Hello racers,

A new Leagues section has been added to the website.
First let me say that it's still a work in progress. It's pretty dry looking at the moment, but there is a lot of functionality.

If you run a league, you can add it to our database so that people can find it in the leagues overview.
You can also add seasons and rounds with events to your league. These will then show up in the racing calendar.

If your league requires people to signup, you can let this website handle that for your seasons or rounds, though if you prefer to do signups on your own website, that's possible as well of course.

Signups made on this website will show up in a personalised overview, so you can always easily find any events you are expected to take part in. If a league host requires a password, you will be able to find it here as well (provided the admin has entered it of course).

Some things that are not yet implemented are better integration with this forum and automatic sub forum eligibility and creation.
Perhaps we can take it as far as binding race results from LFS World to league events. But I'll have to see how people will be using the Leagues section first.

I hope this will make it a bit easier for people to find leagues and I hope it will help league admins get the information out, in turn allowing people to find their league.

If you have any suggestions, regarding features or layout - well anything really - feel free to write them here. Bug reports welcome as well of course, though depending on severity you may want to use the Website Bugs forum for that instead.

Enjoy!

Top work! I really hope this gets more people involved in the LFS league scene.

Great job Victor

Is it possible to withdraw one's entry to an event? I signed up for my league just to test, but now I cannot withdrawl from it it seems.

Edit: Saturday events are showing as Friday events on the calendar. Everything else appears to be correct.

Quote from Cornys :

Saturday events are showing as Friday events on the calendar. Everything else appears to be correct.

Can you make a screenie of the calendar as you check the times it shows for you?
And when you hover over the timestamp of one of your events, does the tooltip display the correct UTC time?

And I see i have forgotten to add a 'remove signup' function. Will do that soon.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5hmjek411suyany/Calendar%20Problem%201.png?dl=0

Highlighted the event, nothing changed. Time is correct when written in text. It seems almost like you programmed the calendar for the week to start on Monday, but then did everything else correctly. Whole weeks are moved one spot to the left of where they should be.

Can you confirm it is ok now?

Good job m8

Great work, it will be easy again to find a league to start in.

Looks great, keep working on it.

Perfect! Only suggestion is to do something about the timezone. Even when I am logged out I see the Amsterdam/Paris timezone. One way to solve it is to do it like Twitter/Facebook style.. Counting the number of days/ho ... es down to the next event. And then maybe on the event details page mentioning the exact date/time in GMT format. Added bonus maybe that people can define their own timezone in their (forum) profile and then only display it GMT style when not logged in.

Oh and... I would love to see a switch where you can see the difference between leagues what has sign up requirements and which ones do not have those requirements. Open entrance / sign up.

Oh andand... Little column for stream broadcast would be very nice too. Broadcasting is always a lot of work, that deserves some attention in my opinion. Little camera logo, that you click on it and then go to where the stream is (going to) be broadcast.

Great stuff Vic

Nothing useful to say about this yet, except this is an excellent innovation. A little momentum building up around here, which is welcome!

Quote from Victor :

Can you confirm it is ok now?

Yes, it looks perfect now Sorry, I went to bed right after posting that description

Great job, this will surely be very handy.

Could we set that the week starts with Monday, so Monday is the first column in the calendar?

What felt into my mind - does the system notify league admin when sign-up has been changed? And if yes,does it have timestamp or something? Would be important in case someone without registered team drives a good race and then registers under some team just to help it get points in team standings. I hope you get the idea.

Edit: Just an idea - would it be possible if content from calendar would show up in website - if more entries,then as a ticker,for example unter those changing cars.

Calender looks good.
I hope many will use it!
(even if just to put a note in calender with link to more info/other site)

"Staff" can only post news, must be "Adminstration" to edit the settings or calender?


1) Some events go longer than one day, like qualifications.
In unofficial google-calender it looked like this:
https://www.lfs.net/attachment/133027


2) I think important purpose of calender is that new drivers can easily find the way.
At the moment still bit confusing:
Pretend a new user sees calender, for example this entry:
20:10 RTFR - 2015 - 100th RTFR - Race

Click the "100th RTFR" : Now user knows the track & car but still no idea what server, password or how to join.
To get that information user needs to go back in browser and click "RTFR", to get to league profile. Not so intuitive, maybe there should always be easy way to go to league-profile? (clickable name perhaps)


3) There is this guide: http://en.lfsmanual.net/wiki/League_Racing_Guide
Does not have to be that text, but some instructions of that kind might be helpful. Maybe it can be edited a bit and linked somewhere.

Could there be a way to/does this automatically remove leagues after a certain period of inactivity? If a year or two down the line it's full of defunct leagues, then it will just replicate the problem of the leagues section in the forum

On LFS-manual there is also bit choatic, with pages like this:
http://en.lfsmanual.net/wiki/Active_Leagues

Think such pages should be marked as outdated? It is wiki, so could make some template, similiar to how it is done here:
https://wiki.openttd.org/?title=Copying_GRF_to_data_folder&oldid=85164
(see the note at top)
Then nobody is angry because his page got deleted (sometimes has "historical value" maybe) but visitor knows to look elsewhere for up-to-date info.

Thanks for the great feedback! Some good ideas there which I will have a look at.

I've been thinking about the look of the league details page and was wondering if it should be made to look like a youtube account page for example. It can be given a big graphical header + icon (logo) and then have tabs under it for information, news and seasons. It could be given many of the usual social functions as well - likes, get notified upon season changes / additions (ie. subscribe), etc.

Quote from cargame.nl :

Perfect! Only suggestion is to do something about the timezone. Even when I am logged out I see the Amsterdam/Paris timezone.

I've heard this before, but I do not understand it. All times, no matter if you are logged in or not, are always local. Why would you NOT want that?! It cannot be easier for people to see times in UTC and then having to convert them to their local time themselves. I do not see any benefit in that.

Quote from Victor :

I've heard this before, but I do not understand it. All times, no matter if you are logged in or not, are always local. Why would you NOT want that?! It cannot be easier for people to see times in UTC and then having to convert them to their local time themselves. I do not see any benefit in that.

I guess that if you have multiple drivers coming from different timezones it might actually confuse things (not using UTC).

Quote from Gutholz :

Think such pages should be marked as outdated? It is wiki, so could make some template, similiar to how it is done here:
https://wiki.openttd.org/?title=Copying_GRF_to_data_folder&oldid=85164

Another example, on the official English Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut (see the template at the top)
It's a great idea! I could try to create this template, as I already have some experience with wikis (I have done 2,205 edits, mainly on the Hungarian Wikipedia).
But let's not go offtopic.

Quote from three_jump :

I guess that if you have multiple drivers coming from different timezones it might actually confuse things (not using UTC).

Yes exactly this. A lot of people, including myself get confused by time zones and as a result missing races. What, I even have a hard time tracking the time in my own timezone ..

Lets not forget Europe by itself already from UK/Portugal to France/Germany/Poland/Italy and then complete Eastern Europe/Finland/Russia/Turkey are separated in different zones. A local timezone causes way too much confusion, as a result a lot of leagues start to use GMT announcements while others used CET and then you get the endless discussion .. "ah wait, so my time is +2 hours? No its +3.. Or.. Oh wait, we are GMT+1! No, its GMT+2 now because of different DST sync.. Etcetc.." So... Well.. Timezones create chaos if you have multiple countries from different time zones agreeing to do something together.

And then there is also the people who want to watch a stream, maybe from across the ocean. A countdown is much easier for everyone to understand, at least thats what Youtube/Google also thought probably (Livestreams also countdown prior to broadcast).

The power of mouse over can also be used. Information box when the mouse gets hovered across an item.

We have discussed this in the past, so what's changed? LFS racing is international so we need to express times in an international standard, and there is only one - UTC (aka GMT).

To avoid all confusion it seems obvious that league race start times need to be given in UTC / GMT (as discussed at great length in the past). To make it simple for anyone to understand, I would suggest it should be shown in the user's local time as well, beside the UTC time.

Otherwise if I ask someone in Estonia, "when does the race start" and he says "at 21:00 in Estonia time" I will have absolutely no idea what he is talking about, because I don't know the time zone of Estonia. He needs to be able to tell me the UTC time so I can convert that to my time, without needing to know Estonia's offset as well as my own.

Note that in the race setup screen in LFS, local time and UTC time are shown at the bottom left, for this exact reason. The clock on the track at Westhill shows UTC time during practice mode so it appears the same for everyone who is looking at it in real time.

Still.. Mentioning and remembering times can lead to confusion because the clock in the living room or Windows often is used (especially when you are in a website). This is also a very nice way of dealing with timezones;
https://www.f1calendar.com/#!/timezone/Europe-Rome