2025-2026 Season Kickoff Updates
Last Updated 28 July 2025 @ 9:30pm EST
As we head into the new season, we wanted to share some updates and upgrades we've made, as well as talk about the future of AskFRED!
Recent Updates
Club De-Duplication
We recently shipped a new feature that pushes Tournament Organizers to upload fewer Club record duplicates with their results. In the same way we've asked you to check for duplicate fencer records upon uploading FencingTime results, we now also ask you to check for duplicate clubs. Almost everyone has experienced a situation where their club record has duplicates in FRED, and this has historically been the primary reason for it. That hole is now closed up (assuming TOs correctly merge records when prompted), so we should see this happening far less frequently.
BC Daily Digest
Bout Committee members now get a daily digest email summarizing the outstanding activity on their upcoming and recently completed tournaments, as well as high level Stripe account information. If you don't have any tournaments that fit this description, the email won't fire off for you. We've done this to enhance the BC experience, and also as a response to feedback we've gotten through our support channels. This should make it harder for anything to fall through the proverbial cracks for Tournament Organizers who are sometimes too busy to log in directly to FRED to check on things. This email currently is only sent to BC members directly for the tournaments they own, and is NOT sent to managers.
Single Event Cancellation
Previously, FRED didn't support the ability to cancel a single event in a tournament. Now, it does. When cancelling an event, it functions the same as a Tournament's cancellation - which is to say, it sends an email to registrants, but it doesn't refund anything.
Fencing Referee App
As an experiment, we've created an iOS and Android mobile application for referees to use to manage their bouts. We built this becuase of a perceived need and as an experimental foray into mobile for us. You can learn more about it here: Fencing Referee
Social Authentication
We've made it easier to log in to AskFRED by adding social authentication. You can now log in with your Google account (Apple, Facebook coming soon). This should make it easier for users to access their accounts without having to remember passwords.
Various App and Navigational Clarity Changes
To try and enhance the usability of the app and reduce some confusion for users, we've made a few tweaks here and there. More visible examples include making the fencer search in dropdowns more forgiving, the addition of a breadcrumb navigational structure for Tournaments, and the addition of a clarifying hero panel on a Tournament's main public page that describes event restrictions that might cause issues for a user before they register.
FRED Data Enhancements
We added some enhancements to the FRED Membership Data page, most notably, punching up the FRED page to include an annually aggregated graph and making the axes more readable/useful via log scaling.
2025 Future Plans
Broad strokes, in the last season we experimented some with features and functionality associated with enhancing both the Tournament Organizer and Fencer experience on AskFRED (Fencer+, Club Manager, etc). While we think these are very useful, the uptake on them hasn't been as strong as we were hoping, at least for the moment. So, our focus in the remainder of 2025 will be on the core FRED platform - registering for tournaments as a fencer and hosting tournaments as a TO. To speak against that some:
Club Manager Functionality
Club Manager will be exiting Beta soon. As mentioned before, we'll be making this feature permanently available to any BC member who is running tournaments that accept payments online, except the mechanism will be a bit more forgiving than the currnet one. There might be other ways to access this feature without this requirement, but this is where we've landed for now.
PayPal Integration
We're working with PayPal at the moment to integrate PayPal into the AskFRED platform in parallel with Stripe. Many people asked for this, so we're working hard to make it a reality. This isn't a small change, so it will take us some time, but we expect it to land later this year. Much more information will be forthcoming in the future.
Better International Support
We've been fixing some bugs associated with internationally operated events, but the roadmap includes more direct, explicit support. Picking a NGB/country on your tournament will mean more in the app soon.
Early/Normal/Late Registration
Adding in the ability to discount early registrations and penalize late ones. This has been on our radar for a while, but its a deceptively large change to make to the platform. 2025 will be the year we make this change.
More User Authentication Enhancements
Soon, we'll be adding Magic Links and Passkeys in addition to the Social Authentication options to further enhance the ease of use and access of FRED's platform.
And more! This is a quick summary of the bigger things we're working on that have gotten a lot of interest and requests, but this isn't the end of the story, either. More to come soon!