December 7, 2012
We posted a new release today that has several new features requested by our customers. Please do not be shy about asking for features - most of the features added in the past six months have been customers suggestions.
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On the member portal, we have had apps for displaying all tournament results and for displaying selected tournament results. We are in the process of further refining selected tournament results. Until now, you could "drill down" to a date, but we then displayed all tournaments for that date. We have refined that so that you can now select specific tournaments within a date:
Above, we are selecting a specific tournament on August 22. We have also changed the name of this app to "customized tournament results". This is a very nice feature when you wish to highlight specific events such as an aggregate stableford, season ringerboard or league championship event.
We have one more step to complete here, to be in the next release. When you create a tournament, you will be able to check a box that indicates that results for this tournament should never be displayed on the portal.
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We have added and cleaned up the Skins functionality. For regular skins, if there is only one ball being counted (the usual case), we now support a threshold (e.g., best ball must be at least a par/birdie/eagle to be considered) and validation (i.e., a winner -- player, pair or foursome -- of a skin on hole x must have a par/birdie/eagle on next hole to win the skin). We support selecting holes or pars (not counting every hole) and you can specify the number of balls to be counted on each hole or par, but in these cases there is no threshold or validation. Fool around with the UI and you will quickly see what we support. Also, take a look at the Silk Skins format. It's like regular skins, but two birdies beats one birdie. An eagle beats two birdies. If there is a tie for the best score, instead of a push, there is a skin won if one player or group has more occurrences of the winning score than anyone else.
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We have learned how important flexible communications to members is for league managers, and we have made the email facility much more flexible. The email action on the golfers menu is now "Send Email to Golfers" and there is a new action to view the sent emails folder. Send email to golfers will take you to a page that looks like this at the top:
and this at the bottom:
You now have complete control over the recipient list. You can check off specific golfers, enter the first few characters of a golfer name instead of locating them in the list, include or remove all golfers in one or more divisions, include the league managers and add other email addresses. We also now provide a preview window so that you will see exactly how your message is being formatted.
We also now provide a folder of all sent emails that you can browse and read. Initially, this list will only include emails created from this Golfers menu and not emails sent from Manage Player Roster. These will be added in the next release. Please let us know if there are any outstanding issues related to emails.
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Also in the area of communication, we have expanded the ability for golfers to send a note to the league manager when registering for an event. We implemented this previously when a golfer clicked on accept or decline in an event invitation, but we have now expanded this to the registration app on the member portal:
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As we have added features, we noted that the league profile was getting long and a bit unwieldy, so you will now see it organized into tabs:
There are many important settings in each of these tabs, so please review your league profile.
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Lastly, we have enhanced the player roster spreadsheet upload. you can now match a column in your spreadsheet to GHIN number or Golfnet ID. If you do, so we will automatically update the league profile to reflect this:
In the column "Our Attributes, we now show both GHIN Id and GolfNet Id. When you match on one of them, the other will disappear, your matched column will be uploaded as the proper handicap service ID and the league profile be updated properly. You can then access the service from the Golfers menu to retrieve handicap indexes.
November 21, 2012
We are on our standard bi-weekly schedule for new releases. While we have been extremely busy talking to the press and prospects since our launch, we continue to add features - guided by our customers. This release has a number of major new features so that managers can save time and golfers can have more fun.
Perhaps most importantly, we have added automatic tie breaking. Thanks to the Fairwinds Mens League and the Silk Group at Wyndemere for their suggestions on implementing this. At this time, we support automatic tie breaking for stroke play, Stableford and Quota, and have four methods for breaking a tie:
- last 9 holes, last 6 holes, last 3 holes, last hole (USGA recommended method)
- #1 handicap holes, # 2 handicap hole, etc.
- 18th hole, 17th hole, etc.
- method 1 and, followed by method 3 if there is still a tie.
You can set your default tie-breaking method in the league profile, but also set in within a tournament:
On the topic of tournaments, the Fairwinds Ladies 18 hole league had a number of suggestions about saved tournaments. We made the following changes:
We do not automatically save all tournaments you create into your saved tournaments library. We saw these libraries getting cluttered. Now, when you create a tournament, just above the Save button is a checkbox to store the tournament in your library.
The tournament library page has been redone. You can now sort tournaments by name or date, you can click a button to "pull" this tournament into this round, and you click a button to indicate that this tournament should be automatically included in all future rounds. You can turn off this auto-include option at any time, and you can delete a tournament that has been auto-included.
In working with the Silk Group at Wyndemere, we realized that our multiple tee support needed a major re-work. It worked fine when just a couple of players were on a different tee, but was cumbersome when each tee had many players. We also knew from past experience with leagues playing multi-round championships that our method of automatically choosing which tees would get rating adjustments could cause problems. We made these changes, and we think you will really like the way we support multiple tees now.
In the league profile, and in the event profile, you can now control which tees get ratings adjustments, and which tee is the tee with no adjustment:
All setting of tees is now done in edit pairings, and we show very clearly the course handicap for each player when you mouse over the player:
You can see on the right that we added position checkboxes. These will only appear if you have already selected a course and tee, and are now making a change. This league has the A and B players in positions 1 and 2, and they play the II tee. The C and D players are in positions 3 and 4 and play the III tee. Setup is now a snap. Choose the II tee, select all, and click go. Now select the III tee, uncheck positions 1 and 2, select all, and press go. Presto. Note that we show on the left very clearly a player's index, his or her course handicap (showing the rating adjustment) and the tee being played.
A number of leagues have requested more control over the tee sheet formatting. That has now been implemented by adding "Tee Sheet Settings" to the Event menu. We are using this new feature to also introduce a preview mode so that you can see exactly how your text will appear. We will implement this approach to "what you see is what you get" in our email pages.
The tee sheet description area is fixed at 4 lines. If you run over, it will be apparent as you view the preview pane. As you type into the top pane, you will see the text in the preview pane, as it will appear. For this to work well, we need to use a fixed font. You can highlight text (bold, italics, underline) and set color, but you cannot change font or size. We welcome your comments.
We've observed over the past year just how popular skins tournaments are as added fun to an event. Oftentimes, these are "optional skins" where those who want to play sign up. All you need to do is create a group of who is in, select that group when creating or editing the skins tournament, and we will score the event over just this group of players. We this release, we have added two additional features to skins games: (1) max score needed to qualify for skin, and (2) skin validation:
Note that there is no longer skins with carry and skins without carry formats. There is just skins, and you then select carry or no carry in the setup. Silk skins remains as a special format (and a fun format).
Lastly, we have modified the help tab:
We continue to provide context sensitive help articles in the middle as well as a search bar for entering a question. We have invested heavily in a knowledge base, so please do use it :)