Now you see it, now you don’t

I just want to tell you about a handy new setting for competitions that we introduced recently.

It’s called Visible and it controls where in SailEvent people can see each competition. You’ll find it at the bottom of the Competition tab on the >Competitions page.

Visible has three possible settings:

All The competition can be seen throughout. That includes by competitors when they eTally, in the Race Team app, in the public location Viewer and of course in the main Club app. This is the initial setting for a new competition.

Not public viewer The competition can be seen everywhere listed above except in the public Viewer. This might be an appropriate setting for, say, club racing.

Club App only The competition is visible only in the Club app. You might want to use this while you are setting up a new competition or trying something out.

Why no Not Race Team? Because we couldn’t think of a use for it! Plus you can control who sees what in the Race Team app per session with PINs.

And that’s all there is to it. If you change Visible don’t forget to Save it.

SailEvent is three weeks old

The first few weeks after launching a new service on the web are always an interesting time. SailEvent's introduction has been no exception!

No matter how much you test and check in the lab, once out in the wild there are all manner of unforeseeable pitfalls awaiting young and innocent software. SailEvent has been buffeted by web browsers and operating systems but, fingers crossed, those travails are all behind us now. If you’ve been caught out by any of them, please accept our apologies and thank you for sticking with it.

On a more constructive note, we have received much useful feedback from early adopters. Several ideas have been filed away for future development; others have been implemented already. Some changes are so minor you may not even notice them but more significant are

• Minimal registration procedure for sailors. All you have to do now is submit your email address, receive an email in response then three clicks and you’re in. You can do more if you want but you don’t have to.
• A statement on online entry forms that sailors need to agree. Clubs write their own statements, for instance “If all else fails I promise to read the Sailing Instructions”. Sailors must tick the box to confirm before their entry is accepted.

And to accommodate additional stuff now and in the future, SailEvent has a new menu system. Hope you like it.

Pricing

Today clubs can use SailEvent entirely for free while they get going again after the lockdown. But what happens after some form of normality returns? In this post we share our thoughts on SailEvent pricing.

SailEvent is a service of Sailing Club Software and Sailing Club Software is a commercial organisation. There are costs to operating software-as-a-service so to be viable SailEvent must cover those costs and provide a modest return on our investment. That’s why we ultimately plan to migrate SailEvent club accounts to a freemium model. Sailor accounts will continue to be free.

Freemium is a well-established approach offering software in a series of tiers. The first tier is free and provides basic functionality with limited capacity – think of it as an ongoing starter pack. Subsequent tiers offer more features and greater capacity in return for corresponding subscription levels.

So that’s our target. When we get there, how the tiers look and what the subs will be are as yet unknown. With a new service in uncertain times it would be unwise of us to make commitments now. What we can promise is that the service will always be affordable otherwise nobody would be able to afford it!

So please keep on using SailEvent free of charge for now and we’ll give you plenty of warning of the move to freemium.