End of Year 2024 Updates

Last Updated 31 December 2024 @ 9:30pm EST

2024 has been a huge and memorable year for AskFRED, and we wanted to share a few updates with the community as we close out the year!

First, we want to thank all of the users who reached out to us expressing concern and wishing us well as we navigated Hurricane Helene. Everyone at AskFRED is doing well and despite the huge impact to the team, we managed to keep things going without major disruptions during that time. AskFRED has committed a significant chunk of revenues in the past few months towards local charities and recovery efforts in Western North Carolina. We ask for anyone interested in helping to do the same; or to consider buying goods and services directly from businesses located in the area. Full recovery will take quite a while, and continued support will play a key role in that process. Especially through the winter.

Second, we wanted to announce a few new features and changes that have been made to the platform in the past few months:

Club Manager Functionality

You can read more about Club Manager functionality here, but the short version is that we've added a new product to AskFRED which allows Club Owners/Managers/etc to view and manage all information associated with their Club on AskFRED. Right now, this new functionality is in early access mode and will be improved further over time. We're providing Club Manager for free to our BC users who run paid events on AskFRED as appreciation for keeping the platform running. This will continue to be free for BC users who run regular paid events on the platform, and will eventually be made available for other BC members at a monthly price.

Public Club Pages

Clubs now have publicly accessible pages on AskFRED. These pages are automatically generated and include all events that the Club has hosted or is hosting. To find a Club's page, visit a tournament and click on the name of the host Club in the main information box. This is a great way to show off your Club's events to the world, and we're excited to see how Clubs use this new feature! In the near future, Club Managers will be able to add additional custom information to these pages.

API Access

AskFRED has added a new API which allows users to access their own data programmatically, as well as query against public tournaments and events. API Access is currently in private alpha testing with the intent to relelase to all users in the upcoming months. If you're interested in gaining early access, please reach out to support. We're excited to see what the community builds with this new functionality!

Improved Bulk Messaging

Now when you send a message to a group of fencers, you can see various additional information such as email delivery status, and who has opened the email and who has not. This is a great way to see who is received and engaged with your messaging and who is not, especially when sending important messages.

Custom Registration Fields

Due to popular demand, we've added the ability to add custom fields to your event registrations. This is a great way to collect additional information from your fencers when they register for your events that AskFRED doesn't automatically proivde due to various privacy laws (the opt-in aspect of these fields resolves this problem). Custom fields can be added to any event, and can be required or optional. If you have any requests for additional custom fields, make sure to reach out to support!

Favoriting Tournaments and Personal Calendars

If you're logged in, you can now star tournaments to add them to your favorites list. Then, you can view these tournaments either in list form or calendar form. You can also add this calendar to your personal calendar app, such as Google Calendar, and whenever you star a new tournament, it will automatically sync to your personal calendar without any extra action on your part! Finally, Club Owners can use this functionality to create an event calendar for their club (i.e., favorite the tournaments you recommend to your students), and then link to or embed the claendar into their club's website directly!

Platform Fee Increase

Due to recent unexpected cost increases with some of the vendors that we use to run AskFRED, we've increased our platform fee to $3 USD per registration paid online (and equivalent in other currencies) starting in 2025. This brings us into historical alignment with inflation over the past 20 years of AskFRED's operation and into alignment with similar registration services such as Eventbrite (while still cheaper than USA Fencing's registration system pricing). It is not something we do lightly or plan to do again any time soon. We hope that the new features and improvements we've made to the platform in the past few months will help offset this increase for our users. Additionally, we'd remind fencers that our Fencer+ subscription includes two free registrations per month for those competing more actively, and has not increased in price.

Increased Reach and Sponsorships

As a part of raising prices, we're going to use excess revenue beyond what we need to cover our changing internal needs and reinvest into the growth of fencing across multiple channels. To start, we've kicked things off by becoming a sponsor of Chaos on the Strip, CyrusofChaos's new podcast. We want to see the fencing ecosystem grow and want to directly support and ecourage efforts like this. Historically, there has been very little support for these types of activities and we hope to change that. More to come!