CHALLONGE!

JSON support for the API

2012-01-12T20:00:00.000-05:00

The Challonge! API now fully supports JSON. Thanks for dealing with nasty XML so long, and sorry for not offering an alternate format sooner!

Almost There

2011-09-08T00:36:00.000-04:00

After getting a new layout 99% production ready, my reviewer/wife wasn't completely pleased with it. It didn't succeed on the usability front mainly, so I started on a completely different approach.

The new(er) design is almost ready to go, and has received much better comments. It stays fairly consistent with the current layout, but offers several usability improvements. Unless I hit some major hurdles with this one, it'll be landing next week. Here's a preview:

Once I get beyond this design work (which I'm terribly slow at), it's back to working on new features!

Snails Quietly Working

2011-07-21T00:28:00.000-04:00

It's true, Challonge! has been pretty silent lately, but there's something very gradually evolving behind the scenes. First up will be a site-wide layout change that should be landing within the next couple weeks. From there, we'll be set up to accept sponsorships, scale more effectively, and start building in some long-awaited features.

Speaking of scaling, a third server was spun up today as a dedicated generator and content provider for live bracket images. This should reduce memory catastrophes on the app server, result in lower image update latency, and allow me to sleep more soundly at night. The database server will also be getting a memory hike in the near future that should hold it over until the next round of optimizations.

Swiss Update

2011-05-07T23:19:00.001-04:00

As of Friday, Swiss tournaments finally started running as they should. Before then, when a participant was removed mid-tournament, he/she remained in the pairing pool for future rounds and auto-forfeited. This led to unnecessary byes, potentially creating unfair tournament pathways for some users. No longer!

Also, organizers now have the option to review results before tournaments end -- they normally end as soon as the last score is submitted.

Unfortunately, a couple other features didn't make the cut for the update, but they're almost ready to go and will sneak in soon:

sign-up caps and waiting lists
country icons
prediction support for the winners bracket of double elim tournies

Bracket predictions coming soon!

2011-03-27T13:35:00.000-04:00

Still lacking a few pieces, but we're hoping to make up for our lack of involvement in the NCAA basketball tournament by offering a bracket prediction extension for ALL Challonges.

Here's the teaser:

Once this is released in beta, it and the voting extension will undergo some revisions before earning their spots on our home page.

In other news, we've secured facebook.com/challonge :-)

Beta release of Voting extension

2011-03-06T20:45:00.000-05:00

A user voting option is now available in the new extensions section of Challonge! settings. Facebook/Challonge! membership is required as usual, though I'm considering adding an anonymous voting option.

Here's a test bracket with very random entries if you'd like to check out the controls:
http://test.challonge.com/voting

More to come, including module & mobile support, so look out for updates on this and additional extensions. Also, it's crunch time for March Madness, so if we get pools going again this year, you'll hear it here first. Though, it'd be nice to predict any bracket, and that extensions section has plenty of vacancy...

Some Attention to Usability

2011-01-25T07:54:00.001-05:00

Having survived numerous feature additions and other abuse, the tournament setup page was starting to show its age. The time for surgery finally arrived. The new layout captures all tournament settings on one page without any scrolling necessary, and the description is finally seeing its dream fulfilled as a WYSIWYG editor.

Sharing User Management and Score Reporting Permissions

2011-01-05T21:20:00.002-05:00

December was Challonge's strongest month yet, but development-wise, it was pretty quiet.

To kick off the new year, I finally implemented some basic privilege sharing for tournaments. Organizers can now share their user management and score reporting superpowers. The scenarios for more complex permission sharing are pretty scarce, so I'll stick to this for now until user feedback sways my opinion.

An access level column was added to the dashboard to reflect the permissions update. At the moment, there are just three access levels: report your own scores (1 bar), score reporting and user management (2 bars), and organizer (3 bars) -- all are reflected in the screenshot below.

Also in today's update were a couple bug fixes and other small tweaks. More to come!

Login with Facebook, Tournament Sign-ups

2010-12-12T21:49:00.000-05:00

If you haven't already noticed, we now allow users to log in with Facebook. This lowers the registration barrier for Challonge! itself and tournaments that use our sign-up feature. We're currently just using Facebook for authentication, but if we add additional features for their API, we'll allow existing Challonge! users to connect their Facebook accounts.

Also related to tournament sign-ups, you can now require users to sign up for your tournaments with Challonge! accounts. Previously, there was no way to disable the "lame" name-only sign-up option.

I'll keep development promises to myself for now, but there's some good stuff in the works for early 2011. Stay tuned!

Rails RegExp Fragment Expiration

2010-11-10T14:26:00.000-05:00

Challonge.com caches various bits of tournament data (including the brackets) as files. To avoid showing stale data, various events expire these fragments. In Rails, expiring fragments is done by either passing a unique identifier (for 1 fragment), or passing a regular expression (for multiple fragments).

Here's the catch with the regexps: ALL fragment paths pass through the regexp, even if the regexp specifies a directory path (e.g. /tournaments/592/.*). So, imagine a system with several thousands of fragments in roughly a thousand subdirectories. Now, expire fragments using a regexp every second or so. :-(

Needless to say, Challonge's server is much happier now with the regexp fragment expirations removed.

If you've managed a tournament with us before, you'll notice that adding/removing participants is now incredibly faster than before.

User Interface Update - Stage 1

2010-11-05T00:15:00.000-04:00

The first stage of UI updates has been applied to challonge.com. Tab controls were polished a bit, and various updates were made throughout to improve usability (language, layout, help bubbles). I'll probably jump back into multi-stage tournament development before returning to the UI, though the home page is in dire need of some marketing material (screen shots, extended feature list, etc.).

Here are a few before-and-after shots of the tab controls:

CHALLONGE! Disc Golf

2010-10-28T03:31:00.001-04:00

As CHALLONGE! looks to enter the mobile app space, jquerymobile seems to be a nice fit for people who are connected. It's still in alpha, so I wanted to first try it out on a side project.

So... CHALLONGE! Disc Golf - an app for tracking disc golf scores. Yeah, kinda obscure, but relevant in my life enough to keep my interest in the project. For a demo, check out my disc group.

I've only tested the site with Firefox, Chrome, and WebOS, so comments from other mobile users are welcome. Note, the graphs are not part of jquerymobile; instead, I tried out Flot for the first time.

Look for a redesigned CHALLONGE! mobile site once jquerymobile becomes stable.

Attachments, tips, and more hype

2010-08-12T11:09:00.000-04:00

If you were to graph my Challonge development effort, it would closely resemble a sine wave. My wife and sleep schedule enjoy the troughs.

You may have already noticed, but match attachments arrived in Challonge bracket. Matches are limited to a max of three 250KB files for the time being, but you can add links to the big stuff. These attachments are perfect for game replays (.SC2replay files were the feature request), screenshots (great moments or victory proof), and links to videos or live feeds. Also, while the UI change was minimal, I spent a good amount of time figuring out where to put the attachment links. The update added some real estate for additional match-related features (voting being the biggie).

You know how full match scores and edit score links show up when you hover over a match (for the tourney admin at least)? That feature was overhauled with a different javascript library, so not only are the pop-ups more responsive, but the amount of code is significantly less. With it being lightweight, I added it to the base javascript bundle for Challonge, so this paves the way for help bubbles and more clarity throughout the site.

The hype: match voting, multi-stage tournaments, ladders, API

Swiss Revisions

2010-07-07T22:43:00.000-04:00

I knocked the "beta" off Swiss tournaments (again) now that I have unit tests to back up my confidence. Swiss tournaments will short-circuit if they reach a state in which pairings aren't possible -- a state that previously left the organizer scratching his/her head. Some language was added to clarify this possibility.

I believe that just leaves 1 issue which I'm not considering a beta-blocker. If you remove a player from a Swiss tourney after it starts, that player will remain in the pairing pool for the duration of the tournament, giving his/her opponents automatic wins. The player should in fact be removed from the pool, but Challonge doesn't currently support a variable number of matches per Swiss round. This change will be made eventually.

My current dev branches: ad-free accounts, individual match attachments & voting, ladders, android app

Big spankin update

2010-07-01T13:37:00.001-04:00

Private messaging has finally arrived, and with it comes a boat load of other updates.

Account usernames. Necessary for messaging and some other future developments
Inbox/Sent Messages/Notifications page with thread support
Emailed notifications and PMs are now optional for those who would rather just log in to see updates
Notification messages were reworked to include usernames and instructions for sending a private message to an opponent and organizer
Log section added to all Challonges. This will show who reported scores and when - transparency+++
Participants can now edit their scores in addition to just reporting them. They can only change outcomes (the winner) if scores for successive matches have not been reported
Fixed some forum bugs
Forum section is now enabled by default with an option to hide it
Videos section is no more. Past contributions are converted to a forum post
Participants list section added that shows seed, bracket name, challonge username, and link to send PM
The home page (when not logged in) was touched up a bit

Blog Fooocus

2010-06-21T21:19:00.000-04:00

Though I've been resisting it from the beginning, private messaging is on the way. This should help open up communication between players and fits nicely among a handful of other changes on the way (per-match attachments like replays, photos, and videos, also match scheduling and voting).

I have 5 development branches of Challonge, so I either have ADD or there's a lot coming through the pipeline...

Double Elimination Bug Fix

2010-05-06T22:26:00.002-04:00

There was a strange bug affecting double elimination tournaments with qualifying matches. Under some circumstances after qualifying match scores were reported, first round matches would appear to get mixed up (labels would no longer be in alphabetical order). This would result in winners advancing to unexpected positions in the bracket. Fortunately, matches on the back end were fine, so the patch just applied retroactively fixes any affected brackets. Unfortunately, many people may have already run from Challonge in terror.

Thanks to those who pointed this out!

Gears Turning

2010-05-04T17:47:00.000-04:00

There haven't been any major Challonge changes lately, but there are a couple interesting features in the works.

Custom Subdomains
I've been sitting on this feature for a while - trying to keep it as simple as possible. The gist of it is that users would be able to create custom subdomains (dave.challonge.com) and then publish tournaments to them (dave.challonge.com/tournament_url). The root of the subdomain (dave.challonge.com) would then act as an index for all tournaments published to it, and it could also be customizable with images, links, etc. - useful for arcades, websites, and other organizations. In order to allow someone else to publish to your subdomain, you would simply share a key string. For small venues, this key string could be shared between a few people. For forums, the key could be in a sticky thread in a private section of the forum. Anyway, comments are welcome. I'm hoping to get this in production this month.

Tournament Chat/Forum
I'm adding a "Forum" tab for tournaments which will provide basic means for communicating. This will be kept nice and thin and easy to ignore if it's of no use to you.

Ladders/Leagues
One of these days... I've been talking about these for a while. Free time has been scarce, but I'll eventually fit these new Challonge types in.

Markup in Tournament Descriptions

2010-03-30T11:42:00.001-04:00

This was a long time coming, but markup is now allowed in tournament descriptions (HTML & Textile). I'm hoping flexibility is limited enough to prevent Challonge from giving birth to myspace-like pages.

In the future, most minor updates like this will only be communicated on twitter (twitter.com/challonge), so please subscribe to our feed for the latest info and tips.

March Madness on Challonge!

2010-03-10T22:21:00.000-05:00

Basketball fan or not, you should fill out a bracket for the NCAA division I men's basketball tournament! Head over to challonge.com/marchmadness between Sunday and Wednesday to fill out your bracket. The 64th seed won't be decided until Tuesday.

If you're running a pool, have participants fill out our bracket and send you a link to it. You'll then be able to grade the brackets and rank them against each. You can specify the number of points awarded per round (1/2/4/8/16/32, 1/2/3/4/5/10, etc.).

New forum for feature requests

2010-03-08T18:38:00.000-05:00

I still need to link challonge.com to this site, but I'll be managing feature requests at http://challonge.uservoice.com from now on. Please stop by and post suggestions or vote to help me prioritize.

Hello, Scrollbars

2010-02-24T00:23:00.000-05:00

Themeable scrollbars have replaced the arrows in Challonge brackets.

Why the change?

Long scroll distances were tedious to cover for large tournaments
Scrollbars are more easily identified by users
Vertical mouse wheel, arrow up/down/left/right, page up/down, and home/end keys are now supported

Also! Round robin and Swiss tournaments will no longer be constrained to 3 columns. They'll take advantage of the full width available to them.

This update turned out to be far more daunting than expected. I couldn't find an adequate plugin to handle themeable scrollbars, so I ended up rolling my own. IE 7+, Opera 10, Firefox 3, and Chrome are supported. I may share a jquery plugin for this down the road, but for now, I'm anxious to get back to work on ladders and other features.

Adding participants in bulk

2010-02-07T15:23:00.003-05:00

Tournament creators now have the option of adding participants in bulk, 1 participant per line in a text area.

Match scheduling and ladders are on the distant horizon.

Update to Swiss Tie-break Algorithm

2010-02-05T00:56:00.001-05:00

CHALLONGE! now uses the Median-Buchholz system for breaking ties in Swiss tournaments. A "tie-break score" column will now be displayed in the results table which shows the sum of a player's opponents' scores, with the best and worst scores discarded. Should players be tied by score and tie-break score, they are sorted based on their records relative to one another. Seed breaks up any remaining ties.

Layout Update, Tags Trashed, and Printable Blank Brackets

2010-02-01T22:28:00.000-05:00

Not a complete overhaul, but the Challonge layout has been updated. The home page was polished a bit, primarily for new visitors to the site, and everyone will appreciate the new slimmer header.

Tournament tagging has been trashed completely, but digging up old tournaments is easier than ever now that the home page allows for tournament name filtering. If you were among the minority that appreciated the tags, hold tight! There's another option around the corner.

Bracket Refreshing Awesomeness

2010-01-12T14:22:00.000-05:00

I just finished a revision that allows for bracket refreshing without full page loads. I'll be publishing the update to production this evening, and it carries with it the following improvements:

Brackets will automatically update every minute - see results as they come in without touching anything.
Score reporting/editing within a bracket is no longer followed by a full page reload. A quick refresh is done instead...much smoother!

Also, swiss tournaments were recently refined a bit. They should run smoothly from start to finish now, and pairing should correctly follow FIDE specifications for most cases.

Swiss Tournaments!

2010-01-02T10:00:00.003-05:00

Challonge is now offering Swiss-system tournaments! I expect there will need to be a few revisions to the pairing algorithm, so I encourage Swiss-pairing-masters to check things out and get me in line.

Also among the updates:

Avatar uploading - While I still encourage the use of Gravatar, I realize many users either don't have Gravatar accounts or would prefer to have distinct Challonge avatars.
Updates to database schema for storing scores. This should speed things up a tad and fix a bug.

Configuration Win

2009-12-16T11:49:00.000-05:00

Challonge is snappier than ever thanks to some recent server changes. I dumped Apache for Nginx and finally patched a memory leak that was causing occasional mayhem on the server.

I'm also in the process of switching the app to use haml as part of a code refactoring effort.

Stay tuned for several enhancements right around the corner...

Ties

2009-12-04T01:11:00.000-05:00

Ties can now be submitted for round robin matches. They act as the second sorting value (behind # of wins) when ordering the standings.

I might be brewing up support for Swiss tournaments... but don't get too excited yet, chess players. I have a good bit of code to write before these hit production.

Bronze for Single Elimination

2009-12-02T09:38:00.000-05:00

An optional match for 3rd place can now be included for single elimination tournaments. This match pairs the losers of the semifinals.

Maybe Next Time

2009-12-01T11:29:00.001-05:00

Final results now include the 3rd place finisher (aka "Maybe Next Time"). Round robin ranking was improved a bit to support this, so RRs finally list the winners instead of just displaying a big table (though this is still available below the bracket). Single elimination brackets will soon be updated to support an optional 3rd place match between the semi-final losers.

Not sure when the bug was introduced, but the losers bracket print view is fixed for the bracket generator page. The [L-X] identifiers for seeding the bracket were all showing as [L-]...not very helpful like that. Whitespace between the winners and losers bracket was also removed from the print view.

Thanks to all who have requested new features and continue to support Challonge! November was a great month with a record number of published tournaments and verified new users. There are several new features in the works as we look to offer some new services.

Round Robins Evolved Again

2009-11-26T12:31:00.000-05:00

Round robins have evolved yet again and finally match the look of the elimination brackets. Also in the update is a scheduler, so the days of giant round robin tables have passed.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tags and Profiles

2009-11-18T09:35:00.000-05:00

I didn't go overboard on this, but tournaments can now be tagged. The new user profile pages benefit the most from this as it allows users with several tournaments to get organized a bit. I still need to add a tool for better tag management, but this should be a good start.

Live Bracket Images

2009-11-09T13:19:00.000-05:00

Live bracket images are currently undergoing production testing. You can check them out for any published Challonge bracket by going to http://challonge.com/images/brackets/[Tourney_URL].png

Here's an example:

These will be offered free of charge and linked to from tournament pages in the near future.

Filesystem Rebuild

2009-11-08T19:45:00.002-05:00

I have everything backed up, but it's looking like the Challonge server needs a rebuild. Sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: Challonge has switched hosts - more memory at our disposal now, so expect a bit of a speed boost. everything should be set up and running now.

UPDATE2: Character set problem messed up all special characters (accents, etc.). Good to go now thanks to this fine advice.

FREE Bracket Modules

2009-11-06T00:40:00.000-05:00

Because free is so much better than not free, I split the bracket module feature into two tiers - standard and premium. The premium module takes on the previously posted pay structure while the standard module carries an ad banner - read more here.

I'm currently testing "live" bracket images on production, so those should be available soon. This should be welcome news to forum users!

Also, I'm really hoping to get a Challonge t-shirt order in this month. Who wouldn't want one of those for Christmas??

A couple other minor updates just made:
- server callback to check URL availability on new tournament page
- tournament name filter added to tournament browsing page

Bracket modules for external websites, finally!

2009-10-29T17:07:00.000-04:00

Challongers can finally host brackets on their own websites. To help cover some of our hosting costs and avoid cluttering the bracket modules with ads, we decided to charge a modest amount for them. Most small venues will get excellent mileage for next to no cash (5,000 uses for $5; 20,000 for $15). The modules are ad-free and you can report scores and log in/out from within them - read more here.

Bracket Module Beta Testing

2009-10-13T13:58:00.000-04:00

Bracket modules are finally in beta. If you're interested in testing them, send me a request along with your Challonge account email address (http://challonge.com/dashboard/contact). Beta testers who send me feedback will earn some extra module use credits when this feature is production ready.

The Challonge favicon was just updated and I also added "apple-touch-icon.png" for iPhone users who bookmark the site.

Up next:

T-shirts - struggling with ideas here. If you come up with a great idea and I go with it, I'll definitely send you a free t-shirt.
FAQ / Help page, brief screencasts?
Tournament tagging -- need to think this one over as I want to keep things simple.
Single elimination display options for conference tournaments - 2 or 4 brackets converging to the center

New Logo!

2009-09-30T23:05:00.000-04:00

Just posted the new Challonge logo. It's good to know a graphics guy (thanks Chuy)! I haven't touched up the stylesheets to match the new shade of orange, but hey, I was anxious to get it up there. T-shirts are inevitable.

Major Upgrade Complete

2009-09-25T15:31:00.000-04:00

Here are the highlights:

Participant management rewritten

Participants can be entered with a name and email address - the giant textarea for entering names has been dropped (except for the bracket generator)
Email addresses are looked up immediately and linked to Challonge accounts (previously not done until bracket was published)
Drag-n-drop ordering/seeding
Participants can unregister themselves prior to tourney start

Tournament Sign-up pages

Challonge users can sign-up with a name or team instead of having to use account default (previously not possible until bracket was published)
Upon registering, non-challonge users are given a link to unregister in case their plans change
If you sign up for a tournament using your Challonge account, the tournament organizer will not be able to see your email address. The organizer can only see email addresses that he/she enters.

Score and outcome editing for tournament organizers (finally)!
Multi-set score view displayed when hovering over a match
Round robin rewrite

Scalable
Easier to read

Dashboard changes

Paginated table view of tournaments
Table view of open matches

Print preview views now apply the print stylesheet, so you don't have to use your browser's print preview for the real preview
Contact/Support now requires Konami Code to send comments... a nice alternative to captcha if you ask me

Bracket module documentation is coming along nicely. I still have a couple admin pages to write for them, but modules should go public in October. Here's a pretty bland module sample. As this demonstrates, you can choose to hide the upper-right control box and arrows, and all the colors are customizable. There'll be flashier samples in the docs later.

If you're interested in beta testing the bracket module, send me your challonge account email address via Contact/Support on challonge.com

Challonge! == David Cornelius

2009-09-11T12:03:00.000-04:00

Effective this morning, my name is "Challonge!", and I will now use "its" and "we" instead of "his" and "me." Very exciting stuff. This will give Challonge.com a slightly more professional feel when we start selling t-shirts and anything else down the road. Or maybe I just want a business credit card with "CHALLONGE!" on it...

In other exciting news, my buddy's working on a new slick logo for the site. This will help drive Challonge.com to second level (please watch the movie Zardoz). I'm hoping to launch this along with t-shirts, bracket modules (documentation and support pages about 50% complete), and some other site improvements.

SSL and some bracket module news

2009-09-02T10:17:00.000-04:00

Challonge is now set up for secure connections, so most account-related pages will be routed through https. In case you're wondering, the main reason for adding the SSL cert is for running some Google Checkout tests.

Bracket modules are fully functional, but documentation is pretty much nonexistent at the moment. I'll be rolling these out after returning from vacation, so I'll either be inviting beta testers or throwing the modules straight into production.

Legal Stuff

2009-08-23T21:26:00.000-04:00

Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy were added to Challonge. Thanks to Automattic for the open licensing of their legal docs (and the other great free services they provide). I love how website Terms of Service basically make you the Internet God... until you're in court, then who knows.

And in case you're wondering, the docs offer no surprises. I will never give up private information unless law requires me to do so.

New Brackets are Up

2009-08-20T12:07:00.000-04:00

I'm only part way through the major bracket update (skinnable, scalable stuff), but I chopped off some progress into a new release that's up on Challonge.com. I bundled up the bracket controls to help keep things tidy and added scroll arrows for those who hate click-and-drag. The controls are a little lame at the moment, so they might get refaced down the road.

Most of my grunt work in this release should be transparent to users. More time than I anticipated was spent making the entire bracket scalable, and in preparation for allowing custom color schemes in bracket modules, all bracket lines are now drawn using borders instead of images.

The code is complete for reverting score submissions, but there's no front-end in place to take advantage of it at the moment. I did, however, add a warning message if you select a match winner who did not win the majority of games entered, so this should help cut down on mistakes.

In case you're wondering, I try to keep Challonge looking good in Firefox, Opera, IE 7+, and Chromium (usually covers most Webkit browsers like Safari). If something looks funny in your browser, please let me know... unless you're using IE6.

Behind the Scenes

2009-08-12T16:14:00.000-04:00

While no changes have been published to Challonge recently, I wanted to mention a few things that are being developed behind the scenes.

Scalable Brackets will soon be finished. This means you'll be able to zoom in and out when viewing brackets (very snazzy, almost done with this one).

Skinnable Bracket Modules - Colors, fonts, default zoom level, etc. will be configurable soon, so I'll be introducing embeddable bracket modules that can be posted on external websites and fit any design style. I'll probably have to charge a modest amount in blocks of 10,000 requests or so (server load will rise), but these should be pretty sweet and useful.

Improved Participant Management - Just a vision right now, but this one's pretty high priority for me. I want to spruce up the tool for adding/removal people, changing seeds, setting teams, etc. Plenty I could ramble on about this, but I'll spare you.

There are several other items on the horizon as well. If you emailed me a feature request, I haven't forgotten about you!

Bracket Reset

2009-07-20T00:20:00.000-04:00

shallonge.com points to challonge. Early on, that domain was actually favored for whatever reason...seems like crazy talk now.

Anyways, I just pushed up a "bracket reset" feature that's a step in the direction of a score correction utility. Resetting a bracket clears all the scores and takes you back to the point at which you can add participants and edit seeds. So, if you accidentally start a tournament before adding some stragglers, you can just reset, add them, and start things fresh -- no need to start from scratch as before.

I have a terrible time staying consistent with my Challonge priorities, but at the moment, I'm looking into sprucing up the methods for managing participants. Something drag-n-drop is the vision, but we'll see. Also, someone emailed me about adding Swiss Tournament support. I'm interested for sure, just wondering when I'll have a chance to push through that mind bender.

Losers Bracket Perfected

2009-07-14T16:20:00.000-04:00

While the old way of generating double elimination losers brackets wasn't all that bad, I finally nailed down the logic that will create ideally configured brackets for any size tournament. The placement of losers in the bottom bracket should now prevent rematches for as long as possible, giving participants a nice mix of opponents.

The updated algorithm for creating double elimination brackets will only affect new tournaments. Already published brackets will be completely untouched.

I know there were at least a few people waiting on this update, so thanks for your patience and feedback!

Introducing Challonge! Mobile

2009-07-13T11:42:00.000-04:00

Don't get too excited! Challonge mobile doesn't let you view brackets or much else, but you can at least report scores from your phone now. The interface is dead simple, so I imagine it'll work on most mobile browsers -- I tested on a BlackBerry 8830 with the crappy BlackBerry browser and Opera Mini. Just hit Challonge.com from a mobile device and you should get redirected to the mobile site: challonge.com/mobile

Sign-ups, etc.

2009-07-11T09:49:00.000-04:00

The tournament creation process underwent a major overhaul to make it more intuitive and add the sign-up page option. Instead of having to figure out all the participants up front, you can now opt to have Challonge host a sign-up page for you. You can then distribute a sign-up link and filter the list as you wish before kicking things in gear.

Also in this release, the arbitrary 4 person limit for tournaments has been dropped to 2, mainly for the sake of hosting finals. I can't remember what else was changed at the moment, but there were a handfull of other tweaks as well.

Coming up next! By popular demand, I'll be creating a score fixing utility so you can repair reporting mistakes and not have to start from scratch. Also, I'm working on the bracket viewer to allow for size scaling and multi-set score viewing. The viewer will eventually be modularized to allow users to embed customized brackets anywhere on the net. The core logic of double elimination losers brackets still needs some tweaking as well...

Regarding the Losers Bracket Update

2009-06-24T18:49:00.000-04:00

While the losers bracket update was an improvement, I finally realized a few key concepts that will help me finalize the bracket. It's all figured out in my head... now for the tedious part.

Double Elimination Loser Bracket v2

2009-06-23T00:07:00.001-04:00

While I can't claim to have addressed every losers bracket scenario perfectly, I think the latest update corrects a lot of the scenarios, especially for large brackets. There's no way to avoid rematches for some bracket sizes, but the "standard" sizes (4,8,16,32,64,...) and most variants should be smarter than before.

Existing tournaments will not be affected by this update, but all new tournaments and bracket generator output will reflect the new algorithm.

Special thanks to Pierre and Esteban for identifying some of the losers bracket seedings that didn't look quite right. I'm not 100% content with the changes this update enforces, but I think the algorithm is more reliable than the current one.

Thanks for using Challonge! There's plenty more to come, and I appreciate your support. Please feel free to contact me with your comments by following the Contact/Support link at the bottom of Challonge.com.

! Double Elimination Brackets !

2009-06-19T17:25:00.000-04:00

I finally got around to applying the new look to double elimination brackets. There are bound to be a few flitches to work out, but I'm pleased that this feature is out the door at last.

Next, I'll be revisiting the seeding logic for losers brackets. Scenarios for large tournaments have been brought to my attention (thanks!) where rematches aren't avoided as much as is possible. Tournament open sign-ups are also near the top of the queue.

A Tweak or 2

2009-06-15T16:31:00.000-04:00

Tournament participants can now set their names for each tournament instead of being restricted to a single name per account. This allows a participant to provide a game specific alias or team name that will show up in the brackets.

sweet updates at last

2009-05-10T19:55:00.000-04:00

It had been a long while since any updates were pushed out the pipeline, but finally some progress was made! There was a significant change to the database model that eliminates some major annoyances and paves the way for team and open sign-up tournaments. No longer will you have to enter @challonge.com for users without email addresses. Also, the participant management interface is far more flexible than before, and the tournament setup process is more user friendly... I hope.

As mentioned in the previous post, the brackets have a face lift coming. Single elimination tournaments already have the new look, so if you're interested, give it a quick look using the bracket generator. The "classic" bracket will still be available as a printer friendly version.

Next in line: new bracket look for double elimination (already in the works), open sign-up tournaments (right now you have to sign up people on your own), and team tournaments (the one I have the biggest personal need for right now). After these are shipped, I'll be looking into bracket export options (image, pdf, etc.) and embedding options so you can post a live bracket on your website or in forums with custom colors & styling.

Let me know if you're in need of a certain feature and I can adjust my priorities. Suggestions and feedback are always appreciated!

Bracket Remodeling

2009-04-21T13:39:00.000-04:00

Here's a sneak preview of the new brackets under development. Single elimination is completely working, so as soon as I expand the new look to double elimination, these guys will be live.

Round robins are still crying for some love, but I have a couple tasks to do before I give them any.

Talking to myself

2009-04-17T00:08:00.000-04:00

Now that I finally applied some styles to challonge.com, I figured I'd start talking to myself a bit. I'll be mentioning random upcoming features here, so feel free to chime in if there's something you'd like added to the site.

Though challonge has gotten its first swipe of styling, the generated brackets are still pretty lame. I opted to make them Google maps-ish with click and drag viewing, but this may change once I finish reworking the display of the brackets.

Also in the works: team tournaments, open sign-up tournaments (currently only support invitationals), and some additional UI changes (photos?).