Blog Fooocus

Though I've been resisting it from the beginning, private messaging is on the way. This should help open up communication between players and fits nicely among a handful of other changes on the way (per-match attachments like replays, photos, and videos, also match scheduling and voting).

I have 5 development branches of Challonge, so I either have ADD or there's a lot coming through the pipeline...

Double Elimination Bug Fix

There was a strange bug affecting double elimination tournaments with qualifying matches. Under some circumstances after qualifying match scores were reported, first round matches would appear to get mixed up (labels would no longer be in alphabetical order). This would result in winners advancing to unexpected positions in the bracket. Fortunately, matches on the back end were fine, so the patch just applied retroactively fixes any affected brackets. Unfortunately, many people may have already run from Challonge in terror.

Thanks to those who pointed this out!

Gears Turning

There haven't been any major Challonge changes lately, but there are a couple interesting features in the works.

Custom Subdomains
I've been sitting on this feature for a while - trying to keep it as simple as possible. The gist of it is that users would be able to create custom subdomains (dave.challonge.com) and then publish tournaments to them (dave.challonge.com/tournament_url). The root of the subdomain (dave.challonge.com) would then act as an index for all tournaments published to it, and it could also be customizable with images, links, etc. - useful for arcades, websites, and other organizations. In order to allow someone else to publish to your subdomain, you would simply share a key string. For small venues, this key string could be shared between a few people. For forums, the key could be in a sticky thread in a private section of the forum. Anyway, comments are welcome. I'm hoping to get this in production this month.

Tournament Chat/Forum
I'm adding a "Forum" tab for tournaments which will provide basic means for communicating. This will be kept nice and thin and easy to ignore if it's of no use to you.

Ladders/Leagues
One of these days... I've been talking about these for a while. Free time has been scarce, but I'll eventually fit these new Challonge types in.

Markup in Tournament Descriptions

This was a long time coming, but markup is now allowed in tournament descriptions (HTML & Textile). I'm hoping flexibility is limited enough to prevent Challonge from giving birth to myspace-like pages.

In the future, most minor updates like this will only be communicated on twitter (twitter.com/challonge), so please subscribe to our feed for the latest info and tips.

March Madness on Challonge!

Basketball fan or not, you should fill out a bracket for the NCAA division I men's basketball tournament! Head over to challonge.com/marchmadness between Sunday and Wednesday to fill out your bracket. The 64th seed won't be decided until Tuesday.

If you're running a pool, have participants fill out our bracket and send you a link to it. You'll then be able to grade the brackets and rank them against each. You can specify the number of points awarded per round (1/2/4/8/16/32, 1/2/3/4/5/10, etc.).

New forum for feature requests

I still need to link challonge.com to this site, but I'll be managing feature requests at http://challonge.uservoice.com from now on. Please stop by and post suggestions or vote to help me prioritize.

Hello, Scrollbars

Themeable scrollbars have replaced the arrows in Challonge brackets.

Why the change?

• Long scroll distances were tedious to cover for large tournaments
• Scrollbars are more easily identified by users
• Vertical mouse wheel, arrow up/down/left/right, page up/down, and home/end keys are now supported

Also! Round robin and Swiss tournaments will no longer be constrained to 3 columns. They'll take advantage of the full width available to them.

This update turned out to be far more daunting than expected. I couldn't find an adequate plugin to handle themeable scrollbars, so I ended up rolling my own. IE 7+, Opera 10, Firefox 3, and Chrome are supported. I may share a jquery plugin for this down the road, but for now, I'm anxious to get back to work on ladders and other features.