MotorsportReg.com Blog | Brian Ghidinelli (8)

Brian Ghidinelli

Never say never (to refunds)

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

At some time in the past I am sure that I said something to the effect of, "we never do refunds". It's because by the time someone needs a refund we have almost always sent the money on to the event organizer and no longer have the funds in question. Regardless, refunds due to a participant have been one of the last bastions of paper in a process that we have almost fully digitized.

Well rejoice... I am eating my words because refunds back to the original account are coming to MotorsportReg.com later this week!

Initially we'll be offering it to a small group of trial organizations while we monitor the process and ensure it's working as expected. We have tested everything to our satisfaction but there are some things you can't test without running real transactions; like whether or not the correct amount of money actually winds up on the credit card!

We're excited to remove another barrier to saving organizers time. Contact us if you want to be one of our trial customers!

Topics: Features

Three reporting updates

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Just a quick Monday update to cover a few changes over the weekend for reporting. The first is that we added the ability to filter the financial reports to online payments only. This means that you can now duplicate the "You've Got Money" email report delivered every two weeks when we perform direct deposits in the event that you need to go back in time or the email disappears into the great spam box of the sky.

As a result, we've created a new default financial report aptly named "You've Got Money" which groups by pay period and only includes online payments. Each pay period will tie to your direct deposits just like the email report.

Finally, there have been two long-standing oddities when grouping data in reports. Frankly, they're a little embarrassing. The first is that the groups themselves may or may not be in alphabetical order and although that's not a requirement, it should at least be consistent in its behavior. The other is that from time to time, data inside the group may not be in the right sort order. We looked at that code every time a customer brought it up and we kept seeing all trees and no forest. Finally Susan Wright at Road America asked us again last week and one more look triggered the light bulb! All reports should now consistently order the groups alphabetically as well as maintain sort order inside of the group. No changes are necessary for your existing reports; it will just work the next time you run it.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

We received a neat hack from PCA Northeast Region for password protecting a portion of a registration form. While we don't support this natively, combining an event question with a validation rule that checks for a particular answer lets the registration form stop the user if they don't provide the right password.

Creating a partial form password

This is a clever way to provide an option for pre-approved or in-the-know members only. It could be used to protect a single option or the entire registration form. Very cool! We've added a setup guide in the documentation here.

Topics: Customers, Features

Reporting update for SCCA Regions

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

We don't normally do organization-specific updates but this particular set primarily benefits Sports Car Club of America regions using MotorsportReg.com. We just released three enhancements:

Detail reports now include a full-page pre-populated official SCCA tech form

Attendee and assignment reports now include a "Region of Record Abbreviation" option; for SCCA regions this will be a 2-4 letter abbreviation sent to us by National (e.g. SFR = San Francisco, ATL = Atlanta)

Attendee and assignment reports now include a "Region of Record ID" option; for SCCA regions this is a 1-3 digit number (e.g. 33 = San Francisco, 3 = Atlanta)

We also added two new reports recently under Assignments. They are the Spotter's Charts developed by SCCA Atlanta's Paul Gauzens which organize the vehicles by group and number to help stewards and other folks figure out who is who while on track. We brought a second version organized by class as well.

Topics: Customers

Profiles updated for email deliverability

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

ReturnPath's SenderScore is an important rating for email servers as it impacts deliverability across a wide range of email services. Recently we saw our reputation take a brief nose dive when our score dipped. The reason? We had reportedly been sending emails to honeypots, unadvertised email addresses designed to capture spammers.

The problem? We don't do that. In fact, further research showed that some of the domains of our legitimate users had expired and been reconfigured as honeypot domains. Our once legitimate opt-in email addresses had aged out and become a liability. On top of that, a mailing list we operate was tricked by honeypot "from" addresses trying to spam us. Our software tried to do the right thing and verify the request with an opt-in confirmation but that confirmation only generated additional email to the spam traps. Ouch!

That was simply no good. We immediately began reaching out to key parties and updating some of our processes. Tonight we made the most recent change on our to-do list. As part of a routine release window we performed some batch processing on older MotorsportReg.com accounts. Accounts that haven't registered for an event in several years have been set to inactive status. All profiles are still available and no data has been deleted! This change only means the old profiles will no longer be included in the email blaster. We also caught up our permanent bounce processing so that email addresses which no longer work were also flagged as inactive. The net result is that your email blast counts may appear to be reaching fewer people but, with improved deliverability, your messages will be reaching an even higher percentage of real subscribers going forward. If you want to review the profiles, you can list all inactive participants by choosing "Members" in the top navigation and then clicking the Inactive link.

Email deliverability is hard and it is only becoming harder as ISPs struggle to cope with the non-stop barrage of spam and unwanted email. We'll continue to make changes and tweaks as necessary in order to keep your email reaching its recipients.

Update - More about Inactive Status

We're receiving some questions about the update and there is some confusion over the inactive status in general. The inactive status has been around and in use for more than a year. Before the update above, you already had people flagged as inactive. Here are all of the reasons a profile could be flagged as inactive:

Recipient flagged your email as spam with a supported ISP; we switch them to inactive

Clicked the "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of emails you deliver; flagged themselves as inactive

Have had three or more permanent bounces to their email address

Have not registered for an event with your organization since 1/1/2006

We're being very pragmatic here - we don't want to remove anyone from your distribution lists who is still an engaged member or participant. We are working to keep everyone from shooting themselves in the foot by sending messages to people that don't want them or whose email addresses no longer work and eroding the reputation of our mail server.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Beginning yesterday at 3:00pm Pacific time we began receiving reports of intermittent access problems with MotorsportReg.com. Initially it appeared to be a routing issue but as we worked with our vendors to peel back the layers of the onion we found it was a problem with a DNS server. For a small percentage of our users this made the site unavailable and we are very sorry for the interruption.

DNS is the system that changes names (like MotorsportReg.com) into addresses (in this case, IP addresses, like 69.36.240.124). At the moment, one of the six DNS servers our vendors run has lost our address and is giving out bad information to anyone who asks it for directions. It's like asking six people for directions and one of them tells you to make a left instead of a right.

The issue manifested itself as certain people not being able to reach our site while they are able to reach other websites and/or intermittent access problems reaching our site.

The reason is because DomainMonger.com changed the IP address of one server without a formal notification and our firewall rules blocked the new IP address from updating. Our network and services are locked down extensively to comply with PCI DSS so this new, unauthorized IP address was unable to continue updating its records. Unfortunately this lack of communication for infrequent events (this is the first time DomainMonger made a change like this in 9 years) is not entirely uncommon in the web industry and is difficult to track.

We have updated our firewall rules to permit the new IP address to update and they should start resolving again within 120 minutes or so. We apologize for the hassle - please let us know if we can do anything to help.

On a side note, if you are an organizer we strongly recommend you follow us on Twitter or at least bookmark our twitter page at @pukkasoft because it runs through an entirely separate network that is not impacted by issues related directly to MotorsportReg.com. We also directly post issues reported by our monitoring partner, Pingdom, which give you an early warning if issues arise.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

We have a lot of customers who work together in a geographic area, especially among our SCCA Club Racing customers. SCCA Central Division, comprised of Chicago, Blackhawk Valley, Milwaukee and Land o' Lakes regions, has a common set of Divisional racing numbers they would like to reserve regardless of which region is hosting an event. This scenario is played out across the country with neighboring clubs who share participants.

In MotorsportReg.com, each organization has their own sandbox with private numbers for their events which requires significant cooperation and management to enforce across different organizations. And if you have never witnessed a driver who finds someone else has taken their number erupt, it looks something like this:

Still Two #XX entered in SM. It's my permanent number!!! For the South East!!!!

That's a lot of exclamation points. As a driver and racer myself, I know many of my fellow competitors are just one step from the edge trying to balance their families, jobs and racing. Far be it from us to give them the proverbial push over the edge!

No, because as of today we have launched our public number pools which allow any organization to flag their numbers as public and for any other organization to subscribe to them. The subscription is read-only so the owning organization controls who receives a number. Our popular Use-N-Reserve feature is only functional for events held by the owner of the number pool.

Select an available number

Subscribing clubs choose the number pool like for any other event as part of a segment and behind the scenes we check to see if the participant has a number (including in a specific class or group) and enforce the uniqueness required by the organizer. If not, they'll pick from a list of available numbers like any other number pool.

Check out our Number Manager documentation for details.

Topics: Features

Slip angles

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

From Wikipedia: "Drifting refers to a driving technique and to a motorsport where the driver intentionally oversteers, causing loss of traction in the rear wheels through turns, while maintaining vehicle control and a high exit speed. A car is said to be drifting when the rear slip angle is greater than the front slip angle prior to the corner apex, and the front wheels are pointing in the opposite direction to the turn (e.g. car is turning left, wheels are pointed right or vice versa), and the driver is controlling these factors. As a motor sport, professional drifting competitions are held across the world."

And now all customers running drift events can select the new Drift event type under their Basic Settings. Enjoy, but uhhhh, try not to breath in all that tire smoke. :)

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Over the past 18 months, the HPDE Insurance Program has become a big hit with the HPDE enthusiast community. With over 3,000 policies sold, it is clear that enthusiasts want affordable coverage while they are participating in HPDE events and the HPDE Insurance Program meets that need.

The HPDE Insurance Program offers affordable, single-event coverage to enthusiasts participating in structured driving events. These policies are only offered to "approved" driving events, and the program is endorsed by both BMW CCA and PCA. If you aren't sure if your events are approved, contact Lockton Affinity (the program administrator) to take the necessary steps to get approved.

This program was formed by Ryan Staub at Lockton Affinity with our assistance here at MotorsportReg; this truly is a program designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. Throughout the design, both the individual enthusiast's and the event organizer's needs were considered. From a participant's perspective, the single-event structure is very appealing to the driver that participates in less than 6 events per year. The ability to add a second covered driver at no additional charge, the "stated value" policy with the option to cover modifications, and the ease of purchasing coverage online in just a few minutes are all very appealing. As an HPDE instructor, I take comfort in knowing that the policy covers me if I'm asked to drive their car too.

Approval from the HPDE Insurance Program lends credibility to the safety and structure of an event organizer's driving events. This can be used as a great marketing tool to separate your program from non-instructed, loosely-run track days. Event organizers that include information about this insurance program in their event pre-registration materials consistently report increased attendance in their events. For the driver that is on the fence about attending an event, knowing that they can obtain affordable single-event insurance for the event can often help to nudge them over the fence.

Visit http://hpdeinsuranceprogram.com and click the "Apply Online" link to confirm if your upcoming event is listed. If not, contact Lockton at hpdeins@locktonaffinity.com to get your event added. In a time where many event organizers struggle to gain the necessary registrations to put on a profitable event, this is a free tool that benefits your participants and can help encourage participation.

Topics: Customers, Misc

Updated detail reports use less paper

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Thanks to some feedback from the SCCA National Convention and some prompting by Robert Baizer from PCA San Diego, we took another look at our detailed "one-pager" reports. Organizers have been noting that, depending upon their particular event, the report was instead a "two-pager" and it was wasting paper.

The problem lay in how our print style sheet was translated to PDF, the most common output format. It wasn't until we created a document in Word with line of Times New Roman sized 6 to 12 points and printed it that we recognized the 10pt font sizes we specified was more like giant kindergarten 14pt¹. It's no surprise that things were spilling over into multiple pages with the extra size and line spacing.

We experimented with actual printed copies and drove the sizes down to match the 9 and 10pt samples we printed from Word^{2, orange boxes}. In addition, we have also reformatted event questions to display in two columns and span the width of the page^{3, purple boxes}. This gives the assignments at the bottom a much better chance of displaying on the same page and should reduce the amount of paper and ink used. It's also easier to scan now that most items reside on single lines without so much wrapping. We'll be pushing this change live tonight so let us know how it looks next time you print!

Organize awesome events.Our all-in-one event management software keeps organizers sane & attendees happy.

Brian Ghidinelli

Recent Posts

Never say never (to refunds)

Three reporting updates

Password protect your form

Reporting update for SCCA Regions

Profiles updated for email deliverability

Update - More about Inactive Status

DNS Server Issues

Cross-organization permanent numbers

Slip angles

HPDE Insurance Program Update

Updated detail reports use less paper

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