Challonge 2013 Year in Review

Thanks for an exciting year! We've come a long way from 2009 and greatly appreciate everyone who has helped us along the way.

This past year we worked especially hard to achieve nearly 100% site availability, ending with 100% in December, our busiest month ever (see our site status history). Several site enhancements were mixed in, but the best is on the way during the first half of 2014!

2013

• 22.8 Million Visits (+71% from 13.3MM in 2012)
• 8.1 Million Unique Visitors (+50% from 5.4MM in 2012)
• 68.3 Million Pageviews (+80% from 37.9MM in 2012)
• 357 Thousand Managed Tournaments (+123% from 160k in 2012)
• 304 Thousand New Registered Users (+72% from 176k in 2012)
• 6 Million Games Managed (+100% from 3MM in 2012)
• 4.4 Million Players Managed (+100% from 2.2MM in 2012)

November Site Updates

We made several touch-ups to the site over the past couple weeks:

• New score reporting form – amazing that the old one survived for years!
• New tournament layout – slimmer left menu and more mobile friendly. This layout will likely be used throughout the entire site soon.
• New round labels – now working for all tournament types, including the losers bracket for double elimination. Also easier to update, and more features to follow (like selecting best of 3/5/7)
• Participants page replaced by Scoreboard – shows live rankings, match history, and will be further developed with player stats

Here's a quick visual rundown:

Challongetoberfest

This Saturday is the 1st annual Challongetoberfest. We'll be getting together to knock out some enhancements to the site before turning our attention to beer and StarCraft. Look for some high-impact features to land that day or early next week.

We're hoping you didn't notice, but early last week we paid off a ton of technical debt, replacing a large portion of our bracket algorithms with new libraries. While being transparent to Challonge users, this enhanced backbone was a prerequisite for our group stage work and will greatly benefit us as we redesign our brackets and continue to grow our community.

Organization Improvements

We recently overhauled most of the permissions code in Challonge, making it far easier to confidently add new permissions-based features. The first of the resulting changes deals with organizations.

Up until last week, organization memberships merely allowed users to publish tournaments to an organization's subdomain. They offered no shared permissions. Well no longer! Organization hosted tournaments can now be managed by all their respective members.

Along with this change, we also improved navigation on the organization pages for members.

Currently in development:
group stages, integration of improved bracket algorithms, redesigned brackets

For Rubyists Out There — Upgrade to 2.0

We recently upgraded from Ruby 1.9.3 to 2.0.0, and this simple upgrade had a dramatic effect on our application server load. We had been pushing 3 cores at peak, but on 2.0, we're rarely pushing 2 while serving a comparable request load.

Aside from updating a few gems, 2.0 was a simple upgrade, so if you're still hanging out on 1.9.3, consider this your nudge!

Announcing March Madnonge!

Challonge! is the ultimate source of tournament brackets, but did you know that we're also the ultimate source for tournament predictions? Announcing March Madnonge!, the first of our new annual tradition to bring you the easiest college basketball prediction platform yet.

With no registration required, creating your prediction is a snap. Create your prediction anytime before the start of the games on March 21st and be automatically entered for your chance to win a Google Nexus 7!

March Madnonge! is a taste of things to come for prediction tournament hosts.

Head on over to http://contests.challonge.com/ and make your prediction now!

Swiss Tournaments

An often overlooked major feature on Challonge.com is the Swiss tournament format. While running a Swiss tournament on paper is a nightmare, we've taken the pain out of it to bring its many advantages over traditional brackets to light.

Swiss tournaments give equal play time to participants, pair players with others of similar skill level, and determine a winner in far fewer rounds than you'd anticipate. They're essentially smarter, abbreviated round robins.

First Round

Top seeds are paired against bottom seeds. Random seeding should be used if no ranks exist. For 8 players, the pairs would be 1v5, 2v6, 3v7, and 4v8.

Points

Match wins are awarded 1 point, ties 1/2 a point, and byes 1 point (or as configured). For multi-set/game matches, you may opt to award points for set/game wins as well - this gives match losers a chance at partial credit.

Additional Rounds

After each round, players are grouped by score. The top and bottom half of each group is then paired (same method as the first round), but steps are taken to ensure there are no rematches. Players float up or down between groups if necessary. When there's an odd number of players, a bye is awarded to the lowest ranked player who has not yet received one.

The minimum number of rounds to determine a winner is equal to the binary logarithm of the number of players rounded up (3 rounds for 8 players, 4 for 16, 5 for 32, and so on). On Challonge, you can opt to play more rounds than the minimum for more definitive results.

Final Results

Players are ranked by score at the conclusion of the tournament, with ties broken using the Median-Buchholz system.