Legal Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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...