Layout Update, Tags Trashed, and Printable Blank Brackets

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.