prettify

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Release notes for November & December

This fall has been incredibly busy! Here's a rundown:

  • Round robin group stage support - over 6,000 group stage tournaments since this launched on November 19th! This was the top requested community feature.
  • Modal/pop-up windows inside bracket embeds now use responsive css (better phone support)
  • If you're accepting public registrations and using the check-in feature, the registration link will remain visible above your bracket during the check-in period. It previously vanished once check-was underway
  • If you set your max # of participants as 256 (our current max), we'll carry a waiting list for up to 256 additional participants. Previously no waiting list was possible beyond 256.
  • Bracket predictions now include a "rank" column on the predictions page, and the page loads way faster than before.
  • BUG FIX: When using the linear scoring option for bracket predictions, the appropriate number of points is awarded for the final round.
  • The Konami Code is back on our contact page!

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Removing the mystery from our tie breaks

If you've run a round robin or Swiss tournament on Challonge, you know that ties are fairly common. While the logic behind our tie breaks is often obvious, that's not always the case! And when ties aren't broken how you'd like, there's nothing you can do... until now.


Challonge tournament organizers can now define three tie breaks in advanced options. If you like our defaults, no need to look, but if you've been craving more control or transparency, you now have it.


Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Release notes - Mark underway matches


  • Allow admins to mark open matches as "in progress." This allows you to keep track of the matches that have been assigned a console / table /etc. The label to the left of an in-progress match is orange and updates in real-time with the rest of the bracket. This is currently geared toward admins, but this will prove to be especially useful for spectators down the road.
  • Tournaments you've voted in are no longer displayed on your dashboard.
  • FIX: in rare instances, rounding errors showed up when calculating round robin and swiss participant stats, showing too many digits after the decimal. This is fixed.
  • FIX: printer-friendly live images no longer show blocks in place of less common Unicode characters
  • Beta testing is underway for two-stage tournaments (group stage + final stage -- e.g. World Cup) 

Monday, September 15, 2014

Release Notes - More love for touch devices


  • Added drag and drop support for touch devices (including Android and iOS) for participant reordering, swapping of participants in brackets, and bracket predictions.
  • When someone is not logged in and views match times, they are now displayed in the tournament host's timezone. We previously defaulted to US Eastern time.
  • Match times are assigned with a date & time selector widget now. This was previously done with 6 painful drop-down lists.
  • Admins can now view bracket predictions before a tournament is started.
  • FIX: API support for org subdomains with dashes
  • FIX: Bracket predictions for 2-3 player brackets

Friday, August 22, 2014

Release notes - week of August 22


  • Participant check-in was deployed last week (more on that here soon)
  • Match history links on the standings page now link to their respective match details
  • API: Add participants in bulk
  • "Best of #" can now be specified for a round. This is styled differently in round headers, sets the default number of form fields when reporting scores, and impacts match notifications.
  • Smaller and more appealing site header for phones (let us know if it doesn't look appealing to you)
  • FIX: Discussion post formatting should match what was shown in the editor
  • FIX: iOS score reporting

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Challonge Premier just got better


Today we're taking a step toward retiring bracket module credits. Effective immediately, as a Premier subscriber, you can embed your brackets on other websites without advertisements.

Q: What is Challonge Premier and how much does it cost?
A: Premier removes advertisements from your experience on Challonge.com, allows you to embed your brackets without ads or usage limits, and supports us so we can continue to improve our service. It is available for $5.99/month, or $29.99/year. Find more info and subscribe at challonge.com/premier

Q: How do I embed a Challonge bracket?
A: Instructions are at challonge.com/module/instructions

Q: What happens if I already have module credits?
A: Your credits will continue to be usable, but we'll only deduct from your balance if you are no longer a Premier subscriber. If you want to cash in your credit balance and have a Premier subscription, let us know and we'll gladly do so via PayPal.

Q: Can I purchase additional module credits?
A: No. Once your credit balance reaches 0, you'll need a Challonge Premier subscription to embed your brackets without advertisements.

Thanks for your support!

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Challonge Premier

Whenever the Challonge team attends a LAN event, the users of our service we run into always ask the same question: 'How does Challonge make money and what can I do to help keep Challonge around?' We appreciate the positive feedback we receive (this has always been our development fuel), but until now we haven't had any formal way for users to show their support.

Challonge Premier was designed to provide users of Challonge that rely on our service a way to support the team behind it. We try to keep the ads displayed on Challonge as relevant and as least intrusive as possible, but we think the layout looks better without them! With Premier, you will not see ads while browsing Challonge from your account. Please note: people who view your brackets will still see advertisements, unless they are also Premier subscribers. Additionally, we would like to recognize the users that sign up for Premier by displaying a Premier badge next to their username to publicly display their support.












We appreciate community feedback and support from all users of Challonge and would encourage everyone to get a Premier badge displayed next to their name! Click on the Challonge Premier button (displayed next to our ads) to get started!

https://challonge.com/premier


Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/challonge if you'd like to run into us at a future event you're attending!

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Adam Oliver joins CHALLONGE!

We're excited to introduce Adam Oliver as our Social Media Manager!

Adam, a fellow Midwesterner, will be joining us remotely from Lee's Summit, MO. As Project M's leader, he's an experienced software project manager, successfully elevating the game from a small side project to one of incredible popularity. Additionally, he has organized and participated in numerous tournaments, adding a valuable perspective to the Challonge team.

Adam will be promoting tournaments and helping us align our development efforts with the needs of tournament organizers. Give him a shout at @challonge or @Strong_Badam, and if you're in the Chicago area, join the entire Challonge team at UFGT on May 23-25!



Saturday, March 29, 2014

We're looking for a social media manager

Challonge is looking for someone to manage its social media. This is a part-time contract position for someone who's familiar with Challonge and in tune with the tournament scene, especially eSports.

Responsibilities include:
  • Posting to Twitter/Facebook/G+ 2-3 times per week
  • Responding to and/or escalating mentions
  • Highlighting new or lesser-known features of Challonge.com
  • Highlighting noteworthy tournaments
  • Communicating with Challonge developers

We're a small company of part-timers with a big user base, so there's plenty of room for growth in this position. Give us a shout if you're interested!

Sunday, March 16, 2014

March Madnonge 2014 is here!

New year, same ridiculous name. We're excited to host another year of bracket pools for the NCAA men's basketball tournament: March Madnonge 2014!

If you're like us, you're a fan of the tournament but not a fan of signing up for convoluted bracket contests. With this in mind, people you invite to your pool are not required to create accounts. They simply are invited to a fill out a bracket. Good luck with your prediction!


Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Team Support

Team support, the first of many features we hope to deliver this year, has finally arrived! We try to work on features that are highly requested by the Challonge community, and this is one of them with 64 votes in the feature request forum:

https://challonge.uservoice.com/forums/44455-feature-requests/suggestions/3720742-allow-team-tournaments

The next time you sign into Challonge, you'll notice there's a new team menu from the main navigation. From this menu you can view all of the teams you're a member of, or add your team to Challonge.


Teams registered on Challonge will each have a page that displays the team description along with listing all of the members of the team. Team owners can also make changes to their team from the 'Settings' and 'Members' pages (from the left navigation menu).



As always, we try to keep tournament management as simple as possible for tournament organizers. For tournaments that will have teams competing, all the organizer has to do is turn on the teams feature by checking the teams checkbox when setting up their tournament.


Teams can be added to the tournament by the tournament organizer by searching for the team's name. For team tournaments, we still allow 'anonymous', unregistered, teams to be represented by entering a team name into 'Display Name'. This can come in handy in last minute situations when there's no time to register the team into Challonge.



Additionally, if you choose to host a signup page, users that administer teams (team captains and team owners) can add their team to your tournament.


Since a single user can administer multiple teams participating in the same tournament, we've added a new 'Team Settings' page where you can manage all of your participating teams for the tournament in a single page. This page allows you to either set a custom 'Display Name' for your team for the current tournament, or to unregister the team entirely.


We'll be monitoring the initial teams and team tournaments that are created for ways to improve the team experience on Challonge, and as always we appreciate any feedback from the Challonge community!

Sunday, January 5, 2014

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)