Dave Cornfield
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An option to automatically invite the guests (spares) when the team attendance drops below a configurable number of players would help fill in the holes when regular players can't make it.
I have the same issue: Availability is not the same thing as Attendance
Here's the email I sent directly to support:
This is an all round great app and I've been using it for a couple of years now.
I especially like the feature of being able to share players between teams, which I just finished using.
The thing is I use this feature to work around dealing with spare players, and that's because I find managing spare players within the app a challenge.
* * *
The problem is that (available) spare players only get to attend when there aren't enough (available) regular players. Attendance & availability are not the same thing.
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So let's be clear about the team roster, player availability, the game roster and the difference between regular and spare players.
The team roster lists all players, including both regular and spare players.
Player availability does not mean a player will actually attend a game, but only indicates that the player is available to attend the game.
The game roster lists players selected from the team roster that will actually attend.
There are a couple of things to note:
All players on the team roster have availability regardless of whether or not they are on the game roster.
Adding or removing a player from the game roster does not change their availability.
Typically only available players will ever be added to the game roster.
Any player on the game roster that becomes unavailable (or unknown) should be removed from the game roster.
Now comes the difference between regular and spare players:
A regular player is a player that is automatically added to the game roster when they say they are available.
A spare player is a player that is not automatically added to the game roster when they say they are available.
The moral is that spares must be manually added to the game roster after it becomes clear that there won't be enough regulars to fill it. If by chance a regular player that was previously unavailable becomes available, some spare gets manually dropped from the game roster. Note that the spare must be notified of their roster change, because it tells them to show up or not, often at the last minute.
Now I'm not looking to have the decision to add or drop spares automated, I just need the availability of spares, the roster control and the notifications and I'll make those roster change decisions myself.
Currently the app doesn't distinguish between regulars and spares when it comes to availability and the game roster, so I have to collect spare availability and do game roster adjustments and notification outside the app using good old fashioned email. It's a real shame to have to fall back to email for spares when the app is so good at collecting regular availability.
As it stands the app can only be used to collect regular availability. That's because if you include spares in the team roster, they need to be manually rostered-off each game if you want to see only regular player availability - yet as soon as you do that you lose the availability of the rostered-off player.
My guess it that you have a single attendance field that holds UNKNOWN / AVAILABLE / UNAVAILABLE / OFF which is actually blending together player availability (UNKNOWN / AVAILABLE / UNAVAILABLE) with the game roster (ON / OFF). All six permutations are valid states, but you apparently only have four.
If you used two variables /game/player - one for availability and one for the game roster - that would be a great start.
If the roster variable is set from a default held in the team roster (regulars default to roster ON, spares to OFF) - that would be better.
If the roster variable followed the availability variable - except for when a spare indicates they are AVAILABLE - that would be even better.
If roster changes sent notifications to the affected player - that would be the icing on the cake.