New game booking tool, all free

[Pendra]

Hello

 

I'm happy to present you my new site, the www.airsoft-booking.com

This new tool/forum will hopefully make the old style, PM, Email and Excel driven event organization obsolete once and for all. It is not your average forum, it is designed to help organizers create events and manage attendance quickly. It also allows the players to see all these events in a well sorted manner and sign up in seconds.

Keep in mind that the system and the design is still in beta form. Some smaller features are not implemented yet and the theme is not final.

However, the main features are in place and ready to rock! The game database is emtpy at the moment (new launches tend to behave this way), but hopefully event organizers will start to use it soon.

I want to make this the best and most simple booking tool available, so if you have any suggestion about new features, I will try to incorporate it into the system.

[verticalflyer]

This is a great idea and good luck with it. You may want to think about providing country by country options for players to easily find what is on within travel distance for them (and in their own language). If the site takes off you could easily find dozens of sites every weekend using the site and this might be cumbersome and off putting for some users.

 

Once again, good luck with this project

[Panzergraf]

That's pretty neat!

 

I registered at that test-event to see how it worked, and I'm pretty impressed.

 

 

So, say, if I were to add an event there, would I get emails from the site with updates on how many have joined?

Would it be possible to create subforums for each of the factions, like one for blue and one for red, that are only visible to those who have registered there?

 

How about integrating it with paypal or something, so players can easily pay for their tickets, and the event organizer can easily keep track of who have payed?

 

 

It would make organizing events MUCH easier!

[Shriven]

Very interested indeed: I run the booking for CAGE FIBUA, and manually inputting into an Excel spreadsheet is an *albartroth*, and then checking the paypal account to see who has paid deposits.

For MY purposes at least, players would need to be able to submit name, address, passenger status or the type and registration of a vehicle, and the ability to pay deposits via paypal.

 

My concern is, since in my case, we require so much information ( each player must be security checked by the home office!), that the information would be in the hands of another and possibly insecure.

 

[Pendra]

Country checking is already in, it is just not activated yet. I plan to add proximity checking, too. It will be based on GPS information. To make that work, both the user and the site would need to input that into the system. After that you can filted by country, or by distance from you.

 

Multiple language is not a problem. I have installed 10 language packs. However the special booking texts should be translated by someone because English is the only foreign language I speak.

 

Paypal integration is planned right after the country/distance filtering.

 

It doesn't send emails about attendace at the moment, but I can make to do so. However you will visit the webpage every now and then anyway, to check out and book new games. While there, you can check the calendar and see the current numbers in a sec, as the events you booked are marked with green color text. It displays that info like 7/30 which means 7 registrations and max 30 slots.

 

Would it be possible to create subforums for each of the factions, like one for blue and one for red, that are only visible to those who have registered there?

This is a very interesting proposal. The problem is that you would not be able keep your secrets from spies from the other side. The spy can quickly swap sides for a few mins, check the secret thread, then swap back, unless the side is locked by the creator. But the idea is sound so I will see what I can do about this.

 

For MY purposes at least, players would need to be able to submit name, address, passenger status or the type and registration of a vehicle, and the ability to pay deposits via paypal.

Yes, storing real name and real address info creates a security issue. I can add a Blowfish encryption and make that user input visible and readable for the specific user and creator of the game ONLY. The company where I work runs a big loyalty program and we store the personal data of 10+ millions customers this way so that should be completely secure. Also I won't give personal data to any third party under any circumstances. I loath every website and company who do that..

By the way you can import the Printable player list into Excel. Just save it with .xls extension and Excel will open it.

 

Feel free to create a test events and see how that aspect works. I made a Sandbox forum to play around.

[Pendra]

Country filtering is in.

PayPal integration is in. It should work fine as long as the receipinet Paypal account is allowed to send IPN/PTD data (Business acounts can do that for sure). With that type of account, the system will shows the actual transaction number next to each player for reference. If the receiving account doesn't allow this, the system can't display the transaction number and you will still need to check your Paypal and mark the people who paid. However in any case, the payment is simplified a lot.

There is encrypted personal info field, which is visible only for the organiser and the player.

I added some sample events and enabled every tool for guests under the sandbox . The events are somewhat based on real games, sites and dates. That should demonstrate a what this system can do.

[Pendra]

Finalized the features.

- Recurring events is in. It creates threads, base datas, side datas using the actual thread as basis.

- Event cloning is in (creates thread, base data, side data based on active thread)

- Fill the Game Base Data form with 1 click using personal template, saved earlier

- Using preset sites is possible

- Possible to add actual map of the game site, other than google maps.

- Google maps link created from coordinates

- Game filter is complete. Now you can filter on Country, Game type, Site type, Attendance and Distance.

 

[Pendra]

- Equipment rent is in. It shows the price, adds the rental fee to the paypal payable link (if used) and shows the number of kits still available.

- The your Registration form is auto filled in every thread using the last registration data entered. This means even faster booking.

- The organizer can now specify if personal data is required or not (all the personal data is encypted and visible to the organizer ONLY.).

- The personal data field is greatly expanded.

- Added a new automatic registration mail sender option. If it is checked, the registration will dispach a mail to the organizer's email address. The mail contains the game name, the game date, and all the data entered into the registration form. This function is usefull if the event organizer prefers some other way of booking, but the players like to use this booking system. In this case, a player may create the thread for the event and fill in the base data. While the actual attendace numbers will be off, because the data flow is one way only (airsoft-booking -> organiser site) it still speeds up the booking, allows the use of the event calendar and the event filtering. You can also see your personal scheadule

 

I also inserted some actual game into the database. I will try to add as many AS events as I can, so players don't have to ask question like "Is there a good game next week in this region?" in the future.

If you need some other function, I'm sure I can implement it.

[Pendra]

Every UK game and site added! You will find contact info, driving directions and a booking form that sends automated booking email.

[Pendra]

I made a few additional modification, and now the tool set can be integrated into any PHPBB3 forum in a few minutes. Other forum types and portals may take a little longer. That is about the last of the mods, since I really can't think anything else.