I think showing local time is always better, like the lfs calendar does.
I think that most of the time, the people you may want to talk about an event will have the same time zone as you. In those cases that the time zone is not the same, most likely they will know to make that conversion.
On top on that, the point with this addition its to see what events are going to happen soon so I can register/attend. For actual planification with friends, the most logical would be to use the calendar in the website. So I think VladM's suggestion to display time until event will be more useful than UTC.
The mockup looks nice in general, really a good addition to LFS!
And one more question, I think TeamSpeak or Discord was required in an event I saw once. Is this common and if so, should there be an indication about that? Maybe on this new events display or at least on the website if you click the link? It could put some people off certain events.
And should there be an indication like beginner / intermediate / expert? That could help people choose an event.
I still have on the my list the live broadcast link. Not sure how to display it yet.
And should there be an indication like beginner / intermediate / expert? That could help people choose an event.
I still have on the my list the live broadcast link. Not sure how to display it yet.
It deppends on every organizer, in CESAV for instance is not mandatory to use TS or Discord. But even if it was mandatory, the list should be an overview of the events without specific rules, because every event or organizer will have a whole set of different requirements to participate. If you are instested to participate in an event, you will/should follow the button to get more information
Honestly I don't like this kind of indication as it depends on the registered drivers for each event, and large grids or rounds with multiple divitions, you will be able to find other participants with a level similar to yours, no matter if you are starting or you are a veteran. So I wouldn't include it either.
TeamSpeak is usually used during NDR-sanctioned races (so once in a while); Discord is used most often in FragMaster's weekly events (GTi Thursday and FOX Friday). Indication of some sort might be helpful.
I feel like such indication would do more harm than good, if anything it would be off putting to people who believe they are too unexperienced (or too good) for the level indicated.
What if you add an "Info" button and display the league information in an popup window if this is possible. For the FragMaster events the mendatory Discord is discribed in the league information.
That would be very helpful to add
Agree with you, also our own judgements on our experience can be vague, so believe it wouldn't be useful enough
To me it's not clear where I can click to see more info.
Is event title a title or a button? Is the picture clickable or not?
Some quick thoughts
* What happens when I start LFS without internet connection? I guess the whole left side would not be displayed?
* When displaying the start time, I think the main menu should also display the current time somewhere (for lazy people like me)
* Upcoming multiplayer events (nitpicking)
EDIT: does anyone see a danger that new players might think there is no pick-up racing and that they need to wait for events to race online?
* I'm liking the last design very much, but with the ability to do custom backgrounds should the text area have some kind of background?
* Would filters be a good idea? If I have to sign up for a league, or there are no open spots then there would be no need to display it. Unless I'm already signed up for this.
This brings me to my next thought (and probably way beyond the original intention)
I think it would be helpfull if the sign-up process for leagues where to be managed over the lfs sites a bit more.
Currently a league has a sub-forum where all this is done per hand.
If the league section were to be expanded to handle sign-ups then it would help organising / managing the event and automatic reminders/notifications (even in-game)/leaderboards and all sorts of other stuff would be possible to do as well. Maybe even expand the statistics section of LFS World to included "raced leagues, results...)
I know this is far beyond the current scope but somehow related and probably something that needs a lot more thinking down the line.
* What happens when I start LFS without internet connection? I guess the whole left side would not be displayed?
* When displaying the start time, I think the main menu should also display the current time somewhere (for lazy people like me)
* Upcoming multiplayer events (nitpicking)
EDIT: does anyone see a danger that new players might think there is no pick-up racing and that they need to wait for events to race online?
* I'm liking the last design very much, but with the ability to do custom backgrounds should the text area have some kind of background?
* Would filters be a good idea? If I have to sign up for a league, or there are no open spots then there would be no need to display it. Unless I'm already signed up for this.
This brings me to my next thought (and probably way beyond the original intention)
I think it would be helpfull if the sign-up process for leagues where to be managed over the lfs sites a bit more.
Currently a league has a sub-forum where all this is done per hand.
If the league section were to be expanded to handle sign-ups then it would help organising / managing the event and automatic reminders/notifications (even in-game)/leaderboards and all sorts of other stuff would be possible to do as well. Maybe even expand the statistics section of LFS World to included "raced leagues, results...)
I know this is far beyond the current scope but somehow related and probably something that needs a lot more thinking down the line.
As far as I know, LFS Leagues section already has this function of accepting and managing signups. For each season, organizers can independently opt in to use this function, or set the signups as "Off-site signup" which can be a link to an other website/form/forum section etc.
If that's already the case then fine. It's been a while since my league racing days
It still feels to me like there's lot of extra text which may help first/second time reading through it, but will become clutter. My quick counter-idea (not proposal of design, would need to think about it much longer, but more like food for thought):
( [TTV] ) ([ event name ]) <- no round or part of text "Soccar Cup R10"
( event image ) ( Fri Mar 25 15:00 local 4h left ) <- click to UTC/local (but no button visual?)
( or ) ( LX6 / South City Town Course )
( event description ) ( by Race Green Events )
( (switch by click) ) ( Mar 25 11:00 1h left [sign up] ) <- the "[]" are button-visuals
( maybe switch all ) ( at MRC E-challenge [join] )the "TTV" would be twitch/youtube/... icon hovering over image. And the extra description could maybe pop up over the image in bottom 2/3 of it, maybe on-hover.
Also these are "upcoming events", but maybe having one extra banner/switch somewhere for currently being streamed events, just icon of twitch/youtube/... with event name maybe. (with further backlog idea about being able to connnect to server as spectator through some replication on server side, not as current spectators taking up real slot, but making mass-spectating available through internal proxy-replicator, not putting extra load on event server).
The main point of this idea is to keep the info text as much to point as possible, ie. name of event, time, how much time is left to plan/sign for it, car/track. I assume that is the top-priority info to decide for people to join?
I think you get away with omitting most of the labels, it may be a bit confusing for first time users, but IMHO people will pick up over time what is what, and then it will be less clutter when just trying to figure out if there is something you want to join.
To reduce clutter, or to add something more useful instead, I think Organiser line is redundant since they put it on title or in the image most of the times.
I agree with local time zone. You could easily tell someone about your time zone and the event time, instead of UTC time zone and UTC event time, so it doesn't change much except makes it easier for you when it is your time zone at all times.
I agree with local time zone. You could easily tell someone about your time zone and the event time, instead of UTC time zone and UTC event time, so it doesn't change much except makes it easier for you when it is your time zone at all times.
Agree with the use of local time rather than UTC. Just makes it a little more clearer for the racer instead of them having to try and work it out for their timezone
I think we are only team forcing people to use discord...but we make that very clear everywhere on server and plenty of times before races so I'm not sure its needed. Having less info on main will be better imo.
As for beginner, intermediate, expert - let me tell you, this is the beauty of LFS
No matter how fast you are, if you can keep it on the road, there will be someone with similar pace to you, helping you to a great race. Races we have a actually a mix of expert, intermediate and begginer drivers, so categorization is not needed.
I also agree with local time but I’d additionally suggest a days/hours/minutes left Info to make it even more obvious. I recall many individual community members who fail to join in time as they remember times wrongly or similar.
I can easily add export functionality if that will help with people using the on-site signup feature. Also I can make the player detail fields dynamic, so you can ask your racer any details to fill in during sign up. E.g. racer / car number, team name, etc.
I've been wondering why ppl prefer to use the forums for sign ups and wonder if any other event organisers see this as an obstacle as well?
I wonder if the "Organiser" field provides relevant information to the user? We don't have it stored atm (though we could), with limited space on the page, we can be critical about what we show. Maybe a live-stream link has more value than an Organiser field?
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I wanted to add a few thoughts about the Leagues section on this website.
The calendar
It's very textual and can be improved. Scawen and I had a chat today and concluded it should look more like Mandula's new posts.
- use the Round logo (to be implemented), or if not available, use the Season logo, or otherwise the League logo
- only state the start time of the first event of the round. So we wouldn't show all the events inside the round like we do now.
- clicking on the event in the calendar will open the details page of the round
- the round details page is a new one and will display all the details for the round
We were wondering if this is too complex? Many people do use the season and rounds feature so I think that's understood.
Though it might be a bit of work to fill it all in, when this was created there was a need for many options because of different league setups and requirements.
But the sign up isn't used at all I think. So with regards to the question asked earlier, is this too complicated to setup and / or use?
Browsing the leagues
We realise the league pages consist like 99% of text. It's not very pretty and maybe the UI isn't the best either. I wonder what you think of this? And because I'm not very good at design, if there are suggestions, they are very welcome
Planned changes
The league logo's dimensions are very free form atm. We are going to enforce 1920 * 1080 so we can display them more uniformly and predictable. Also as you can see in Scawen's preview screenshots, they look nicer if they're all the same size. So if you run a league and have a logo, you could already prepare it to match the required dimension.
The calendar will be changed to be more graphical. And Monday will be the start of the week
A new round details page will be created
There will be the option to upload a logo for each round, in case ppl want to give each round a different identity / appearance.
Round events currently only have a "type" (practise / qualify / race). I'll add a "event name" as well, so you can better specify what each round is. Some leagues for example have Heat 1, Heat 2, etc which is more informative of a name.
We may do away with the car selection for events and replace that with a free-form text field where you can enter anything you want (to mention what cars will be used). The same for tracks, so you can e.g. indicate a layout name, if used.
We used built in sign up feature for fox endurance..worked great to get people signed up but there is no connectivity with insim (so we still needed to keep track of times manually for prequalify of each round). And there is no "send message to all" option, so message recipients were still entered manually. I found a way to help myself with excell and some filters alongside find replace, but it wasn't automatic.
Thank you all for the feedback. I'll remove the 'Organiser' field from the LFS display and use the space for the Live Broadcast info. Will remove UTC and add a countdown, and experiment with reducing text.
It'll be great to hear from some organisers about making the on-site signup useful as Victor described. We can do some good things with that, e.g. provide notifications / only show join button if user has signed up.
It'll be great to hear from some organisers about making the on-site signup useful as Victor described. We can do some good things with that, e.g. provide notifications / only show join button if user has signed up.
The feature is good, however it has little benefit compared to sign-ups via thread posts or via Google Forms documents. It furthermore takes away a bit of publicity from the sign-up process compared to especially the post-based sign-ups: while every new entrant generates a new post and thereby increases the activity in that subsection the league sections’ sign-up form is a “silent” solution and may not be as “attention grabbing”.
A while back I also had a few suggestions to the system, I feel as they could still be beneficial:
https://www.lfs.net/forum/post/1957779#post1957779
I have the feeling the planned changes go into a similar direction.
That's an interesting point. I suggested to Victor during our chat, to make sure you can see who has signed up to an event/round.
Would it be sufficient, to be able to see that list of entrants on the round's web page that is now planned?
Those look very relevant, thanks for the post.
About host password sharing, we were thinking that it could be automatically passed to the in-game calendar, to people who have entered, so the "join" button automatically fills in the password when sending you to the "join specific host" screen.
Export (e.g. CSV) is an important feature as mentioned by Victor at the start of his post. Which makes me think of something else:
About prequalify events, I'm not sure I get exactly what you are saying, but I think there is a situation where the organiser wants to submit a list of entrants, created elsewhere by some other means. As I understand it, it is possible to edit the entrants in the existing system. But maybe the ability to submit a CSV would be useful (e.g. a CSV import similar to the CSV export mentioned by TFalke in his linked post).
Something about terminology regarding 'Leagues' etc.
I've asked Victor about this. He is at least in agreement with some of it (and still considering part of it). We have got a feeling that the word "Leagues" for the forum section may put people off a bit as it suggests a long-term thing you have to commit to. But the reality in LFS that it is usually a series of races, or seasons of races, but not really a 'League' as such.
I thought I should ask in case you have a better idea, or can think of better names, but here are the changes I proposed (with slight change as suggested by timdecnodder below):
Description Existing Proposed
----------- -------- --------
Website section title: Leagues -> Events
Collection of Seasons: League -> Series
Season: Season -> Season (no change)
A round in a season: Round -> Round/Event (interchangeable)
An element of a round: Event -> Session
EDIT: Thanks to timdecnodder. I had "sub-event" instead of "session" but session sounds much better.
Please do say if you have any more suggestions!
I would suggest using the word session instead of sub-event
Thank you. That's much better. I can't even understand how I've had a 24 hour mind blank about that.
EDIT: I've edited the post to say session now.
I think it would improve the visibility to have the info their on the page already.
The password sharing would greatly help organisers as it can streamline the spread of information! It basically acts as a “white listing” for approved entrants, pretty much exactly how it should be, from my point of view.
Two things I forgot to mention earlier: it often is problematic that organisers know very late if people are competing or not, so as organiser you might not know what to expect on race day. In CityLiga, in NDR and in many other series there are therefore confirmation systems: if real life or other commitments prevent you from competing on race day, you state your absence. Handling that via the website rather then via forum posts, maybe with an additional reminder to confirm or unconfirm x hours/days before the start for a round, may streamline the process on the competitors’ side.
Secondly there is currently no way to schedule time-trails in the calendar like rallies, slaloms etc., that use the autocross starting point. Currently you can let a session be a race, a practice or a qualifying. It frankly is a niche yet it would be good to reflect such competitions on the calendar. Similarly “drifting” cannot be entered, maybe a “other” option might help to catch the “non-racing” competitions on the calendar.
How to improve attendance for scheduled events?
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