Release 8 To Do List

Release 7 just went out today and it pleases me very much to be able to put out those updates and I think it adds a lot of value to the site. Release 8 isn’t going to be as spectacular, but it includes some stepping stones that will allow us to build a better advanced search.

In Release 8 I need to allow clubs to specify the platform on which the club is based. Games like Forza and Gran Turismo won’t have any options to choose from, but Project CARS and the Formula 1 games will.

Right now the advanced search is useful for finding a club that has an upcoming race, but if you are searching for a Project CARS race there is no way to filter by PC, XBOX One, or PS4 and there needs to be. Updating the advanced search is not going to happen as part of Release 8 but as part of Release 9. The advanced search is going to be completely overhauled and will take a while to complete.

Another addition for Release 8 is to show the game and platform on the club home page. I haven’t figured out the exact placement for this yet. I’ll provide screenshots when the release date approaches.

Release 8 will also allow clubs to apply penalty points to racers in each race. Right now clubs can give out bonus points, but not take any away. These points will be taken into account for series and race standings and in all leaderboards.

The last item for Release 8 is to add number of races attended to the series leaderboard on the series details page.

To recap, Release 8 will include:

• # races attended column on series details leaderboard
• support for penalty points per race
• ability to specify the platform your club uses
• show game and platform on club home page
• show platform on club search and view all clubs(not advanced search, yet)

This is a fairly straight forward release and shouldn’t take too long to complete. I can’t give a hard release date yet, but I can estimate it should be ready before the end of August.

Thanks for reading and please share any feedback you have on the site. If you are ever clicking through the site and say to yourself, “I wish this site did this, it would be so much better,” then please contact me.

Release 7 Details

Release 7 is all about individual racer statistics. Until now we have had the leaderboards page and the racers pages, and they do provide some good data to pour over, but it doesn’t really let you evaluate a racer’s performance at-a-glance. The following post will detail all of the features of the new “Racer Detail” page.

The Racer Detail Page

Here is the racer detail page viewed in a dialog box. At the top left of the dialog you can see an icon with 4 arrows pointing outwards. Clicking that icon will break the page out of its dialog and open in a full web page. The full page view is good when studying the Average Finish chart which we will discuss later.

At the top of the page you can see the racer’s name or gamer ID and their status in the club they belong to.

Below that we have 3 dark blue boxes, Series Won, Races Won, and Attendance.

Series Won will show how many series this racer has won, rapidbushnell has never won a series 😦 In parenthesis you can see what the series winning percentage is. If rapidbushnell had won 5 series out of 10 that he attended, the percentage would be 50%.

Races Won is the same as Series Won, but showing data for individual races. rapidbushnell has won 2 races, which is only 2% of all the races he has attended.

The Attendance box is divided by Series and Races. Shown here, rapidbushnell attended at least 1 race in 23 distinct series held by this club, which is 85% of all series this club had scheduled. rapidbushnell has attended 85 races, which is 67% of all races ever held by this club. These numbers do not take into account races or series that are scheduled but have not yet been completed.

Graphs

The Winners Circle pie graph allows anyone to see how often this racer gets Gold, Silver, Bronze, DNF, and Non-Podium finishes. The large dark blue slice above represents the non-podium finishes. The tiny black slice represents DNFs. Each slice in the graph can be clicked and a list of races will populate in the table on the left. You can click into any of those races and see the full results of that race and the series standings up to that point. This graph really highlights the at-a-glance evaluation that we are striving for with this release. You can immediately  tell that rapidbushnell rarely podiums, but consistently finishes races to completion.

The Average Finish line graph shows the change in the racer’s overall average finish position after each race. The Y-axis shows the range of finish positions that this racer falls within. On average rapidbushnell finishes between 5th and 6th place, but closer to 6th. The X-axis shows the date MM/DD of each race and the actual position achieved. While studying this graph you can see that before his race on 6/1 his average finish position was around 5.85 and that on 6/1 he finished in 9th place which brought his average up to 5.9. This graph currently only looks at the past 60 days, but we have plans to expand the capabilities of this graph in the near future. Although rapidbushnell doesn’t finish low enough to really affect this graph in a major way, you can at-a-glance see where he is most likely to finish during a given race.

The racer detail page is built so that we can add new graphs when we find that they could be useful, or upon request. Thank you for reading this post and I hope it helps explain some things if they weren’t obvious. If you have further questions or suggestions just leave a comment or contact us: rcm@racingclubmanager.com

Project CARS Ruapuna Park Support

Project CARS announced the release of Audi Ruapuna Park International Raceway today, so we added support for the tracks.

You can now schedule races at any of the 5 variations of this track. The variations include GP, Club, Outer Loop, Circuit A, and Circuit B.

Ability to Delete Your Club

The Club Profile page now has a “Delete Club” button at the bottom. It allows clubs that were just trying the site as a test, to delete the club and all data associated with it. In the confirmation prompt, we stress that we cannot un-delete a club. In reality we have database backups so if you were to delete by accident, although an unlikely event, we could restore from our backups.

This is a very minor update and was not included into an official release. I am still developing Release 7 and trying to figure out the best stats to put on the Racer Detail page. Once I figure out the final layout of the page I will do another blog post and detail all the new features.

Thanks for reading!

RaceRoom Track Support Update

We added a few tracks that maybe we missed initially or came out since our site launched for RaceRoom Racing Experience. We don’t currently have any clubs on our site that use the game, but it would be nice to support all of the tracks from their store just in-case we do get a club eventually.

Macau

Paul Ricard

Salzburgring

Shanghai Circuit

Sonoma Raceway

Now Supporting F1 2015!

You can now create clubs based on F1 2015 and schedule your races. The game will be released on July 10th 2015 for PS4, Xbox One and PC.

Release 6 Details

Details about Release 6 are here! This release contains some useful functionality for admins as well as non-admin users. I’ll tell you about the changes we are implementing for non-admin users first.

I have been using Racing Club Manager to track Forza 5 data since before the site had even launched. In that 8 months or so I have recorded quite a bit of data and I noticed that the Series page was loading slowly. My club only has 3 or 4 active series in a given month so the sluggishness had to be coming from trying to load up all of the inactive series at the same time as the active ones. The quickest fix I could think of was to only load the active series first and to wait until the viewer actually wanted to see the inactive series before starting to load them. I added a button labeled “Show Inactive Series…” at the bottom of the active series rows. This is only a temporary fix for this issue and I will address the loading times at another time in the near future. Honestly the Series page could use some renovations.

The admins are getting some functionality tweaks on the Manage Races screen. First off, I am replacing the “Available Racers,” mutli-select control with a scroll-able div element. The reason for this is that multi-select controls do not work on some(all?) mobile devices therefore eliminating the ability to record results from your phone/tablet. Recording results from your phone/tablet is going to be a pain no matter what interface I come up with, but at least now admins will have the choice. As a side-effect of the user interface change, there is a bonus feature. Admins can select multiple available racers without holding control or shift(shift now doesn’t work) and the order you select the racers in, will be their assigned finish position. Before this change you could select, for example: 5 racers and move them all over to the results, but they wouldn’t necessarily be assigned a finish position in the order that you selected them. This cool new side-effect should make recording results just a little bit easier on the admins.

I’m going to schedule this release for Friday July 10th at 11:00am Eastern US. It should be complete and tested before then, but July 4th weekend and the days leading up to it are always hectic, so better safe than sorry. I would hate to tell you the earlier and then have to push it back a week.

Thanks for reading and using the site! Just wait until I reveal what I have planned for Release 7. STATS! STATS! STATS!

Release 5 Manage Club Members Renovations

Release 5 is finished and here are some screen shots and details not mentioned in the last post.

The menu has been update to include access to the Manage Members screen. As an admin you have a permission level, and you need permission level ZERO or ONE in order to access that page. Basically, if you have access to Manage Races then you also have access to Manage Members.

When recording race results there is an icon above the available racers section that you can click that will open the Manage Members screen in a dialog window. This is for when you need to quickly add or edit a racer while in the middle of recording results.

Above is a screen shot of the Manage Members screen.(showing as a dialog window) You can sort by name or by the last time a racer showed up to a race. I decided not to include the filtering option for active and non-active. It just didn’t seem necessary at this stage. Also, you can click a members name if you want to edit the name. You can deactivate a member at any time or even remove a member as long as they do not have any results recorded.

Thanks for reading!

Release 5 Details

Release 5 is already in development and now it is time to share what I have in store for you guys. This release will be purely for helping admins manage club members more efficiently, there will be no updates that a casual club member could see.

Right now the only way to get to manage your members is by clicking a small icon when you are recording your results. Release 5 will add a new admins menu option. The manage club members page is completely renovated and matches the look of most other pages on the site.

This newly renovated page gives you some new features that will allow you to manage your members better. You can filter your members by active and non-active, by default non-active members will appear at the bottom of the list so they are out of the way. You can sort the list of members by the date they last showed up for a race. This is my favorite new feature because I always have a hard time figuring out who hasn’t shown up for a race in a while. When recording results you have to sift through a list of available racers and sometimes that list can become overwhelming. When a member hasn’t shown up for a long time, you can mark them inactive which will get them out of the way and make recording results quicker.

Removing a member is only available if that member has never recorded a result before. If we were to remove a member that had results it would alter the outcome of every race they attended.

This release is fairly easy to implement and should be ready to deploy by next week. If you’re following me on twitter you’ll get even more up-to-date information on this release. Thanks for reading!

Ability to Dismiss a Request to Join

I published a small update that will allow admins to dismiss a request to join the club. The reason for this update was due to club members that had already been added to Racing Club Manager were submitting a request to join. In order for me to get rid of their request was to deny it, since approving it would create a duplicate racer for my club. When the racer gets an email saying they were denied, it creates an annoying conversation that needs to be had.

Now you have the option to dismiss a request to join, which removes the request from the queues, but does not send anything to the requestor. We still log who dismissed the request and when, but it is not a readily available report. If you believe your admins were involved in shenanigans, you can send me an email and I can look into it personally.