Welcome to 2026 - New PayPal Integration, Waitlists, and More!

Last Updated 1 January 2026

Happy New Year from AskFRED!

We're excited to kick off 2026 with you and wanted to share some new features we've recently added to the platform.

Growing Together

2025 was a great year for fencing. We saw a 6% increase in tournaments run on AskFRED compared to 2024, along with an 8% increase in on-platform event registrations, while new user accounts grew by 3%. The takeaway? We're hosting more tournaments than ever and Fencers are competing in more local events than ever. Thank you to all the tournament organizers and fencers who make this community thrive.

PayPal Integration

Tournament organizers can now accept payments through PayPal in addition to or as an alternative to Stripe. If you run tournaments, you can join the public Beta for this feature by connecting your PayPal account in your Bout Committee settings to start accepting payments immediately. Learn more about PayPal and AskFRED.

Waitlists

Events can now have waitlists. When an event reaches capacity, fencers can join a waitlist and will be automatically promoted when spots open up. Tournament organizers can enable this feature in their event settings. Read more here:

• Using Waitlists as a Fencer
• Using Waitlists as a Tournament Organizer

A Beginner's Guide To Tournaments

We drafted our first official guide, written for new tournament organizers to have a starting point for running their first event. If you're thinking about running your first sanctioned tournament, take a look at our Beginner's Guide to Running USA Fencing Sanctioned Tournaments. If you have any thoughts on how to improve this, feel free to reach out with suggestions!

Registration Attendance Rates

In the Bout Committee area, when you visit your "Manage Registrations" page, we now surface the estimated likelihood that a registered fencer will actually attend the event. This only shows up if we have enough attendance data to produce an estimate for the fencer. The goal here is to help Tournament Organizers better plan their events!

Fencing Referee App

We launched Fencing Referee, a free mobile app for referees to track scores, manage cards, and time matches. Available on both iOS and Android.

Public Roadmap

We've launched a public roadmap where you can see what features we're working on and what's coming next. You can log in and vote on the features you'd like to see prioritized, and we'll use the community's feedback to help guide what we work on. Your voice matters in shaping the future of AskFRED!

Looking Ahead To 2026

We anticipate 2026 to be a big year for fencing and for AskFRED in general. We have an increasingly ambitious roadmap that involves completely rethinking the registration workflow that we have today, as well as shipping an AskFRED mobile app. More details to come over the next few months.

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As always, if you have questions or feedback, reach out to us through our Help Desk.

Thanks for being part of the AskFRED community. Here's to a great 2026 fencing season!

The AskFRED Team