Competitions

24Creating a competition

Setting up an event: creating it inside your organization, filling in the settings, and deciding when it becomes visible to the world.

Organizer tools

Before you start#

A competition belongs to an organization, so create the organization first: see Clubs and organizations. You need to own or manage it.

You want You need
An internal competition, visible only to your organization SkyTrackPlus or higher
A public competition, listed on the site with public registration SkyTrackPro

Note

Every competition starts internal. New competitions start as internal: only your organisation sees them. Publish later from the manage page. That means you can build the whole event in peace and let pilots in when it is ready.

Creating it#

Where Profile › Competitions › Add New Competition
  1. Open the Competitions tab on your dashboard and press Add New Competition.
  2. Choose the Organization that will own it. Everything else hangs off this choice.
  3. Enter the name, a description and the location.
  4. Set the start and end dates of the event.
  5. Fill in the safety and retrieve phone numbers, radio frequencies and notes if you already know them. They can be edited later.
  6. Save. The competition appears as a card with a Manage button.

The card is the entry point from now on: Manage opens the full screen manager, and the tasks button takes you to the task planner for that event.

The settings tab#

Where Manage Competition › Setup › Settings

Settings is the whole identity of the event. Take the time to fill it in properly: most of it is what pilots read before deciding whether to enter.

Name and Slug
The event name and the address it gets. The slug appears in every link you hand out, including the stable live tracking link. Set it once and leave it.
Max pilots
The capacity of the event. The registration flow enforces it: once it is reached, no further pilot can be moved into an accepted status.
Entry fee and Currency
What it costs to enter. Shown to pilots and used as the default when you request payment.
Location and Country
Where the event is. Drives the country filter on the public list.
Timezone
The zone all the event's times are given in. Set it before anything else with a time in it, including tasks and the weather forecast.
Registration opens / closes
Date and time
The registration window. Close cannot be before open. Pilots see Registration Opens Soon before it and lose the form after it.
Event Starts / Ends
The competition days. End cannot be before start. These decide where the event appears in the list.
Selection mode
How pilots are chosen when there are more entries than places. See Running a competition.
Visibility
Internal, Public, Archived
Internal is your organization only, public is listed on the site, archived is finished and out of the way. Switch it with the button in the manage header rather than here.
Status
Where the event is in its life: upcoming, open, completed. Kept in step with the dates most of the time. Archiving sets it to completed.
Live tracking
Enables the competition live view and the stable live link for the event. Turn it on for any event where pilots track. It is what makes the participant filtered live map work.
Hero image
The picture at the top of the public page. One good photo of the site does more for entries than three paragraphs of text.

Below the fields sit the free text blocks: Information, Rules, Refund policy and Payment information, and the operations contacts: safety and retrieve phones and radios, the info, retrieve and pilot chat groups, safety and retrieve notes, and which channel is the official one.

Caution

Write the refund policy before you open registration. It is the single field that generates the most correspondence when it is missing.

Listing a competition hosted elsewhere#

If your event runs on another platform but you still want it in the calendar here, mark it as external.

  1. Tick External competition in the settings.
  2. Paste the Event page URL and press Import from link. The name, dates and location are read from that page where they can be found.
  3. Choose the Hosted on provider: Airtribune, Civl Comps, PWCA or Other.
  4. Add the Registration URL and the Results URL.
  5. Set a takeoff pin and the timezone so the weather forecast still works.

Note

If the import cannot read the dates it says Dates could not be read in full, please set them manually. and you fill in the rest by hand. Nothing is lost, the import is a shortcut and not a requirement.

Going public and archiving#

The manage header carries three actions that decide who can see the event.

View public
Opens the public page in a new tab, exactly as a pilot sees it. Before publishing. Always look at it once from the outside.
Make public
Lists the competition on the public page and opens registration according to the window. When the settings, the signup form and the required documents are finalized.
Archive
Sets the visibility to archived and the status to completed. After the event, once the results are published. It stays readable, it simply leaves the active list.

Tip

The checklist before pressing Make public: dates and timezone correct, signup form and required documents finalized, staff and their capabilities reviewed, refund policy written, and the public page checked from the outside.