you planning to keep making those RSS-generated threads?

How about XSeed integration (Kludgy that it may be, its still the de-facto standard for the USFA National BC).

Preregistration downloads for import into XSeed wouldn't be a too hard, but the results upload is likely to be a big fat pain.......

Thanks for the comments everyone!

-p

[fencergal33]

Awesome. I did not konw that the forum can read RSS feeds and automatically create threads from them. Maybe you told me that at some point, but i don't remember. I should be able to put together a "discuss this tournament at f.net" link now, because thread creation was always the hardest part of that feature. Are you planning to keep making those RSS-generated threads?

Thanks for the comments everyone!

-p

That idea might actually be really good......"Discuss the tournament" threads could happen automatically, and that way no one has to start one of the ever present "Who's Going to XYZ" threads........I like FRED more and more...

[peet]

That idea might actually be really good......"Discuss the tournament" threads could happen automatically, and that way no one has to start one of the ever present "Who's Going to XYZ" threads........I like FRED more and more...

Yeah, it's something Craig & I have always wanted to do, but there are technical issues. He gave me a copy of he vbulletin code (that runs this forum) a long time ago so I could try to do it, but vbulletin is singularly un-hackable.

This RSS business might make it much easier.....

-p

[Frank Pratt]

<snip>Preregistration downloads for import into XSeed wouldn't be a too hard, but the results upload is likely to be a big fat pain....... -p

Yeah, because Xseed itself is a pain is the posterior end. However, if it could be done, this would be a great way to display NAC results on FRED and the USFA's Home Page.

Sure would be nice if Xseed could export results to a pretty HTML page as Fencing Time does. Then again, it would be nice if Xseed spoke XML as fluently as Fencing Time and FRED.

[Frank Pratt]

In case anyone was wondering, Fencing Time 2.0 is scheduled to be released next week... stay tuned!

Upload results from more than one computer
Large tournaments that use more than one computer to run different events can now upload multiple results files directly to the website, whereas previously Dan or myself had to merge them manually. FRED now provides an "Event Sync" step that allows this.

If Fencing Time 2.0 can handle seeding by national points and repechage and the new FRED can put together results data from multiple computers, will the dynamic duo be able to handle an NAC event?

[KD5MDK]

You mean for organizers to pay referees? I'm not sure what FRED's role in this would be. Can you elaborate?
-p

Well, you do have the names and divisions of all the USFA's referees for the foc.askfred.net site. So if referees could log in and define a paypal account (email address), then tournament organizers might be able to, using a sort of online paypal store sort of system, pay their referees, keep track of who they've hired, etc. Perhaps even integrate with FT who directed which bout, and arrange some sort of piecework payment system.

(not that I think piecework is a better system, it was just a random idea)

[Mauler]

You mean for organizers to pay referees? I'm not sure what FRED's role in this would be. Can you elaborate?

Also not sure what you mean by "tournament management points". More elaboration perhaps?

Basically what I have in mind is to eventually offer FRED as a one-stop-information-center for tournament organizers with Bout Committee Membership. In its current form, the website manages the heaviest bulk of the information - the registration. But organizers might appreciate an easy-to-access means (i.e. everything in one place) of handling other tournament information as well. The referee list, ratings, payment (amount and preferred method) in the same page might be useful. Even other aspects of the event such as venue cost, food cost down the line?

For the most part, referee management at local and regional level is done in a "hand-shake-deal" manner. Basically organizers keep a small list of the "regulars," call them up couple of weeks prior to an event to see who wants to work, hand them a check at the end of the day, and may make a note of who worked in some "tournament ledger," even if at that.

I suspect that majority of the clients I have refereed for don't even really keep detailed record of tournament activities, however. For many, it's basically do whatever it takes to get the event set up, survive the day, and forget about it once it's done... with very little record for review other than a vaguely categorized expenses.

Referee database is already in existence, so it shouldn't be too tough to make it accessible from tournament management page. And if referees prefer on-line payment for their services, it's simply a matter of allowing a PayPal link on their information cell. And organizers may even gain insight by having some hard data on how they've been using referees throughout the season.

Obviously, I'm an oddity when it comes to my insane frequency of refereeing which sometimes may even keep me from checking my physical mail for weeks at a time. But as far as the value of an on-line payment system, anyone who uses Direct Deposit at day job can identify with it... as well as anyone who referees at a local meet and is told to wait for the check in mail.

While what I've mentioned so far would mostly benefit organizers of larger, frequently scheduled, events and there's no particular need for the referee management section to be publicly visible, there is also another benefit to integrating referee database with tournament management section of FRED. Something that was inspired by a client I recently refereed for.

Start-up tournaments looking to attract and build up on new customer base (fencers) may also benefit from "showing off" by making public a list of the confirmed referees to add credibility of their yet unknown event. For the majority of the fencers who regularly seek out and travel to local/regional events, cadre of referees is a significant factor in their choice of events in ensuring a favorable value-per-dollar.

It can also work the other way as well. Referees, also, might find it beneficial and insightful to have an easy-to-access point (i.e. on-line) for a database of their own activities. How many times they've worked for certain clients, what level of refereeing they did when and where, how much they were paid for, and perhaps even a field for any feedback/memorable incidents, desired learning objectives for upcoming assignments, etc.

Yeah, I take it pretty seriously. But hey, information was meant to be categorized, indexed, overanalyzed and reorganized! And our sport should keep adapting new technologies! Including IT!

[KD5MDK]

I would agree that as a fencer (and to another degree as a referee), knowing who will be refereeing there has a substantial impact on my willingness to consider attending. If it looks like the organizers are setting up a first rate event, I'd be willing to travel further/pass up a conflicting lesser event slightly closer than if I knew nothing.

[KD5MDK]

ed linked from round results.[*]Club abbreviation tooltips
Hover on a club abbreviation, and the club's full name and division come up. No more "what the **** club is XXXFC???".

I like this:
http://askfred.net/Results/results.p...nt_id=629#2301

RUS - Russian National Team (North Texas Division)

[peet]

Basically what I have in mind is to eventually offer FRED as a one-stop-information-center for tournament organizers with Bout Committee Membership. In its current form, the website manages the heaviest bulk of the information - the registration. But organizers might appreciate an easy-to-access means (i.e. everything in one place) of handling other tournament information as well. The referee list, ratings, payment (amount and preferred method) in the same page might be useful.

Yeah, exactly; it has always been in the plans to integrate foc.askfred.net and askfred.net so that an organizer could manage referees in the same place that they manage the rest of the tournament. Like a "invite refs" link that takes you to the ref search, lets you check off a list, save them, and then send them all emails at once. Evite for fencing tournaments! It would also be pretty cool to implement some kind of "pay this ref" link either via paypal or some other means.

Also, just like you say, the site could track ref service as well. Ref info could go up & down between the site and the tournament software along with the preregistration and results. I know Engarde includes ref info in the XML import/exports, and Dan & I have always talked about putting it into the FRED<->FT XML.

Of course, I've still got a healthy list of todo's for the ref database site that Bill Oliver has been sending me over the last few months. They're still sitting in the todo too.

One of these days...............

Thanks again for all the thoughts..

-p