Guide for Tournament Directors
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The first thing you'll need to do is to create an event from your Organization's home page.
You'll need to choose to create either a Demo event or a Live event. The Demo event has all the same functionality but limits video time to only 20 minutes. Demo events are great for exploring Yaatly, familarizing your tournament staff with managing your event or getting your participants familiar with using Yaatly.
When you're ready to create your Live event, you'll next be asked to tell us the date, hours and expected capacity for your event:
Note that you can repeat this step for as many days as your event runs by selecting "Add another day to your event." This is particularly useful if you have a schedule that differs day-to-day or if you're expecting a different number of people each day (or both!).
The information you provide in this step helps us determine what it will cost to run your event on Yaatly. You pay for Yaatly just like you'd pay for renting a building for your face-to-face tournament: once you tell us how long you'll need access and how many you expect, we'll tell you the number of user-hour credits will be required to run your event. You can read more about our pricing here.
When you're satisfied with your event set up, you'll be given the option to pay for your event. If you have sufficient credits in your account, you can merely click "Pay XXX Credits"
If you need to purchase more credits, you may do so under your Account, accessible from your Organization home page:
After you've created your event, you'll be able to enter your Event's Lobby. As Tournament Director, you have a number of tools available to you from the lobby. You can find many of these tools by clicking the "Manage Event" button:
That button opens a menu with lots of options for controlling your event:
From the Manage Event menu, you can adjust event settings, make event-wide announcements, add users to be Admins in your event, invite others to your event, edit the details of your event and add critical information--like the schedule and topics--to the left menu bar for all participants to see.
In the upper left corner, you'll find controls for Chat and Systems Check and you can view status of those attending your event by clicking on the "View Attendees" button.
To invite others to your tournament, you simply share the Event Invitation Link available by clicking the "Manage Event" button and selecting the "Invite others to your event" menu.
The Event Invitation Link should be shared only with Organization Managers (i.e.: coaches, directors, club presidents, etc.), not Participants (i.e.; students, competitors, judges). Once Organization Managers should go to the link in their browser, and accept the invitation on behalf of their Organization. All members of their Organization will have access to that event via their Organization page.
If you're planning to invite people who will participate in the tournament but who won't be affiliated with an organization (guest judges, etc.) you should create a unique, temporary organization for your specific event. You can do so from your homepage by selecting the "Create New Organization" option.
Give your temporary Organization an Event-specific name that indicates that it's temporary.
Then you can add unaffiliated participants to your temporary organization by inviting them to become members of the temporary organization.
Once you've built your temporary organization and have created your event for which you'd like the members of that organization to have access, you'll need to accept the Event Invitation Link for that event on behalf of your temporary organization. Once you've done so, the members of your temporary organization will only need to log onto moot.yaatly.com to access the event through their Event listings on their account home page.
Alternately, you can make your event public by toggling "Allow Anonymous Login" under the Event Management Menu. Read on for more information about Anonymous login.
Not all observers need or want to create a Yaatly account. If you'd like to allow observers to join anonymously, you can do so by activating permissions under the "Event Settings" menu.
When you enable Anonymous Login, anyone with the URL to your event (from your browser's URL bar) will be able to enter. Anonymous participants do not need the Event Invitation Link to join in the event; anyone may simply share the URL from their browser's URL bar.
Please keep in mind that enabling Anonymous Login is risky: you'll no longer have control over who may enter your event (as you do when participants are required to be members of an invited Organization to enter) or how many people may enter (and, therefore, use up your event's capacity).
Your Tournament HQ is the communication center for your tournament. You can use this option to create rooms like "Information Desk," "Check-in" or "Judges' Lounge." To do so, simple select "Create Room" in the left sidebar:
The rooms used for your Tournament HQ can be accessed in another tab separate from Yaatly. Tournament Directors often use this feature to keep a room open at all times in which people can quickly find them (like a real-life help desk). To do so, simpily select the "Invite People" option in the room and copy/paste the URL into a new tab:
By far the most important thing you need to do is to create competition rooms for your matches. Moot.Yaatly allows you to create competition rooms by simply uploading an Excel (XLS) file with the appropriate data. More on creating your XLS file below.
Competition rooms are made accessible to tournament participants through Postings in the lobby. Various competitive circuits call these different things (e.g.: matches schedule, pairings, schematics, the draw, etc.) but all of them contain the same vital information: who is competing in which rooms with which judges. Typically a Posting contains all competitive match-ups for a particular time block.
Postings are created in Moot.Yaatly by uploading a XLS file containing all the data related to the match-ups in that time block. More information on the files you'll upload to create postings is addressed below.
To begin creating postings and rooms, select "Import Postings & Create Rooms" in the lobby:
From there, you'll be asked to select the file you'd like to upload. More information on creating uploadable files is below.
Select the file from your computer's local drive and hit "Open"
Once you've reviewed your posting and are satisfied that it's accurate, you can select "Create Posting"
Moot.yaatly accepts uploads in the XLS (Excel) file format. You can adjust all data required for a posting in that file before you upload it into Moot.Yaatly.
The XLS file requiress three columns with headings arranged in this order: JUDGES, APPLICANT, RESPONDENT. Moot.Yaatly treats the data in each cell as text, so you should include the information as you want it to appear on the posting in your event's lobby. The JUDGES column should contain the names of all judges for that particular match, whether that's one judge or multiple judges:
You may combine multiple divisions in a single file by creating a separate sheet in your spreadsheet program for each division. If, for example, I have both a Varsity and Novice division that run in the same time block, I can create a single XLS file that contains a sheet with Varsity matchups and a sheet with Novice matchups.
You may also do this for multiple time blocks; you could, for example, upload a single posting that contains your 8:00am rounds on one sheet and your 11:00am rounds on a second sheet.
The names you give each sheet will appear as tabs on the posting displayed in the lobby of Yaatly.
Below you'll find a posting file template that you may dowload and edit with your own data. Please remember to delete the instructions in this file by deleting the first row, but keep the column headers (JUDGES - APPLICANT - RESPONDENT) as Moot.Yaatly uses these headers to understand the data in the file.
From the lobby, you can access the Manage Event panel for your event.
That menu provides you with a host of controls that allow you to run your event. You can allow anonymous entry to your event, control who sees or accesses certain rooms, use a different video conference service for the Auditorium (just drop a link to your Zoom, Google Meet or other VC room in "Event Details"), make annoucements and much more!
