Testing your show before show day

The best show day is the one where nothing is being tried for the first time. Register a fake car, vote for it, print its card, check it in at the gate. Half an hour on a weeknight, and your team walks into Saturday having seen every screen.

The stage ladder

A show moves through stages, in order: Draft, Published, Registration open, Registration closed, Voting open, Voting closed, Archived. The dashboard shows where you are and offers the next step. Nothing happens on the public side until Published, and nothing can be registered until Registration open.

Stage	What the public sees
Draft	Nothing yet.
Published	The show page, with a countdown to when entries open if you set one.
Registration open	The registration form.
Registration closed	A closed note in your words. The kiosk still takes walk-ups on the day.
Voting open	The ballot, and the live leaderboard if it is on.
Voting closed	Results once you finalize them.
Archived	The permanent page with winners and the gallery.

Times that move it on their own

Every stage change can happen on the clock instead of by hand. Under Settings: Registration opens and Registration closes on the Registration tab; Voting opens and Voting ends with the show’s dates on the Show details tab, all in the show’s own time zone. When a time passes, the show moves. The public pages count down to each one, and every owner and admin gets an email when the stage changes, with who or what moved it.

Set them and your show day has one fewer thing to remember at 8 AM. The buttons stay on the dashboard for moving early, and every move is written to the change log.

A dry run, step by step

1. Publish the show and open registration. Register a car from your own phone, as an entrant would. If the show charges a fee, set it to zero for the test or use a discount code that covers the whole fee, which makes a free entry with no payment step.
2. On Registrants, find your test car, print its windshield card, and mark it checked in, or scan the check-in code from its confirmation email and tap once. If you run a gate, scan its gate pass instead.
3. Open voting. Scan the card’s code, vote for your car, and watch the pick save itself. Try the location check on Ask, so the team has seen the step once.
4. Open the TV board on a laptop and the phone leaderboard on a phone.
5. Close voting, look at the Results page, and open the awards script.

Everything you touched is now test data, which is what the next section is for.

Wiping the test data

Settings, then Destructive actions, at the bottom of the sidebar in red. Two clears: Voting data, which removes every vote, voter, score card, nomination and award decision for the show while leaving your categories, judges and assignments in place; and Registration data, which removes the test entries and their cars. Both need the owner, both ask you to type the show’s name back, and both only run while the show is in Draft or Published. A show that has opened registration or voting keeps its records.

Move the show back to Published before you clear, if the dry run took it further. Then set your real dates and open for real.

What testing does not cover

• Card payments only run for real, through your provider. Test one and refund it there if you need to see the whole path.
• Emails to your test entrant are real emails. Use an address you own.
• Clearing is not an undo for a live show. Once real people are in it, corrections are per entry on the Registrants page.

Next, if judges score some classes, give each judge their code and a scoresheet to try on the same test car.

Keep reading

• Check-in and cards
• Emailing registrants
• Gate Mode
• Gear & services
• Group entries
• Importing entrants
• Judged scoring
• The location check
• Payments and payouts
• Recurring shows
• Results and awards
• Roles and staff access
• Security and reliability
• Setting up registration
• Spectator donations
• Spectator voting
• Sponsor invoices
• Sponsors and tiers
• Your own pages