Rosterity Help Page

Introduction: Rosterity is intended to be a lightweight, configurable means of keeping track of teams of people who meet on a regular basis. It was written with sports teams in mind, but there's nothing saying that it can't be used by other groups.

Creating a Team

The first thing a team organizer will want to do in Rosterity is to request a team key. This team key is based on the team 'nickname', which must be unique on the site. The key will be e-mailed to the requestor, so a valid e-mail ID must be provided. To create a team, the following info is requested:

Field Description

Team Nickname This is a shorter form of the team name - this is used in the URL for your team's start page, and is used to cross-reference all of your team's player and game data. Choose it wisely, because once you register it can't be changed. Nicknames must be unique in the Rosterity database.
Full team name A possibly longer form of the team's name which will appear on webpages.
E-mail contact A (hopefully valid) e-mail address. This will not be shown on the webpages, and the page itself does not generate any messages automatically - it's mainly a way for the Rosterity developer to let users know about any changes that might impact their website usage.
Password for users Rosterity's security model is pretty simple - all players on a team use the same password. Having this password will allow a user to edit their attendance information, or to change the attendance info on another player's behalf. It does not allow users to edit game or player information. When creating a team, you're asked to enter your new user password twice to ensure that you're typing what you think you're typing.
Admin password The key to the kingdom. This allows the team admin to edit their roster & schedule, and to change the player categories (more about this later). Again, you're asked to verify your admin password.
Player categories (optional) Depending on your team or league, you could have different categories for players. In a co-ed league, you could have different categories for males & females. It could be broken down by position (Goalies, Forwards, Defense), or left blank to have all of your players lumped together in one category. It's up to you. On the front page, the game summary will show you how many players of each category have indicated that they'll be at a given game - make it whatever you feel will be the most useful.
Team Add Code A magic sequence of characters that allows a team to be added. To get the code, for your team's nickname, use this form and supply your desired team nickname and a valid e-mail address - your team code will be mailed to you.

Field	Description
Team Nickname	This is a shorter form of the team name - this is used in the URL for your team's start page, and is used to cross-reference all of your team's player and game data. Choose it wisely, because once you register it can't be changed. Nicknames must be unique in the Rosterity database.
Full team name	A possibly longer form of the team's name which will appear on webpages.
E-mail contact	A (hopefully valid) e-mail address. This will not be shown on the webpages, and the page itself does not generate any messages automatically - it's mainly a way for the Rosterity developer to let users know about any changes that might impact their website usage.
Password for users	Rosterity's security model is pretty simple - all players on a team use the same password. Having this password will allow a user to edit their attendance information, or to change the attendance info on another player's behalf. It does not allow users to edit game or player information. When creating a team, you're asked to enter your new user password twice to ensure that you're typing what you think you're typing.
Admin password	The key to the kingdom. This allows the team admin to edit their roster & schedule, and to change the player categories (more about this later). Again, you're asked to verify your admin password.
Player categories (optional)	Depending on your team or league, you could have different categories for players. In a co-ed league, you could have different categories for males & females. It could be broken down by position (Goalies, Forwards, Defense), or left blank to have all of your players lumped together in one category. It's up to you. On the front page, the game summary will show you how many players of each category have indicated that they'll be at a given game - make it whatever you feel will be the most useful.
Team Add Code	A magic sequence of characters that allows a team to be added. To get the code, for your team's nickname, use this form and supply your desired team nickname and a valid e-mail address - your team code will be mailed to you.

Team Page

Once your team has been created, it will appear in the selection form on the Rosterity start page. To bypass this form and go directly to your team's page, use a URL of the following form:

http://www.rosterity.com/?tid=nickname

Your team page will show you a list of upcoming games (past games are not shown), and it will have a field at the bottom where you can enter your team's user password. Entering the password will open up the forms that allow users to submit attendance information.

The Admin Page

Okay, you've created your team, now what? To get to your team's admin page, log in as a regular user first. A new link will appear on the sidebar that will take you to your team's administration page (where you log in using your team's admin password). Once you've logged in, you'll see some forms that allow you to add, modify and remove players and games, and to modify your team's information and player categories. You can also change your user and admin passwords.

Special note: if you change the list of player categories, make sure you revisit the list of players to see if the assigned categories make sense. After changing the categories, the forms on the admin page and the tables on the start page will be updated to reflect the changes.

Editing Attendance Info

Now that you have games and players, you can edit your attendance info. Go back to your start page, pick a game and click on the 'Edit Game' button. This will display a form that lists the players' current attendance data with corresponding 'notes' - after making the changes that you want to make, click on the 'Update' button to commit the changes to Rosterity's database.

User View

If you are a member of more than one team that uses Rosterity, you can register as a user and associate your teams with your user profile. To register a team, go to your user preferences page and enter the team nickname and password for the team that you'd like to add (repeat this for the other teams that you play for).

Once you've added the teams to your profile, your user page will show a list of upcoming games for all of your teams sorted by date. To change the number of games show, modify the 'maximum games' field under 'Display Options' on the user preferences page.

When a user logs in to his/her profile, they are automatically logged in as a user in all of the profile's associated teams.

Privacy Policy

Rosterity will not display, share or sell any of the personally identifiable information that is entered - this includes e-mail addresses and player names (one must log in to see the list of player names for a given team). Of course, if a captain chooses to put this type of information in his or her team's 'Team Comments', then that is his or her choice and it is not the responsibility of Rosterity.com.

Supported Tags in Comments

The following tags are supported in comments:

Administrivia/Support

Rosterity doesn't have an army of support staff - it's just me. If there's an issue with the page (forgotten passwords, access problems), let me know (admin@rosterity.com) and I'll get to it.

Rosterity is free to use. Of course, if you'd like to make any donations to support its development/operation, you can use the Paypal donation button on our contact page.

Planned Improvements

Some new features are "in the pipe" and will hopefully be added to the site soon. These include:

automatic notifications: the tool would automatically e-mail a snapshot of the attendance for the next upcoming game at an admin-specified time.
'player view' - if a person is a member of more than one team that's being managed by Teamtrack, have the option for a 'player login' that would show the upcoming games for all teams the player is part of (this would be mostly for my convenience, but others might find it useful too)
RSS feeds for teams - lets the admin subscribe to an RSS stream to get notifications of attendance changes 'as they happen' via an RSS reader like Thunderbird, Google Reader, etc.
History - add the ability to go back and see attendance for past games
general housekeeping - automatic database cleanups, game expiry after a certain time, etc. (behind-the-scenes stuff)

If you would like to add anything to this list, feel free to suggest it via the address on our contact page.