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This past weekend the Tomoka Marathon offered RaceJoy’s tracking and cheers for free to its participants and spectators. 35% of the race’s finishers used RaceJoy’s interactive race day features while on the beautifully unique Old Florida course. The Tomoka Loop is designated as one of Florida’s Scenic Highway and runners are privileged with this distinction […]
We have rolled out Email Reporting for Races, Clubs and Partners to show you: EMail Requests Delivered Opens Clicks Bounces Spam Reports In addition, you can drill down into the following non-delivered emails types: Blocked Emails Bounced Emails Invalid Emails Spam Reports Unsubscribed Recipients The statistics are shown in a graphical and table form:
We have added the capability to do internal questions to Running Clubs (it first came out for Races and Volunteers). This is useful for two use cases: If a question is being asked to club members, but you no longer want to ask the question. By setting it to “Internal”, members will not have to see […]
We have begun developing our new Photo Platform for RunSignUp. There are two key pieces of new architecture that we are using as we build out this new platform, and they are cool for tech geeks. As mentioned in the 2016 Roadmap, we are developing an open platform for photos for race websites. We anticipate integrations […]
Time is running out to take advantage of RaceJoy’s discounted buyout pricing. With the buyout races can offer RaceJoy’s advanced GPS Tracking and cheers for free to unlimited participants and spectators! The 20% discount pricing ends March 31 and makes RaceJoy’s advanced runner tracking affordable for any race. If your race is scheduled at a […]
We have a series Customer Case Studies, in which we take your stories and share your challenges and successes as a learning tool for other RunSignUp users. This Case Study focuses on a commitment to Race Day technology. View the PDF Version of the Case Study Erie Runners Club, RunSignUp, and Race Day The Erie Runners […]
We are pleased to announce that Megan Cary has joined RunSignUp as a Customer Support Representative. Megan will join the customer support team helping customers with RunSignUp, Race Director and RaceJoy after years in the endurance and sports management world, most recently working as Event Timing Director for a large timing and event management company in […]
We did the first Market Analysis last September, and hope to continue to do this every 6 months and continue to make it better (so feel free to send suggestions or corrections to bob.bickel at runsignup.com). We do this as part of our own internal market evaluation processes, but share it since there does not […]
Interesting blog suggesting that the TV show Friends was the downfall of Western Civilization. His point is that Ross was the smart guy on the show and always got made fun of for being smart – much like the kids he coached in his high school chess club. The “dumbing down” of America… This rung […]
We are pleased to announce a partnership with Allianz Global Assistance to begin offering their event registration insurance* for events registering on RunSignUp effective immediately. Allianz Global Assistance is the world leader in travel insurance, assistance and personal services. Event registration insurance is an optional offering that Race Directors can include for their participants when setting […]
We try to improve our infrastructure in Q1 of each year to make sure we do not build up technical debt and stay on top of the most current trends in technology. We have four goals when we look at this each year: Improve Availability – reduce the chance our systems will go down, and […]
This past weekend, the Alamo 13.1 in Texas and the Excalibur 10 Miler in Florida offered RaceJoy to their participants and supporting spectators. Participants and spectators at both events had access to RaceJoy’s advanced features: The Alamo 13.1 offered free live runner tracking along the course, GPS-based progress alerts at every mile, and cheers – […]
As part of our big infrastructure upgrade, we have improved our processes for database backups that are in addition to the AWS Aurora automated backups. The Aurora backups are good from a reliability point of view with features like enables point-in-time recovery. However, the backup is only good for 35 days and the time to recover […]
Sometimes participants make mistakes typing in their email address (in spite of having them double enter them). We added some logic to check for common mistakes with common email addresses: Look for @gmail typos like gmial, mgail, gmal, etc. Look for @Yahoo typos We also try to correct aol, msn, hotmail, comcast, verizon, and sbcglobal if the […]
We have added the ability to allow races to enable runners to transfer from one race to another. This is useful for race series or race management companies to allow a participant to transfer from one race to another race on a different date. Note the money stays in the original race, and there are transfer […]
July 18-20, Philadelphia, PA What’s New for 2016? New Dual-Track Format: We’ll run dual tracks throughout the Tuesday Sessions, allowing you to pick and choose between Customer Presentations and RunSignUp-led technical demonstrations depending on your topics of interest. New Venue: We’re moving east to the Chemical Heritage Foundation in the historic Old City section of […]
We have added a drill down capability to the Referral Report. This is useful to see exactly what referrals have come from each referrer. Used in combination with the ability to manually add referrals to a referrer, this gives you the power to keep your top referrers happy! Simply click on the referral code in […]
We found a nice Chrome Kiosk App that will allow timers to use Chrome as a web browser in a kiosk mode. This means any Chromebook or Netbook will be able to be in a secure and simplified kiosk mode instead of having the complexity of a full browser for users. Here is a demo […]
From Florida to Utah and Louisiana in between! This past weekend RaceJoy was available at a lot of races, but three stood out with high usage from participants and spectators. These races showed that runners, walkers and spectators alike are embracing RaceJoy’s advanced tracking and cheers, opting for a special race day experience. The three […]
Here at RunSignUp, we’re mostly runners and triathletes…but we like to have a little fun with other sports sometimes. We have an internal Fantasy Football League and a March Madness pool, but we thought this year it would be fun to get our friends, partners, and customers involved in the competition! How to Play: It’s […]
There are a number of processes that run on a scheduled basis in a big system like RunSignUp – these are called Chronjobs. They are typically run on one server in most environments, and that is how we did things until today. As part of our infrastructure upgrade, we have added the ability for these […]
You have used our integrated email system to send over 6 Million Emails this year so far (early March). There are a wide variety of Emails sent, here are some of the types: Running Clubs are using our Free Email for sending Monthly Newsletters Races upload lists from partners to send emails promoting their race […]
We have updated the Social Sharing on each race website. We used to use a third party widget from AddThis which was pretty generic and not very powerful and had performance issues. We have replaced this with the new social sharing functions we developed as part of the Enhanced Facebook Sharing as part of the […]
March 9, 2016 – RunSignUp has partnered with iTaB to make it easy for Race Directors to offer runners a personalized race medal. Race Directors can elect to seamlessly add iTaB as an add-on in the RunSignUp registration process, providing them with an opportunity to enhance their race at no additional cost to the event. iTaB […]
We have also done a major upgrade of the RaceJoy infrastructure on Amazon AWS – more than doubling the size of the database server and upgrading to the latest version of the database. This will mean our standard environment now handles the largest loads we have had without us having to do special upgrades over […]
In our new Confirmation Email Customization, we added the automatic generation of a calendar event to be attached to the email. This makes it simple for the participant to add your race to their calendar on their phone or computer with one click. Some races and partners do not like this. We give each race […]
With the release of our Automated Referral Rewards program, some race directors have been approached by participants wanting to get credit for a registration. This may come about because they did not share their specific link with the referral tag, or they talked with someone about your race. If you want to give credit for […]
Yes, we know these infrastructure updates are kind of boring. But we want to document them. This one involves if there is a loss of connection to the read replica database(s). It now auto-failovers to the master database. We had two instances of this happening over the past year and wanted to handle it in […]
We continue to do our annual big infrastructure update. Improvements to date have decreased average page load time across all devices (over 50% are mobile phones) from about 3.2 seconds to 2.85 seconds. While that does not sound like a lot, that is 980,000 seconds (11 days and 8 hours) of wait time last week […]
We are looking for another person for our team who is fast-learning and self-motivated with experience in customer service and credit review to join RunSignUp’s finance team. This position will be located in our Moorestown NJ office. In addition to some customer service responsibilities this individual will have the primary responsibility to review and evaluate […]
We have upgraded our web servers to PHP 5.6. to continue to keep our software stacks up to date. We have also upgraded our log handling mechanism. We now save logs for 3 years in AWS S3. We make use of the the Amazon Glacier storage after the first year to save on costs.
As we continue to upgrade our infrastructure over these few weeks, we have improved our error handling and auto-recovery on our NGINX load balancers. What this means is if there are network or server problems, the system we have in place will automatically repair itself with near zero disruption to users. We have had in […]
We are beginning the roll-out of Automated Emails. Since our Email system is tightly integrated with our database, it means we can do very interesting things in an automated fashion. The idea is that we want to provide a very easy way for race directors to enable automated emails for a variety of common functions […]
We have made major improvements to the Confirmation Email, and created a number of mechanisms for you to customize it to your needs. First, we redesigned the layout to be easier to read. Then we included the following features: Automatically include your Race Logo. Customizable sections at the top, including and Event specific section. Participant […]
Races across the country are getting their races RaceJoy Ready so they can offer advanced runner tracking, GPS progress alerts at every mile and cheer sending on race day. Trend setters seeking to provide innovation for their events and reach a larger audience are choosing the buyout option and offering these features for free. As […]
We have also completed an upgrade of our hardware infrastructure over the past week. This includes upgrades to our front end load balancers, our web servers and our database server (we left the memcache servers the same since they are so over-sized for their load). The hardware upgrades have resulted in an improvement of at […]
You may have noticed a speed up in the Participant Reports on your race dashboard. We did some optimizations of the queries as part of our infrastructure upgrades. We are also benefiting from the upgrade we made to the Aurora Database yesterday. The database upgrade is probably not noticeable to the human eye. Individual database […]
