Release 11 Details

Release 11 has wrapped up its coding phase and is now moving into testing. I am ahead of schedule by 2 whole weeks, so I’m going to publish on Wednesday March 30th instead of April 8th. The two major features I announced were not as monstrous as I thought they could be and that’s always a good thing. Below are some screenshots and more detailed descriptions of all the changes I made for this release.

 Ability to drop specific races from calculating final series results

The admin screen for adding and editing series and races has changed a bit. I made the font slightly larger which is better for any mobile users. Still not perfect, I know, but better.

I removed those ambiguous buttons for deleting and editing the post race write-up. Mostly, I removed the buttons because I couldn’t find one that meant “exclude” that wouldn’t be confused for remove, delete or cancel. Also, I think this looks cleaner.

Each time you expand a race node, you will see the save icon and the options icon. Clicking the options icon allows you to exclude a race from being calculated in a series, delete this race from the series or you can edit the pre/post race write-up. You can hide the options menu by clicking the icon again or just leave it up and it will follow you around when you click on other race nodes. In a future release I will do the same options menu at the series node level.

When a race gets excluded from a series, your members will see this message if they bring up the race details screen. All of the data for that race will still show but when you view series standings the results from this race will not be calculated into the leaderboard.

Alternatively, on the series details screen your members will see a little warning icon next to any races that have been excluded. If they get curious and click the icon a dialog will pop up explaining that the results from that race will not be calculated into the series leaderboard.

Please, keep in mind that when you exclude a race we do not treat it like the race never happened. If you view your average finish position or your monthly/yearly standings, etc. you will still see all of the excluded races calculated into those statistics.

Series List Screen Overhaul

I made a point to overhaul the series list screen because it was really slow to load and really not mobile friendly. Now I only show the name of the series and when the next race is. I do this inside big blue boxes, perfect for mobile users.

Now, all of the active and inactive series show at the same time and it loads very quickly. The ordering of the boxes is different now too. A series with a race that is coming up soon will be ordered ahead of other series that have races further out. Your most recently races inactive series will show ahead of series that have been long forgotten. This design also leaves open the possibility of someday using images in place of the blocks. I do not know if or when I will implement that, but this at least sets the foundation.

Stretch Items

Since I had some extra time, I worked on some little things that have always bugged me. Above is a screenshot from the club home page. The checkbox from the “before” side was hideous and was near impossible to click on mobile with my fat finger. I fixed it by using that bug green button. When on a club home page that is not your default it will appear red with the text: “Not My Default”. Clicking the red button will make this club your default and turn the button green.

I don’t have a screenshot for this but on the admin series/races screen when you would save a race, we would automatically reload all of the series nodes, but it would not expand and show the race node you were recently editing. Now it does! Just a minor convenience for the admins.

I use larger font sizes in the menus so that navigation will be slightly easier on mobile users. In addition, I shortened the text on the admin menus so that the larger font sizes would not stretch the menu too wide.

---

 

So that’s what I worked on over the past couple of weeks and it is almost ready to be published. I’d like to thank @jacall11 for suggesting the change where we can exclude races from a series. I know it will be a useful addition for clubs other than one he is associated with and I always appreciate feedback that benefits lots of potential users.

I will probably tease what I’m going to work on next after this release gets published so stay tuned on twitter and facebook AND DON’T FORGET TO ENTER THE LIVERY CONTEST FOR A CHANCE TO WIN $10 USD. Currently as of this writing there are 6 weeks left in the contest and no entries, so go paint me something and submit it.

Advertisement

Release 11 To Do List

Release 10 was successful and so now we look to Release 11 which is based around a user requested feature. Let’s dive in!

• Ability to drop specific races from calculating final series results

As an admin you will be able to toggle each race on/off. If turned off those results will not be calculated into the series results leaderboard. Messages will be displayed to users that view the results of these races, notifying them that the results will not be counted.

This is an easy change but affects a lot of screens throughout the site and will take a significant amount of time to complete.

• Overhaul Series screen

I really hate the current series screen and it takes too long to load with the data that is shown.

I haven’t fully figured out what the end result will be, but I’m thinking tiles or some sort of large block that is mobile friendly.

Turnaround is typically a month so you can expect this release to be publish around April 8th. Obviously if I finish early or run into any trouble I’ll keep everyone updated on twitter.

Also, I am working on another Racing Club Manager livery contest and will have a blog post about that soon. CASH PRIZE! stay tuned everyone.

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

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!

Release #3 Qualifying/Starting Position Support

I’m about to go into detail about why this release took me so long to complete, so if you’re just looking for a quick update on what is included in release #3, then go to the Release History Page.  Although you will miss the sweet screen shots and boring explanations.

Initially I was working on a more intense implementation of qualifying, but after contemplating the ideas and doing some proof of concept work, I decided it would take too long and not be very useful for enough clubs to make it worth it. After scrapping that idea I was trying to think of the most straight-forward implementation for qualifying and decided that allowing admins to record starting position would be best for now.

There is a new button at the series level of the Manage Races Screen that allows you to turn being able to record the starting position on or off. It looks like a starting grid, next to the [+] button. Clicking the button will either show or hide the “Start” column in the race results.

If you turn ON the Start column for a series, you will now see each racer’s start position in the results. This extends to multi-class and team enabled series as you can see in the above screenshots.

I also added some new data columns on the Racers Screen. In the screenshot below you’ll see that I rearranged the columns to show Points Earned first, then the number of Races Attended. The new columns are Podiums and Average Start. Then the last column is Average Finish. This will allow you to see how well you perform by comparing your Average Start to you Average Finish. In the example below Buddy7085 qualifies in the 4th grid position on average, but is actually better during races and on average he finishes just outside of 3rd place.

In the future I would like to expand on this and create entire racer profiles that include charts and graphs that help to see how good a racer is at a glance.

Update for Review Join Requests

Hello all,

We released an update to the Review Join Requests screen for admins. This update allows an admin that is approving or denying a request to join whether or not they wish to use their e-mail address when notifying the requestor of the admins decision.

Before this update, we always sent from rcm@racingclubmanager.com and when the requestor hit reply, the e-mail got sent back to us. Now when you send your decision, you decide if you want the reply to go back to us(gets deleted) or comes back to you(open dialog, yay!)

Mostly this was implemented so that when you approve a request, you can share a dialog with the requestor. I could also see where admins might want their e-mail address to stay private and would want the requestor to go through other channels to communicate. I hope this is helpful!

By the way, we are still working on Release #3 – Ability to define a racers starting/qualifying position. The release is coming along well. The admin functions are complete, but the UI for the general public is still being worked on. This release should lead to some really cool future releases for “racer profiles.”

If you have questions or comments, we would love to hear them.

Livery Contest 2015

The first official Racing Club Manager livery contest. Here are the details.

Submissions must be posted as an image to twitter and @RacingClubMgr must be tagged in the post, or we won’t see it to count it.

Anything sent after May 1st will not be counted as the prize will be given on May 2nd.

The livery needs to be a Racing Club Manager themed racing livery and can be painted onto ANY CAR from ANY racing game that supports custom liveries.

We will share any submissions via twitter using #RCMLivery and here on wordpress under the category LiveryContest.

The winner will be chosen by me with the help of the Forza club I belong to, RDT3.

I will be using PayPal to send the $10 USD prize to the winner, so make sure you have your PayPal account set-up. If PayPal doesn’t work for you, I can make an exception to send the prize in Bitcoins.

I can’t wait to see all the entries! Good luck!

Support for Teams Update

Wow it’s been a while since I posted anything, but I just haven’t had any major site updates since launch. I have fixed and tweaked a few things here and there, but nothing major to report. If you don’t follow me on twitter and you want more contact about the site and what we’re up to, follow @RacingClubMgr. We post almost every day.

I have been working on and off to get support for teams and multi-class racing into the site and I now finally have something to show you guys.

This first image is the dialog that you are going to get when you click “Add New Series” on the manage races screen. You will now be able to name the series and give the series a type before creating it. The types are Standard, Multi-Class, and Teams. I think the types are pretty self explanatory, so I won’t go through them. Once you click the Add button, the dialog will close and the Manage Races screen will refresh the list and you should see your new series.
The second image shows the Manage Races screen with some new features added. Next to the Points drop-down, you can see a link “Edit Type/Edit Teams” Teams need to be defined for each series, because teams can change from series to series, but should remain the same for each race in a given series. If your club does things differently, CONTACT ME and we’ll come up with a solution together.

The third image is what you would see when you click the “Edit Type/Edit Teams” link. On this dialog you can change your series type or edit teams.

Clicking “Edit Teams” gets you to this screen. This screen allows you to add new teams, remove teams or edit the name and members of existing teams. Right now this screen is set-up so that a racer can only be a part of 1 team per series. I couldn’t think of a reason to allow anyone to be on multiple teams for a given series.

I am about 75% done with the team support and will be moving on to multi-class support next. Apart from a few things left to do on the screens I am showing you here, I still need to come up with the results output for team races and series before I can move onto mutli-class support.

LAUNCH!

It’s official, head over to www.racingclubmanager.com to create your club and start recording data. I can import your old data if you provide it to me, free of charge!

Release #2 Features

I have started developing what is going to be in release #2 and have some updates for everyone. First of all, I will be publishing the Racing Club Manager site by the end of next week. January 16th at the latest.

The features that will be in release #2 include the ability to enter results for multi-class and team enabled races. Enabling that will impact the results outputs for each race, series, and the leader boards so work will need to be done to display results correctly.

A minor change that I have already developed and will be available in Release #1 is seeing ties in the series standings and leader boards. Obviously it’s possible to end up with the same amount of points as another racer by the conclusion of a series so I needed to be able to show those ties. Below is a screenshot of the series standings on a race detail screen showing that the final standings ended with racers having the same result.