Bracket predictions coming soon!

Still lacking a few pieces, but we're hoping to make up for our lack of involvement in the NCAA basketball tournament by offering a bracket prediction extension for ALL Challonges.

Here's the teaser:

Once this is released in beta, it and the voting extension will undergo some revisions before earning their spots on our home page.

In other news, we've secured facebook.com/challonge :-)

Beta release of Voting extension

A user voting option is now available in the new extensions section of Challonge! settings. Facebook/Challonge! membership is required as usual, though I'm considering adding an anonymous voting option.

Here's a test bracket with very random entries if you'd like to check out the controls:
http://test.challonge.com/voting

More to come, including module & mobile support, so look out for updates on this and additional extensions. Also, it's crunch time for March Madness, so if we get pools going again this year, you'll hear it here first. Though, it'd be nice to predict any bracket, and that extensions section has plenty of vacancy...

Some Attention to Usability

Having survived numerous feature additions and other abuse, the tournament setup page was starting to show its age. The time for surgery finally arrived. The new layout captures all tournament settings on one page without any scrolling necessary, and the description is finally seeing its dream fulfilled as a WYSIWYG editor.

Sharing User Management and Score Reporting Permissions

December was Challonge's strongest month yet, but development-wise, it was pretty quiet.

To kick off the new year, I finally implemented some basic privilege sharing for tournaments. Organizers can now share their user management and score reporting superpowers. The scenarios for more complex permission sharing are pretty scarce, so I'll stick to this for now until user feedback sways my opinion.

An access level column was added to the dashboard to reflect the permissions update. At the moment, there are just three access levels: report your own scores (1 bar), score reporting and user management (2 bars), and organizer (3 bars) -- all are reflected in the screenshot below.

Also in today's update were a couple bug fixes and other small tweaks. More to come!

Login with Facebook, Tournament Sign-ups

If you haven't already noticed, we now allow users to log in with Facebook. This lowers the registration barrier for Challonge! itself and tournaments that use our sign-up feature. We're currently just using Facebook for authentication, but if we add additional features for their API, we'll allow existing Challonge! users to connect their Facebook accounts.

Also related to tournament sign-ups, you can now require users to sign up for your tournaments with Challonge! accounts. Previously, there was no way to disable the "lame" name-only sign-up option.

I'll keep development promises to myself for now, but there's some good stuff in the works for early 2011. Stay tuned!

Rails RegExp Fragment Expiration

Challonge.com caches various bits of tournament data (including the brackets) as files. To avoid showing stale data, various events expire these fragments. In Rails, expiring fragments is done by either passing a unique identifier (for 1 fragment), or passing a regular expression (for multiple fragments).

Here's the catch with the regexps: ALL fragment paths pass through the regexp, even if the regexp specifies a directory path (e.g. /tournaments/592/.*). So, imagine a system with several thousands of fragments in roughly a thousand subdirectories. Now, expire fragments using a regexp every second or so. :-(

Needless to say, Challonge's server is much happier now with the regexp fragment expirations removed.

If you've managed a tournament with us before, you'll notice that adding/removing participants is now incredibly faster than before.

User Interface Update - Stage 1

The first stage of UI updates has been applied to challonge.com. Tab controls were polished a bit, and various updates were made throughout to improve usability (language, layout, help bubbles). I'll probably jump back into multi-stage tournament development before returning to the UI, though the home page is in dire need of some marketing material (screen shots, extended feature list, etc.).

Here are a few before-and-after shots of the tab controls: