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These popped up on our radar in the last month or so - more of our customers are using Craigslist to troll for additional participants and cast their net wider. I think this is a great move because the majority of auto enthusiasts still aren't aware that they can compete in an autocross or drive their car on a racetrack. Those thrilling experiences are what turn car lovers into lifelong car club members, participants and (just maybe) volunteers.

One word of advice: use language that complete neophytes will understand. E.g., "Come to a solo event!" means nothing to the general public but "Race your street car against the clock at Qualcomm Stadium!" is a lot more engaging and understandable to the uninitiated.

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To ease integration with a variety of third-party software packages, we've introduced new formats for certain resources of our REST API. Calendar and event listings can now be returned in RSS, Atom and iCalendar formats. This will facilitate easy consumption by software such as vBulletin for automatic content population eliminating human intervention to post event listings on your own website. Thanks to Steven Schlossman from BMW CCA National Capital chapter for the kick in the butt to get this done.

Awhile back we also added the ability to get a list of the entries for an event or for a segment of an event. If you want to list your entries on your own site or grab them for some kind of automated processing, you will want to check out the two resources:

/rest/events/{event_id}/assignments
/rest/events/{event_id}/segments/{segment_id}/assignments


Thanks to Mike Malsed at Formula RallyX who asked us for this one.

For the third year in a row we'll be representing MotorsportReg.com at the SCCA National Convention. Workers and leaders from all corners of the country (plus Guam and Puerto Rico!) will descend on the South Point Casino in Las Vegas for three days of meetings and socializing. We look forward to this event all year long - it's a great opportunity to meet the people who keep the wheels of the SCCA rolling. We'll have our booth as well as a few surprises that you won't want to miss whether you're a customer or not.

A tip for those who have yet to make hotel reservations - you can get a better deal than the SCCA convention rate by using Booking.com. We just made our reservations and saved an extra 20% like last year.

Watch for the return of the candy bowl but in a new, larger size!

We ran a customer survey in June of this year and I have spent a few minutes looking over the results again this morning. There is one particular response that I am especially proud of:



96.8% of our customers, whether on our free or paid plans, would be disappointed if they couldn't use MotorsportReg.com. This means we're delivering on our promise to make volunteers even more awesome at their jobs by making it easier and more fun to organize and attend events.

We don't take this as carte blanche to put down the keyboard and ride off into the sunset though. In fact, since June we've rolled out a bevy of big-iron features like post-event registration editing, membership validation and surveys/elections. But we do take this as a compliment. And for that, we just want to say, we love you too. :)

SCCA's Weekend Membership is an oft-maligned program that requires non-members to buy a temporary, five-day membership to participate in events like Autocross. The membership provides the same insurance that full SCCA members enjoy and it permits the holder to participate in as many SCCA events as they like during the five day period.

Buying the membership on-site requires filling out a form from which the organizer and attendee each retain a portion. The organizer manually builds a summary of the event and mails this info to SCCA National where someone enters the information by hand into the membership system. In the event that the weekend member becomes a full member, they will receive a $15 discount off their yearly dues.

This isn't the worst process in the world but it's certainly tedious. It also further back-loads organizers with more work on the day of the event instead of less. Particularly for single-day events like Autocross, RallyCross or Rallies, this can be a considerable burden. As a new program, it also means another training burden for volunteers and workers.



Enter the MotorsportReg.com Weekend Membership remittance system. We released the feature in September to electronically remit SCCA weekend memberships. It was along with about fifty other changes so I wanted to take a moment to explain how our system is unique and how it benefits your region.

Going beyond automation

Eliminating all of the manual process was the first part of our solution. Using an inventory item for weekend memberships, organizers can quickly transmit the required data to SCCA National on demand before or after the event. The member profiles are automatically updated with the temporary membership number and expiration date. The region will receive their invoice from SCCA National without having to open a spreadsheet, lick a stamp or go to the post office.

We could have stopped there but with inspiration from Regional Executive Nick Hallman at SCCA South Carolina Region, we combined the remittance process with a call to action to help convert the weekend members to become full members. While fast cars and driving fast is an easy "product" to market, many car clubs struggle with moving candidates to members.

We automatically generate a certificate that highlights the benefits of becoming a member and how to redeem their weekend membership for a discount. Any attendee with a valid email address entered in MotorsportReg.com will receive an email like this if their weekend membership is remitted electronically.



We passed this by SCCA National for review and their comment was brief: "Looks good. Actually WOW, I'm impressed."

Try it on your next event and let us know how it works for you. Please pass us any feedback from attendees and we'll continue to improve it to help bolster your member numbers as we work to make your volunteer roles easier and more fun (and more effective!)

We are looking to grow here at Pukka Software and add a customer support player to our team. The position has flexible hours and a remote work arrangement and puts you at the front-line of supporting more than 170 organizations who use MotorsportReg.com and their members and attendees. We're a small company with a strong philosophy and your contribution will have a big impact. You must be the kind of person that owns a project and dominates it!

For those who fancy a job in a motorsports-related field but haven't done customer support before it is worth reiterating that not every call is a petrol-fueled romance that ends on the podium. From time to time the role requires providing difficult answers and charming rude type-A personalities. Those few instances are greatly outnumbered by the well-meaning callers from around the country who are genuinely thankful that a) we picked up the phone or returned their call (unlike certain competitors...) and b) have solved their problem or given them an answer.

We treat even the most inane of questions with sincerity and a positive attitude and you must do the same. Not everyone who uses MotorsportReg.com is a geek like us but we help every last one of them get registered and manage events even if it means doing it for them.

Check out the job description and then drop us a note if you're interested!

This update is a two-fer: two months and twice the updates! There are some major improvements to MotorsportReg.com since early August that impact all of our plans and introduce some important new features. I'll be brief so you can get through them all without too much reading.

August

A long-requested feature and major improvement to managing members is our new membership verification service. Premium plan customers can upload their member list as a CSV file and SCCA regions have real-time validation against their National database in Topeka. All plans can take advantage of the new form builder validation rules for validating club membership and region/chapter membership.

Registration date and status can be used for sorting detail reports. This allows organizers to create incremental reports without printing off duplicates.

Validation rule for vehicle make. PCA regions often limit attendance to Porsches only and this validation rule will enforce that restriction. You can provide a list of makes if you want to allow more than one.

SCCA Weekend Membership support. SCCA regions who accept Weekend Members (primarily autocross and rallycross) can now skip the paper forms and instead remit their weekend members electronically. Set up an inventory item for weekend memberships, make it part of a package on the order form and use the new tool to redeem In addition to saving time, the process also sends the registrant an email certificate that encourages them to redeem it for a full SCCA membership.

Street Survival events added to the calendar and restored our NASA events feed.

Introduced "No Show" Attendee Status. Useful for differentiating between people who cancel and those who don't show up. Many programs like to know who these trouble makers are. Also available in all of the reports as a filter.

August quickies:

• Vehicles like racecars that don't have years can select "N/A" at the bottom of the year list


• Add private notes (and therefore the Cancel date) to the Refunds and Credits manager to make it easier to determine who is owed money (hat tip to Starla McCauley from SCCA Cincinnati for the idea)


• Clone event segments complete with classes, groups and class-group mappings (Mark passes out and Steve Davis from SCCA Atlanta does the happy dance)


• Form builder now allows collapsing a node and its children as well as expanding the node and its children (hat tip Stacy King from Asphalt Ventures)


• Billing tab for attendees now includes payment history for canceled registrations


• Support merging member profiles with payment accounts on file to reduce the number of failed merges


• Changed the deferred payment processing admin tool to pre-select New and Confirmed registrations to help prevent charging waitlisted or canceled registrations by accident

September

September is a great month - not only is it my birthday but both Mark and I went racing for a change (not at the same time, our business continuity plan prohibits it!) We also knocked out some other big items:

We continue to make our drag-and-drop WYSIWYG Registration Form Builder even better and more powerful. New styles help differentiate Groups and Branches and visually identify which children belong. This makes it easier to tell which items are mutually exclusive when placed on the form. Validation rules can now target a nested child! This is a big deal - it means you can hide your "may also be required" items so they won't appear to your attendees until the parent is selected. We also highlight the current node in the pop-up picker to make it easier to find your spot and all validation rule types can now have a custom error message to help you drive home your rules and requirements more clearly.

Another big enhancement to the form builder is the ability to reorder the parts bin which will change the order of Questions and Packages everywhere else. On the attendee page. In reports. Everywhere. It used to be kind of random but now, if you have a bunch of questions or packages you would like to group together (say, a series of related questions), you can drag and drop them inside the Parts Bin as the screen shot shows.

Extend the REST API to get attendee lists. Using our API, you can now get your attendee list remotely for embedding in your own website. Hat tip to Mike Malsed at Formula RallyX for the request.

Updated our rich text editor to the all-new CKEditor 3.0. This is a major update that brings enhanced usability, a lightning-fast load time and the ability to insert a raw line break instead of a double-spaced paragraph (it's a long story, don't ask). It should also handle pasting from MS Word better than before. Be sure to use the "Paste from Word" icon with the little 'W' on the toolbar for best results!

Surveys and Elections! Premium plan customers can now run unlimited surveys and elections. Elections can be locked and anonymized providing secure secret ballots. Membership can be verified in the same way as the registration form described above. We also support a more advanced custom question with two new types available: essay/comment multi-line text boxes and Likert ratings plus working regular expression validation for the answers.

September Quickies:

• Awhile back we combined a lot of our Javascript to make the page load faster. Unfortunately the script from AddThis.com was acting up and slowing down pages where it wasn't used. We've pulled it back out to improve the response time.


• Updated to new Zero Dollar Authorizations for Visa credit card transactions. This replaces the $1 "ghost authorization" used to verify address and security code details before accepting a transaction and will reduce cardholder confusion.


• Help content is getting close to done. Another week or so and we'll have our first online reference manual available 24/7. It's looking really good and most importantly will serve as a great foundation for all kinds of online help we have planned for the future.


• Fixed bug in account options where enabling American Express cards did not actually work. Sorry about that!

With the 2009 season drawing to a close for many of our customers, we have a few more biggies we're planning to release before 2010 begins including registering multiple people with one account, bringing back our shared vehicle functionality and more. You can see the full roadmap on our internal Discussion forum.

On a personal note, I'll be out of the office from October 9th to 24th for my honeymoon in South Africa so development will take a short pause. If you have questions in the mean time don't hesitate to give a call at the office and Mark will get you squared away. Have a great October!

Adding another check to the "reasons why Paypal isn't all that" column:

PayPal’s Pires says [...] reserves are typically 1% to 5% of PayPal sales, but can go as high as 20%. PayPal determines whether to require reserves based on risk associated with the type of product or service being sold, the merchant’s history of charge backs, and the length of time they’ve been PayPal sellers.

The furor from Paypal and Ebay merchants on this is pretty loud. Many merchants, with what sound like quite respectable records, are getting hit with 20% rolling reserves for 30-90 days. Making this relevant to our customers; I don't know a lot of car clubs that could deal with having 20-60% of the monies for an event held up for 30-90 days. Get the full story at BusinessWeek.com.

We'll be performing security maintenance tomorrow, Saturday August 22nd from 9PM until 1AM on the 23rd (Pacific time), to implement recommended updates from our upstream software vendors. We expect the site to be unavailable for approximately 10-15 minutes during this window and will attempt to perform the updates sequentially around the cluster to minimize the impact.

If you need to track the progress or contact us during the work, you can follow our Twitter account as we post updates. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us.

The Tire Rack Street Survival program is one that is near and dear to our hearts here at MotorsportReg.com world headquarters. It's an outgrowth of the BMW CCA Car Control Clinic program tailored for teenagers to keep them safe on the road. The statistics indicate they sorely need it:

"Last year, over 5,000 teenagers died in motor vehicle crashes, the leading killer of American youths aged 16 to 19, accounting for more than 40 percent of fatalities in that age bracket. To reduce this number, Tire Rack Street Survival® has developed a non-profit, national driver education program aimed at teaching teens the skills they need to stay alive behind the wheel."

There's a short 45-second video introduction that gives some idea as to the idea behind Street Survival:



This is a truly phenomenal program that has grown beyond the BMW CCA Foundation and is now backed by other motorsports groups such as the SCCA. While a lot of motorsports is about fun and glory, it's hard not to get excited about saving lives! That's why we are proud to be promoting Street Survival events on our national MotorsportReg.com events calendar.



They will also be included in our monthly calendar blasts which reach several thousand enthusiasts (and parents...) around the country.

If you have a teen or know someone with a teen, a one-day Street Survival course is the best $60 a parent can spend. Take two minutes, right now, and email five parents about this program!