Release notes

What's new

NEXUS on your phone

Volunteers sign up on whatever's in their hand, and until now that meant pinching and scrolling through a layout built for a laptop. The volunteer side of NEXUS is now laid out for a small screen.

• Signing in and signing up, your profile, account settings, filling in a form, and a tournament's overview all fit a phone without zooming.
• Navigation is a slide-out menu, opened from a button in the top bar, instead of the hover-only sidebar — which a touchscreen had no way to open at all.
• The tournament switcher moves into that menu on a phone, where the top bar has no room for it.
• Your competition and volunteer experience show as cards rather than a squeezed five-column table. Adding and editing entries works there too, which it previously didn't on a phone.

Tournament director tools — members, events, assignments, shifts, the form builder and tournament settings — are still built for a desktop. See Worth knowing.

Improvements

• Added an internal admin dashboard for managing accounts, tournaments, and the university/event catalog. This is a platform-admin tool — regular users won't see it.
• The profile edit page has a Back to profile link, and warns you before leaving if you have unsaved changes.
• Required questions during profile setup are now marked with an asterisk, so it's clear up front which ones are holding up the Complete button.

Fixes

• Deactivating or locking an account now signs it out of every device immediately, instead of only blocking future logins.
• Deleting a university that a tournament still uses no longer breaks the page.
• Reordering a ranked-choice question on a touchscreen no longer traps the page. A quick swipe scrolls, and a press-and-hold picks a row up to move it — previously any drag on the list was taken as a reorder, so a long list couldn't be scrolled past.
• During setup, the profile menu is back in the top bar, so you can sign out of an account before finishing. It offers only Sign out until setup is done.
• Fixed a few small UI styling bugs:
  • A tooltip could get cut off near the edge of the screen or inside a scrolling panel.
  • An option in a dropdown stayed highlighted after you moved down to the button below the list.
  • A button next to a page title — Add Tournament, say — could stick out past the edge of the box it sits in.
  • A banner's message and buttons could spill past its edge when there wasn't much room.
  • A role tag you can't change looked slightly off-center.

Worth knowing

• Tournament director tools are not adapted for phones yet. Members, events, assignments, shifts, the form builder and tournament settings are dense, table-heavy screens, and squeezing them onto a phone needs more than a layout pass. Use a laptop or tablet for those for now — everything a volunteer needs works on a phone today.

This is the first release of NEXUS. A tournament normally runs on a pile of Google Forms and a dozen spreadsheets — one for sign-ups, one for availability, one for event assignments, another for lunch counts, and nobody's quite sure which copy is current. NEXUS keeps all of it in one place, attached to the people who signed up.

We're piloting NEXUS with a small number of tournaments this year, so expect bugs and rough edges while we keep building. Join our Discord for support, to report one, or to suggest a feature — during the pilot that's the fastest way to reach us, and it's what steers what gets built next.

What's new

A profile that follows you

Volunteers fill in their details once, instead of retyping them into every tournament's form.

• Name, email, phone, education, and volunteering experience live on your profile.
• Join a tournament and that information comes with you — nothing to re-enter.
• Update it once and it's current for every tournament you join next.
• Directors get complete member details without chasing anyone for them.

Creating a tournament

• Anyone can create one — spin up a tournament to try the features out, no approval needed.
• Name, level, state, date and location are all it takes to get started.
• Tracks are optional up front — set them up now, or add them later from settings.

Roles and permissions

• Roles decide what someone can see and change — settings, members, forms, assignments.
• Define your own per tournament: a scheduling lead and a volunteer coordinator each get their own slice.
• Hand off real work without handing over the whole tournament.
• Everyone works in the same tournament, so no emailing copies of a sheet around.

Tracks

A tournament is more than one thing: each competition day, plus the prep leading up to it like test writing.

• Tracks keep all of it under one tournament — someone who writes tests in October and supervises in February stays one member with one set of data.
• Competition days carry a date, venue and divisions, and are the only tracks with shifts.
• Prep tracks cover the work that isn't a competition day.
• No splitting one tournament across separate sign-up sheets to keep the phases apart.

Events and shifts

• Events come from the official Science Olympiad list for the season — pick them, don't type them.
• Custom events cover anything not on that list — trial events, or jobs like check-in and awards.
• Shifts are the time blocks on a competition day, and what volunteers actually get assigned to.
• Attach shifts to an event to say when it needs people — a morning block and an afternoon block are two things a volunteer can pick between.
• Events and shifts belong to tracks, so a volunteer only ever sees what's available on the track they signed up for — competition-day events stay off the test-writing list.

The form builder

Build your sign-up form inside NEXUS instead of stitching a Google Form to a spreadsheet.

• Custom questions with the question types you'd expect.
• Presets for what every tournament needs, wired to your actual setup:
  • Availability — when someone can work, against your real shifts.
  • Event preference — which events they want, from the events you've added.
  • Lunch — counts per day, without a separate sheet.
  • Track status — which tracks they're signing up for.
• Branching — later questions depend on earlier answers, so people only see what applies.
• Preview — see the form exactly as a volunteer will before it goes out.
• Answers land on the member's record, not in a column you have to match up later.

Joining a tournament

• Volunteers join with an invite — a code they enter to land straight in the tournament.
• Staff invites go out by email with the code attached.
• After joining, they answer whatever that tournament asks on its onboarding questions.

Members, your way

Everyone who joined, in one directory — profile, answers, and assignments on the same record.

• Choose which fields show in the members table, so you see what you care about.
• It's your view — changing it doesn't change what anyone else sees.
• Open any member for the full picture, and edit their details when something needs correcting.

Assignments

• A board for putting volunteers on events and shifts.
• Shows what's covered and where the gaps are at a glance.
• Built from the availability and preferences people already gave you — no cross-referencing tabs.