Hmm is there really a benefit of using SMS rather than email? Nowadays everyone just gets email notifications on their phone anyways right? Depending on the provider, you might not receive the notification as instantaneous as with SMS, but it should still arrive quickly. And emails are cheaper (or even free) to send than SMS.
> got a little confused about the stages. I think I may have set up two by mistake, at least, the "previous" button was visible when I was editing the stage
Hmm I am planning to add "templates" for stages that you select and it will create stages according to a standard template. For example, first a group stage, followed by a knock-off stage. That should make it even simpler to set up stages. I'll look into the "previous button" problem you describe, maybe something goes wrong there.
> each player is just an individual, and there are no teams involved
Yes I have heard multiple people about this confusion. The idea is that if you have only players (no teams), you just create teams with no players in them. I'd prefer not to implement the idea of "players as teams" because it will make things very complicated. I could maybe adjust the frontend though to just show teams as players in that case.
Yes I agree the only way to make it easier is to offer a hosted version. I already offer the demo which is hosted, but I don't (at this time) want to offer a whole service, because of indeed what you mention + I would have to deal with legal stuff like privacy policies etc.
I understand your point and I definitely agree that products should be as easy to use and set up as possible. However, I don't really see a way to make this any easier than it is now, or easier to set up than any other selfhosted project you can find on github.
I'm not targeting high school students (specifically) and it's outside the scope of the project to give a background course in DevOps.
I would argue the software is definitely usable by anyone who has some basic experience with Linux and Docker.
If you have specific ideas on how to make selfhosting this easier, I'm certainly curious.
Hmm it's quite a bit more complicated than that. You need to be able to run Docker containers (that's the easiest way to run this). There's countless ways to do that nowadays, and internet is full of tutorials. Portainer seems easy to use to solve this problem but I've never tried it. There's a lot of cloud providers that offer running Docker containers though.
I havent seen that service before, but it's probably similar. Though they seem to let you still pay for certain features, which Bracket doesn't because all code I wrote is indeed public.
> My wife organises a lot of double elimination tournaments; could you add that as an option?
Yes there's an open issue about that, I do plan to implement that, hopefully rather soon.
> Also, it would be cool to see the live demo tournament populated with matches
Ah that makes sense. I didn't want to set up everything already because it might not be the way you want it to be and would unnecessarily put load on my server. But a few teams+matches should be doable indeed, good idea!
> Lastly re notifications that wavemode suggested; perhaps you let people pay for SMS notifications themselves, as an option beyond web notifications. This page [1] implies that web push notifications are unreliable,
Ah that's unfortunate. I will look a bit more into Twilio then, thanks for raising that!
Ah yes we didn't use best-out-of-three for those tournaments, just one set per match. So I indeed haven't implemented sets yet, but I do plan to implement that.
Ah I tested it but haven't noticed this on firefox or chromium-based browsers on desktop and mobile. Could you tell me which browser you use (and wether it's on mobile or desktop) so i can reproduce the issue?
> does this support players signing themselves up? Or do they have to show up in person and the tournament director signs them up?
Ah this isn't implemented yet as I haven't really come up with this idea yet, but it would be great to have this feature so I created an issue for it :) https://github.com/evroon/bracket/issues/1200. Feel free to leave more feedback there as well.
> I'm also curious whether you've considered integrating this with Twilio or something similar, to send text messages
Interesting idea as well! I haven't implemented any kind of notifications so far yet either. But it seems very useful, also from my experience with hosting these kind of tournaments. I'll think about what the best way to implement this is that would be easy (and free/cheap) to selfhost. Maybe it can be done using javascript serviceworkers that just send web notifications. That would be free. AFAIK text messages would always cost money to send.