Hi there!
Summer is in full swing, and if like me you have small kids of school age, the next 6 weeks are about to become challenging as you try and keep them occupied during the day without maiming themselves or each other. It’s the summer holidays that make me thankful for them going to school!
Thankfully I can hide away and keep working. I’m sure my wife will suspect something is up at some point as every time the kids are being particularly annoying, an urgent support query comes in!
Support is one thing that I love doing. Showing a user how to do something, make their lives easier, or provide a bit of revelatory information is always very rewarding. RackEmApp has become so big that its impossible for anyone to know it all. Even I regularly forget some of the things I’ve built and have to refer back to the code!
When its a bug or an issue its always an excellent opportunity for improvement. A bug fixed for one person is a bug fixed for everyone. Similarly when a user makes a mistake that needs to be unpicked, it means that there is undo functionality missing, or its not clear enough to use in the fix in the first place. I’ll always endeavour to improve this. However my ask to you is, if you aren’t sure, ask the question first. It’s always easier for me to answer the question of how to do something right than potentially unpick everything to correct a mistake.
One of the good things about the summer is the abundance of comptitions that seem to be cropping up, and also seems to be a popular season for money matches. Don’t forget, RackEmApp has great functionality for competition organizers and streamers. If you know anyone still using CueScore, send them my way so I can try and convert thm.
Growth is one thing I am continue to battle. I want more leagues, more users, more traffic. The more we grow the more time I can justify spending on things for the betterment of everyone. I am committed to make RackEmApp the dominant player in english 8 ball technology and any help you can provide in terms of referrals will always be gratefully received – particularly to your county or national governing bodies.
Back to the platform though, we’ve had another great month in terms of added features and functions. As always if you have any more ideas for our roadmap, please do drop us a line and we’ll include it if we can.
Yours in pool,
Matt Warr
RackEmApp Founder
Welcome Aboard!
Since the last newsletter the following organizations have joined the family and gone live with RackEmApp.
With a few more working away on trials in the background!
New Feature Showcase
Custom Menus
We’ve added the ability for you to customize your sidebar menu so you can link to whatever content you like in whatever structure you like, for both internal and external content.
Player Match Bookings
It’s common in leagues to have competitions where players have to arrange their own matches within certain time windows. To improve this we’ve given users the ability to view their opponents contact details to more easily arrange the matches, and also schedule the match from within their dashboards so it appears in the website so interested parties can keep track of things.
More API Endpoints
We’ve added some more API endpoints to allow you to retrieve information about players, teams, fixtures and results to integrate to whatever systems you like.
Standalone Timer
We’ve built a shot and match timer that can be used completely standlone and can be distribute to anyone that needs one if they are RackEmApp users or not. Configurable with shot, match, extension times and can even reduce the shot clock at a fixed point in the match, Ultimate Pool style.
Interactive Roll of Honour
We’ve added a way for you to enrich your website with all the rich history you have – a complete roll of honour that can be used interactively, so even if a player won the singles 10 years ago, you can have it appear on their RackEmApp profiles, today.
Other Improvements
Heres a roundup of all the small features we’ve released recently that might be interesting
- You can now download a CSV file of all your captain contacts from within League Management > Teams to allow you to utilise these contacts for your own purposes – which you must do in a GDPR compliant way of course
- We’ve added the ability to choose which method you use when players have a handicap. Either start on current handicaps, or start on the net score between their handicaps. Available for competition matches and challenge matches.
- Added a filter to the player statistics pages so you can exclude players based upon a minimum number of frames played
- Added a feature to scorecards which allow you to randomize the lineup upon lockin
- Big improvements to the invitation process to make it easier and more obvious for captain’s accepting invitatons to get themselves registered with minimal input
Roadmap
We review our roadmap every month, so if you think there is something else we should/could focus on let us know!
Coming in August:
- Twitter Integration tio allow you to post the same content you currently can with Facebook
- New “Last Man Standing” competition type, similar to that used by Ultimate Pool
- New “Measured Performance” competition type so you can operate a competition based upon time or quantity, like a blackball shootout or 6 red shootout
- Competition API Endpoints to allow for the rerieval of Competition and Challenge match data
- Ability to create Custom Fields for capturing data during league and competition entry
