Adding participants in bulk

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

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

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.