Accounts, sharing, hand-off and backups

Accounts (online)#

On a server, everyone has an account. You sign in with an e-mail link (a one-time link sent to your address), a password, or the organisation's single sign-on where the installation uses one. The log-in page also registers a new account. Every tournament belongs to the account that created it. The desktop build has no accounts: it signs you in as the owner of that computer.

Account menu (your name or address, top right):

• Settings (online only): the account page.
• Features: the switches of the national features (below).
• Log out (online only).

The account page#

Account, Settings (/users/settings). One page with a section for each of:

Changing the address or password, ending sessions, downloading everything and deleting the account ask for a recent sign-in (within the last twenty minutes); you are taken to the log-in page and brought back. Accounts on an organisation's single sign-on keep the address and password with the organisation.

National features#

Account, Features. The parts of the program that belong to one federation are separate switches, all off by default. At the moment they belong to the Belgian pack: the national rating list sync, the national player lookup, the bulk club update, SWAR import, SWAR export, the SWAR results page, the next-round preview and the bye preferences. An arbiter outside Belgium never sees any of them. Switching a feature off only hides its controls: a tournament that used it keeps all its data.

Limits on a shared server#

A server is shared by every account on it, so it keeps one account from taking all of it. The limits are generous; an ordinary tournament never meets them. The desktop build has none.

The server's administrator can change the tournament count, the number of rounds paired at once and the time limit. When the server is already pairing other tournaments, a team Swiss round waits its turn and the button says it is queued; an individual round that cannot start within a few seconds says the engine is busy, and pressing the button again a moment later pairs it. A round that is already being paired, from another tab or by a co-arbiter, is not paired a second time. A pairing stopped at the time limit, or refused, leaves nothing behind: the round is still waiting to be paired.

Sharing a tournament#

The owner can invite other arbiters. Settings, Tournament, card Share / Team: enter an e-mail address and Add collaborator.

• The invitation grants no access by itself. The person receives an e-mail with a link (/invites/…) and must be signed in with that address and press Accept (or Decline). Pending invitations are also listed on the Tournaments page, with the role they were invited for; declining asks for confirmation first. If the tournament was deleted by its owner in the meantime, the link says so and nothing can be accepted. If the e-mail could not be sent, the page shows the link to pass on by hand. If you already accepted the invitation, the link no longer works - it is good for one acceptance, and opening it again says it has been used - and the tournament is on your Tournaments page; if you are signed in with another address than the one invited, the page offers Log out and switch account.
• A collaborator invited as an Editor can do everything the owner can except managing collaborators and deleting the tournament. One invited as an Arbiter gets results and incidents on a phone and nothing else (Arbiters with their own account). The owner changes the role with the select beside the name, before or after the invitation is accepted, and can Resend invitation while it is still pending (the same link, at most once a minute).
• Everyone sees changes as they happen: when a colleague pairs a round or enters a result, your pages update by themselves. When it was a round that changed (paired, unpaired, paired again, published or withdrawn from publication) on the Pairings or Players page, a short notice says so, for example "Round 4 was just paired elsewhere"; the session that did it hears nothing, and the notice never names a person. That includes the audit trail: a row written while you have it open appears within a moment, on the page and filter you were looking at, and every collaborator sees the same rows as the owner.
• The owner can remove a collaborator; a collaborator can Leave a shared tournament from the list. Either way, the hall-box codes that person made for the tournament are withdrawn with them (Live boards), and a code someone made only works while they can still open the tournament.

The tournament list#

Tournaments lists every tournament with its pairing system, number of players, dates and status. Each row has one More menu with these actions (the name still opens the tournament; Delete or Leave is last, in red):

The Archived table below the list has the same More menu on each row, with Export, Unarchive and, last in red, Delete or Leave.

The Recycle bin lists deleted tournaments, with the date they were deleted; Restore brings one back. Deleting, restoring and deleting permanently each show a notice naming the tournament.

A tournament with postponed games still open shows that the standings are provisional.

Hand-off: moving a tournament between two computers#

A hand-off moves a tournament from one copy of the program to another, for example from a server to the arbiter's own laptop at the venue, as a checkout: the tournament is live in exactly one place at a time. Nothing is merged, because two copies that both took results cannot be reconciled.

1. On the machine that has the tournament, Hand off: type where it is going (the club laptop), and press Hand off and download the file. The tournament on this machine becomes read-only, with a banner on every page that says where it went and a button Bring it back; you can still view, print and export it. The file is downloaded.
2. On the other machine, Receive a hand-off and choose the file. The tournament is live there, marked on loan.
3. When the event is over, on the second machine Give back: it makes a return file and locks that copy.
4. On the first machine, Bring it back with the return file: the copy here is replaced by what was played on the other machine and unlocked. A restore point of the frozen copy is saved first; if it cannot be saved nothing is replaced.

What travels: the settings, players, rounds, results, byes, teams, forbidden pairings and pairing rules, the audit trail and the record of what was sent to the rating office. What does not: the restore points, the phones enrolled for result entry, and the collaborators, who arrive as pending invitations. A hand-off file can also be opened as an ordinary backup.

Backups and restore points#

• Restore points are copies of one tournament, taken automatically before an action that is hard to undo and by hand: Advanced, History (Categories, norms and the Advanced tools).
• Backups of the whole database are written by the program about once a day (the first a few minutes after the program starts, if the newest is older than a day) and kept for 30 days. They hold the tournaments, players, results, snapshots and settings, not the downloaded rating lists (these are fetched again). Connections, section Backups lists them (Taken, Size, Download) and has Back up now. The name of the folder that holds the older ones is shown there too.
• Settings, Export and the Tournaments page Export all (JSON) are backups you keep wherever you want.

Connections (the administrator's page)#

Connections is for the person who runs the installation (on a desktop copy, you). It shows the FIDE database and the national list with their update buttons, the version, the backups, the update check (on or off) and the connection to the results site (Players and rating lists, Publishing). On a server the page can be read by a support role, but changes are made only by an administrator.