f! The Blog

While working on the tournament registration process, I realise more and more that the future of ffindr lies in a full-service website for Frisbee tournaments. I'm very pleased with the soon-to-be available functionality, and I really think that it will help to make the hard life of tournament organisers a lot easier.

I plan to release the new registration feature in about one month, starting with a private test run for some tournaments. The system will enable tournament organisers to setup a registration process for a specified time frame and with a user-defined bid questionnaire (i.e. you can ask the bidders all the questions you like). Each submitted bid will then trigger

1. an update of the list of subscribed teams on the tournament's page
2. a notification e-mail to the bidder as well as the tournament director (i.e. to the e-mail address provided for the registration in question)
3. an update of the universally accessible (via a unique address) Excel-file stating all the submitted bids in detail

When registration closes, the administrator (i.e. the person who launched the registration) is invited to make his selection among the submitted bids on ffindr. Once the selection got confirmed, ffindr will automatically notify all bidders regarding the status of their bid by e-mail.

Finally, the list of accepted teams can be modified and/or completed with teams from the waiting list any time by the registration administrator. The list of currently subscribed teams/players, as well as the list of selected teams and the waiting list, can always be consulted on the tournament website. This will lead to a transparent registration process and thus reduce the numerous back-and-forth e-mails regarding the registration status.

The system is suited for team bids and for individual players (e.g. hat tournaments) alike.

If you are a tournament organiser and your event will happen in around 2 or 3 months, I invite you to test the new service. If you are interested in exploring the new feature and you have scheduled its registration period for around July/August, please contact me now!

Back to the long-term vision addressed in the title of this post. For now ffindr offers, next to the collection of global calendars of Frisbee happenings, free and easy to set-up tournament websites with a location map, a trip planner and a contact form. Adding the automated tournament sign-up and team/player selection process makes it two free services for tournament directors (TD).

For now I can imagine the following additional features for future releases:

• an automated tournament schedule planner, based on the selected (and ranked) teams
• live score updates by everybody, based on the games produced by the previously mentioned schedule planner

Anything else that a desperate Frisbee tournament director could dream of? Any ideas are welcome and might find their way directly into the new roadbook of future ffindr developments/features. For now it looks like I will try to create a smart league integration to remedy their current status quo within the tournament section.