Competitions Time announcement - list view & expiry

MSE_Ben_H · 15 June 2020 at 3:19PM

Greetings Compers,

I hope you've all been keeping well and are staying safe during lockdown.

First of all, a big sorry. It's taken us too long to return some of the core features you relied on in the Comping community and we're still not quite there. The Forum team have rightly been giving us a hard time on your behalf.

To be completely transparent, a number of things have slowed us down. Like so many other organisations, we're having to work very differently at (the now virtual) MSE Towers during the pandemic, which hasn't helped the situation. This has also been true of our development partners, who are based in Canada.

But we're also still getting used to our new home and working with our external developers after the massive job of migrating 17 years of accounts and content.

I know it's been a hard slog for you without the ability to enter and skip comps from the list view, and with no way to properly filter comps that have, or are about to, expire.

We've been working on this functionality for a few months now and, in all honesty, our attempts have come up short a couple of times. Competitions Time data stretches to hundreds of millions of rows of 'Skip and Enter' data, and we've had to make sure the logic around merging, removing and archiving threads is robust enough not to cause you further problems.

Thank you for sticking with us. I ask that you stick with us just a little bit longer. Below are some screenshots of the work that we will bring to you – we’re aiming for mid-July at the latest – to show you how tantalisingly close to completion we are.

Happ(ier) Comping,

MSE Ben

Enter and Skip from List view

Enter an expiration date for your Comp threads

Filter Comp threads by Open vs Closed OR sort the list by Closing Date

One-Eye · 15 June 2020 at 7:33PM

Thanks for letting us know that work is progressing on some of our requests.

General
Any changes to Competitions Time (cat=72) also need to be applied to Post/Phone/Text (cat=270) and to Game Over (cat=74)

1) Enter and Skip
a) The view shown and functionality implied is a big improvement - thankyou.
b) Important - We have previously requested that we can Un-Enter and Un-Skip ie. remove a tick or cross.
c) Nice to have - We have asked that we can mark a competition with both a tick and a cross.

Later Addition - a great idea:

womble_lancs said:

It would be nice if there was a function to "mark all on this page as skipped".

2) Closing Date
a) Some people may moan at the extra step when posting, but they should see the need for it.
b) Very Important - The date must be easily editable after posting.
c) Important - Please ensure date is capable of being typed, or copied in, or selected from the calendar as shown.
d) Important - When first implemented, all existing comps will not have a closing date, and this needs to be considered.

3) Filter Comp threads by Open vs Closed
a) I don't understand this. All Open comps should be in cats 72 or 270, and all closed comps should be in cat 74.

4) Sorting the list
a) Very Important - We have asked for and need 3 ways to sort the board. (1) is by last post time ie. Default (2) is by closing date and (3) is by thread start time ie. https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/competitions-time?sort=new which needs to be an option on the drop down menu.
b) Important - When sorting by closing date it is important to have the choice of sorting by closing date ascending or descending.
c) Important - On the screen shot shown, the "Closing Date" filter shows "All" and there is no indication of the other options. Hopefully we will be able to enter a custom range of dates, and if possible other welcome options would be "Today" "Tomorrow" "Today and Tomorrow" "This Week" etc.

.

Blulu · 15 June 2020 at 7:39PM

Thank you SOOOOOO much for the update. It made me feel loads better about what is happening here. I am grateful to and for MSE and will wait very patiently, and with loyalty. I wish I could offer to help in some way, but I very doubt I could offer anything useful - unless it's as some sort of tester, perhaps?

Wishing you and the team well, and hope you all stay safe.

Best wishes

Blu XXX