MotorsportReg.com Blog | Features (10)

Permanent number... or not

November 1, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Drivers, and racers in particular, are fanatical about their numbers. Either they've purchased magnetic numbers or they have them, literally, painted on the side of their car. No matter the reason, we have drivers call us all the time telling us they simply can't register because their number is not available.

Topics: Features

MyLaps Orbits Integration Guide

October 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Time - photo by battsimon @ flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/spbatt/3928384579/) Courtesy of timing and scoring whiz Jim Graffy from SCCA Oregon Region, we have a concise how-to guide for bringing MotorsportReg.com data into MyLaps Orbits (formerly AMB Orbits).

Topics: Features

Hashtags and permalinks

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

While social media like Facebook is not new to most of you, the nuances of Twitter and, more specifically, hashtags may be. "Tags" are a Web 2.0 method of arbitrarily classifying content rather than selecting predefined categories from a controlled list. The unstructured define-it-as-you-go approach gives control to the user over the server and is the system de rigueur of many popular web sites such as Gmail and Flickr. A hashtag can be thought of as a "social tag", or one that helps people interested in a common topic more easily find and consume related content. It might mean tweets on Twitter, photos on Flickr or bookmarks on Delicious.

Twitter explanation of hashtag

Hashtags are most closely associated with Twitter but their concept is simple: create a short, memorable string preceded by a hash (#) that can be used to identify related content across one or more web sites or services. For example, my first real experience with Twitter was the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. Having visited India, I wanted to know what was going on and the mainstream media coverage was fragmented and repetitive. Searching Twitter for the hashtag "#Mumbai", I followed a constantly updating stream of everyone talking about the terrorist attacks including many people on the ground with cell phones in Mumbai.

Create your hashtag/permalink on the basic settings screen

Create your hashtag/permalink on the basic settings screen

How does this apply to you? Last night we introduced a two-in-one feature for hashtags and permalinks for Premium plan customers. Set on the Basic Settings screen, each event can have a short, unique identifier to be used both as a hashtag and a URL shortening service with our new domain msreg.us:

http://msreg.us/YourHashTag

By promoting a single hashtag, you and your participants can easily find content posted anywhere about the event on services such as Twitter, Flickr and elsewhere. These shorter URLs will also fit better into tight spaces like Twitter's 140-character limit and are unlikely to wrap in your emails. Compared to our current URLs, the msreg.us version is as much as 75 characters shorter and points to the same place as the longer link.

Ok, maybe you're saying to yourself, "can I walk before we run?" We realize a lot of organizations still struggle with their web site let alone have a Facebook fan page or Twitter account, but that's exactly why you need to pay attention to these trends. These aren't just for heavy Internet users, they're vehicles you can be using to talk with both the current and next generations of your club. Few things get people as impassioned as motorsports so use these tools to maximize your voice. Start with the easier to remember, copy and type shortened URLs and then start thinking about how to promote the hashtags in your event literature and your social media postings.

"Like" an event on Facebook from MotorsportReg.com

"Like" an event on Facebook from MotorsportReg.com

In addition to making things easier for you, we're also making it easier for attendees to share and recommend your events on various services using the AddThis module and, starting today, the Facebook "Like" button. Anyone with a Facebook account can now "Like" your event which in turn may notify their friends and spread the word about your event and organization.

Want some ideas on how to use a hashtag to reach out and grow an audience? This talk by Baratunde Thurston titled There's a hashtag for that from Web 2.0 Expo last year may help. Warning: some NSFW language in the video.

In addition to a social media user, Thurston is also a comedian and editor at The Onion. You'll certainly laugh and, like me, wonder at first how this talk is relevant. But! Listen to the recaps and consider what might happen if you could reach out to a wider audience and one that might not be immediately aware of you but could be interested in what you do. If Thurston can make the swine flu funny, odds are you can reach just about anyone with your message.

Think before you leap but get a toe out there and get started!

Topics: Marketing, Features

Bits and Pieces - July

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

With just 24 hours remaining in July this post is coming down to the wire. This installment of Bits & Pieces brings some notable enhancements for July. We've already teased a few of them but the previously unmentioned updates will also make lives easier for attendees and organizers alike.

Update credit card or bank account on file screenshot

Update credit card or bank account on file screenshot

First up is a change that allows attendees to update their credit cards or bank accounts on file. Since adding deferred payments last year, we've struggled with how to permit accounts to be added, updated and removed while still ensuring that organizers have a valid account on file at all times.

Account on file removal screenshot

Now under the "Billing" tab, any account on file may be removed so long as it is not the account of record for a current registration. If so, the attendee will have to replace it first using the new update link.

Account refund button screenshot

Also new to the payment system is our previously announced refunds capability. Now send money back to the original account using the new refund button to any transaction from an event that has ended in the past 90 days. Beyond that, transactions will be locked.

Account refund form screenshot

The form lets you perform full or partial refunds. Unlike regular transactions where the fee is subtracted from the total, for refunds we add the fee on top of the amount. This ensures that you can easily specify how much money should be returned to the account without doing any math. We display your cancellation policy alongside the form making it easy to determine what applies in each individual case.

Refunds are currently being tested by a few customers and initial tests are going well. We'll be making it generally available soon.

CKEditor updated to version 3.3.1

The venerable CKEditor has been our WYSIWYG editor for several years now and is loved by all... except when it comes to pasting from Microsoft Word. The truth of the matter is that Word is a real pig of a generator but as the desktop standard few people are willing to switch to something better. Instead, the latest CKEditor 3.3 has a vastly improved MS Word paste feature that strips out the illegal and irrelevant HTML that Word generates behind the scenes. This has several advantages including making your pages smaller (and faster), being more compatible across browsers and generally being easier to work with.

Two great new features are SCAYT (Spell check as you type) and the Search/Find/Replace feature, both highlighted in the screenshot above. For misspelled words, a red squiggly line is displayed and options are provided to correct your error. Well, not your error but someone else's error. Because you never make mistakes, right? :)

Finally, we added a few new attendee and assignment reports to help new organizers jumpstart their reports. Few of our built-in reports include the custom data collected by organizers in the form of event and club questions. These new reports should help organizers see additional ways of including and filtering their data as they analyze and prepare for their events.

Topics: Features

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

Password protect your form

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

Cross-organization permanent numbers

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

Processing SCCA Weekend Memberships

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

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.

MotorsportReg.com Remittance Tool for SCCA Weekend Memberships

MotorsportReg.com Remittance Tool for SCCA Weekend Memberships

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.

SCCA Weekend Membeship Certificate

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!)

Topics: Features

Registration and in-line vehicle editing arrive

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

We've added a couple of big features in the past two weeks, one primarily for organizers and the other primarily for attendees.

Post-registration editing

The ability to come back and edit your registration after the fact is now available! It is disabled by default, so you must enable it on a per-event basis. This lets events whose registrars are OK with post-registration modifications like car classes, numbers or second entries allow them, while registrars who want to keep their events locked like car control clinics or driver schools continue to do so. You can turn it on under the Basic Settings for your event. Any registration after about 6/1 will be instantly editable.

editlink

Be aware there are some limitations - significant changes by the registrar may cause parts of the registration to become locked to the attendee. This is because of the way that organizers have "advanced" editing capability while attendees must use the form. We're hoping to solve this in a future release as well. Generally speaking, most of the changes that registrars are likely to make can now be made directly by the attendee so these situations should be few and far between.

We have a few SCCA regions who have turned this on and we're already seeing less email inquiries which means fewer things for the registrars to do!

Add or edit a vehicle on the registration form

Edit a vehicle from the registration form

Historically, adding or editing a vehicle from the registration form took you out of the registration workflow and into "My Account". We've made this more dynamic so you can add or edit a vehicle directly from the registration form without losing any selections. Since we can add one from the registration form, we simultaneously removed the vehicle form from the new user sign up process. Now it's one fewer step to open an account on MSR and for users that don't require a vehicle, like social events or co-drivers, it's one less screen to skip.

Topics: Features

Announcing our REST API

January 3, 2020 by Brian Ghidinelli

For some time now, we've been internally using an API that facilitates remote access to the inner workings of MotorsportReg.com. Today, we're excited to announce general availability of the service to our customers and partners. Customers with or without development expertise in house can take advantage of our API to incorporate their data into their own applications and websites. Understand the implications are very powerful: this can eliminate manual updates to your website for event-related information! We'll show you two ways you can integrate these listings directly onto your own website.

Topics: Customers, Features, API