This week I'm near Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin - not to attend an event at Road America (drats!) - but rather for our annual team meetup in Lake Geneva. As a fully remote team we find a late summer week to bring the team together, review our progress and refine our plan for the future. It's a chance to replace phone calls and emoji with face-to-face conversations and meals that leaves us energized to keep pushing forward.

Last month I listed a number of improvements for my programmer friends but I'm back with a larger-than-normal list of improvements and fixes to MotorsportReg, including a sneak peek at a major new feature. 

These are not the members you're looking for...

Many organizations have some kind of required membership and we include fields to manage members including membership number, expiration date and more. But if you don't have members, then a small amount of your screen real estate has been taken by these unnecessary-to-you fields.

Good news! You can now disable our membership features under your Account Options which will hide the membership-related fields from your entire administrative interface and streamline the registration process for your participants. 

Assignment / Entry Editor Improvements

When working on an event with limited capacity, it's common to confirm participants based upon their run group or class and the available room. For track days, this can often be driven by the number of instructors you have available or maximum number of vehicles that can be on the track at any one time. Now you can change registration status from the Assignments screen where you can sort and group by segment, class, modifier/PAX, group and more. Thanks to Michael Handelman from PCA Potomac Region for the suggestion.

In other scenarios, the information you need to confirm a participant or make a proper class or run group assignment may be tied up in other fields. In addition to optionally displaying club questions or logbook entries, you can now bring in an event question and list of co-drivers. The latter is especially valuable for making sure you don't double-book one vehicle being used by two participants. It's also great for looking at enduros. Thanks to Jeff Wasilko and COM Sports Car Club for the idea.

Better Mobile Registration Forms

MotorsportReg has always been very accessible from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets but small screen sizes often had to resort to "pinch-and-zoom" to complete a registration. With more than 30% of our traffic coming from mobile devices, we turned our attention towards improving this experience to help your participants register more easily while standing in line, laying on the couch and, yes, sitting on the toilet.

Our update improves the attendee experience - from viewing event details to creating an account to registering - to scale to the size of the screen (known as "responsive design") to make it easier on the fingers and the eyes. 

Clone Number Pools

Number pools keep track of permanent and reserved numbers as well as prevent duplicates during the registration process. If you've ever wanted to make a copy of an existing pool and "start fresh", now you can. Simply create a new number pool and there is an option to copy numbers from other pools. We used this for the SCCA Majors racing series to copy from multiple regional pools into one consolidated national pool. 

Sneak Preview

We have some ideas about how we can make MotorsportReg better reflect the community of enthusiasts that is motorsport while also making MSR more useful to you. Here's a little taste: 

Leave a comment with your prediction if you have a guess on what's coming. :) 

Quick Hits

Here are additional changes that resolve feature requests or bug reports. Most of these requests come directly from you! First, changes for attendees:

• Membership expiration date, if present, is displayed to the member in their "My Account."
• Fixed email receipt in Gmail where sidebar was not displaying properly (thanks to @tuxseto).
• Whenever a participant disputes a credit card charge, we defend you in the chargeback process.  We improved our defenses by adding a click-to-accept checkbox with the cancellation policy.
• Fixed a scenario where a required group with sold-out children would prevent a registration form from submitting (thanks to Kansas City Region SCCA Solo for help).
• Vintage automobile vehicle makes received some cleanup (thanks to Ralph Klingman).

And changes for event organizers and administrators:

• Survey/Election pages now display the number of responses received to show progress when the individual answers are not available during a locked election.
• Added the "1st Timer" field from the administrative attendee list into reports allowing you to sort and filter by it. Create a pre-saved report using this field to simplify reaching out to first timers both before and after an event to ensure they have a good experience and will come back!
• Administrative attendee is now way faster to display and the paid column shows the  balance due rather than just a "$$$" indicator.
• When administrators process a payment, we now log the user to facilitate calculating daily totals by registrar and cash out summaries (thanks to Miller Motorsports Park).
• Class Modifier/PAX is now included in administrative email receipts alongside class and group if you are using this feature.
• Student-instructor assigner displays the instructor's class for scenarios where that impacts what kind of student they should be assigned.
• Staff list now shows the last login date for each administrator to help with pruning the access list and validating recent access.