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We're pleased to announce the start of a new tournament management platform today called Tourney. We've learnt a lot through building BracketCloud and we're applying those lessons learnt to our new product.

What is Tourney?

• Free
• Both web and mobile apps
• Simplified tournament management

You can start using Tourney BETA today. Simply sign up for an account to try it out.
http://tourney.io

Have feedback? Please contact us!

A feature that we have been toying with for a while on BracketCloud has been the Twitter Match Ticker. We've gone through several iterations of development but we've finally finished development and this feature is ready to use!

What is the Twitter Match Ticker?

You are able to auto-tweet match results as they are entered for your tournaments. It's a great way to keep engaged with your community!

How do I use it?

First, go to your Twitter settings page and click the link to Associate a Twitter account. You'll be redirected to a page that looks something like this: Authorize the app and then you're ready to go! You can turn on the Twitter Match Ticker in the settings of any tournament you admin. Happy tweeting! Note: For any of you who have previously tested our Twitter integration features, you will need to associate your account again.

Amongst various bug fixes and improvements, in this version we have added a new Bracket Standings tab and the ability to associate user accounts with team members.

As usual you can give feedback via Twitter or Uservoice.

The new Bracket Standings tab provides you with an easier way to see Bracket tournament ranking positions.

Changelog

+ Bracket Standings.
+ Team members now associable with BracketCloud users.
+ Updated various vendor libraries versions.
+ Fixed scroll issues with embedded tournaments.
+ Added support for Safari and full-screen tournaments.
+ Minor fixes and performance improvements.

We are happy to announce we've added more game icons also available as tournament categories. You can see the full list at Icons and Categories. ** Do you have any request?, please send a comment below! Here are the brand new:

	Age of Empires II
	Age of Empires III
	Borderlands
	Borderlands 2
	Call of Duty Ghosts
	Counter-Strike
	Day of Defeat
	Farcry 3
	FEAR
	FEAR 2
	Gear of War
	Halo
	Killzone 2
	Killzone 3
	Medal of Honor
	Pokemon
	Portal
	Portal 2
	Planet Side 2
	Ricochet
	Serious Sam
	Unreal Tournament
	Planetary Annihilation

Version 1.4. We've made a huge update: Ladders, custom icons, analytics and hybrid tournaments plus some cool things for participants and matches detailed below.
As usual you can give feedback via Twitter or Uservoice.

Changelog

+ Beta release of Ladders tournaments.
+ Hybrid tournaments.
+ Menu to enable/disable chat.
+ Custom Icons for PRO users.
+ Tournament Analytics for PRO users.
+ Match ordering inside a Groups for RoundRobin tournaments.
+ Bracket matches can now have 0 - 0 scores.
+ Participants can be changed of group from the details modal inside a RoundRobin tournament.
+ Participants played matches inside details modal.
+ Participants filter on Players/ Teams tab.
+ "Add participant" button on Players/ Teams tab.
+ Fix background for Full Screen mode of tournaments.

BracketCloud set out as an answer to the popular question, "How to make your own tournament bracket?". Long gone are the days of scribbling what you think is the correct method of drawing single or double elimination brackets on a piece of scrap paper or white board. Now, with the power of the Cloud, you are able to host your brackets safely online for free with BracketCloud.

See that form on your right? Just fill that out and click the link in the verification email and you'll have your first tournament bracket!

Here is an example screenshot from a 512 player single elimination bracket.

Types of tournaments you can create with BracketCloud:

• Brackets are available in a variety of formats whether it be a 8 team double elimination bracket, 16 team bracket, 32 team bracket or even 256 team bracket!
• Round Robin is for scheduling group stages and leagues where all teams play each other and are ranked based on points.
• Ladder tournaments are a way to let teams challenge other teams in an on-going league. Teams are rated based on their results with either ELO or EXP calculations.
• Hybrid tournaments allow you to make multiple stage tournaments. For example a round robin group stage that follows into a playoff bracket.

BracketCloud holds a large number of features that we can't wait for you to try. And we're adding more every day! If you have any questions or require support, please see our support page.

Thanks to the open WebAPI provided by Value, you are now able to link Dota 2 matches to your BracketCloud tournaments. By simply entering the Dota 2 Match ID when entering a match score, you will be able to see the full Dota 2 match details and statistics from your brackets. Make a bracket and try it out today!

Version 1.3 marks the end of Beta. We've cleaned out most teething bugs now and have also pushed our last major UI changes. We thank everyone for the feedback so far as we look forward to pushing BracketCloud to be the pioneer of online tournament management. We hope you enjoy the new interface and features. As usual you can give feedback via Twitter or Uservoice.

Changelog

+ New interface
+ Moved to Bootstrap 3 RC1
+ Tournament categories
+ Improved email custom field validation

- To improve usability we have removed automated lower bracket BYEs. You now must finish BYE matches manually.

Through the brilliant web app OneSky we are able to manage all translations of BracketCloud in an open cloud environment. Anyone can translate BracketCloud into their language or make improvements to current translations.

You can visit the translation dashboard here.
http://translate.bracketcloud.com

This update mainly consists of the new Round Robin tournament type! We focused on making it as easy as possible for you to create groups and manage matches. We love to hear feedback. Tell us what you think about our Round Robin feature! Changelog: + Round Robin tournament type + Twitter match ticker fixed + Other small bug fixes and style improvements Example
Updates every minute - View full tournament There is a bunch of exciting new features that will be added to 1.2.4 expected to be released in the next fortnight!

This is the change log for version 1.2.2 of BracketCloud.

+ Advanced embed settings
+ Select type custom field
+ Checkbox type custom field
+ Re-enable disabled participants
+ URLs in match comments now automatically become hyperlinks
+ Users can now delete themselves from tournaments
+ Small interface improvements.
+ Fixed bug where shuffling would sometimes duplicate participants
+ Fixed bug where anonymous users couldn't see latest match comments
+ Spanish translation
+ Updated Font Awesome to version 3.2

It's that time of month again. In this blog post I will update you all on the development of BracketCloud.

Embed widget

Stage 1 is complete! You can now embed your tournaments as an iframe by simply clicking the share button on the tournament page and copying the iframe html code. We are now working on Stage 2, which will entail advanced embed settings. Through these advanced settings you can fully customize the appearance of the widget to match your sites style. ETA 2 weeks!

Participant management

Complete! Simply switch to the Participants tab on your tournament pages to find the new management interface. We built out two highly requested features here. Custom fields and team member management. If you have any feedback or suggestions please get in contact with us on Twitter at @BracketCloud.

Round robin

ETA July.

Translations

Hindi and Japanese translations have been installed. Next up will be Spanish. We're still looking for more translators so please get in touch!

Google Drive

BracketCloud works with Google Drive! Simply go to your Google Drive dashboard, click Create, "Connect more apps" and search for BracketCloud. This allows you to organize your tournaments within your Drive!

Drupal module

For those running sites on Drupal, we have started development on the BracketCloud integration module. It's open source so do check it out.

PHP API Wrapper

We built and launched a PHP Wrapper for the BracketCloud API. Find it out Github here: https://github.com/drupaljoe/bracketcloud-php

We have released tournament embedding! See below for an example. You can now go to your tournament page, click Share and copy an iframe HTML code to embed your tournaments on your own pages. In our next update you will be able to theme and customize embeds so if you have any specific requests for ways in which you want to alter the embed object, let us know!
Updates every minute - View full brackets

There has already been a large amount of feedback, suggestions and bug reports which really helps shape the future of BracketCloud. This blog post will detail the current beta development status. We successfully launched BracketCloud earlier this month with less teething issues than we had forecasted. This has allowed us to move on swiftly to completing new features.

Embed widget

We're almost finished building embeddable tournaments. We focused strongly on user customization, to help you fit in the widget to your sites theme. We will push this feature to production in the first week or so of June.

Participant management

We are building a separate tab on tournament pages solely for advanced management of Participants. On this tab, you can easily create, edit and remove participants. We will also be providing Team functionality where admins or team leaders can specify the members of their team. One of the most powerful features is custom fields. Using this, you will be able to set custom fields for your participants and specify if they are presented on the sign up form or are for admins eyes only. For online gaming, we plan to improve these even further in future by interfacing with game APIs to validate game IDs, player names etc.

Round robin

The API implementation of Round robin tournament types is complete. We will continue to build the client side functionality through-out June and hope to launch this before July.

Translations

We recently launched our Malay site translation. Over the next week we will launch Japanese, Spanish and Hindi versions of BracketCloud. If you want to contribute and help translate BracketCloud into your own language, please contact us on Twitter via @BracketCloud!

BracketCloud was created for a simple reason - to improve the quality and frequency of competition. Building upon years of experience in tournament web systems and sports management software, we were able to take BracketCloud from conception to launch in just 3 months of development. BracketCloud was constructed using brilliant modern open source technologies such as Drupal, Node, Backbone, Marionette, Underscore, Bootstrap and numerous consumable APIs and CDNs.

Today marks the first day of the Beta phase. During the next weeks, we will listen carefully to your feedback as we continue to integrate new features.

Is something broken? A feature that doesn't feel just right? Do you have an idea? Your feedback helps us to build the best tournament management tool available. Please send us your feedback!

To keep up to date with our activities you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook.