Hi!

We recently ran into an issue where we had five speakers for one meeting (and consequently, five evaluators). I was able to add them in by creating a custom role called "Speaker #5" and "Evaluator #5".

This works... to some extent, but what it doesn't do is increment the count for the general speaker role. Currently, if a user signs up for Speaker #1 through Speaker #4, it still will increment the count of the number of times they have had a speaking role. Since we used a custom role to add a speaker #5, that won't work.

All I want is to add one more speaker role, and have it work just like the others. Is there a way to do this, or at least some workaround?

Thanks

- Eric

http://islandfoghorns.freetoasthost.org/

Sorry at this time there is no way to add more than 4 speakers that update the history.

You can manually update the history from your site admin page.

Eric-

Depending on just why you want to do that, there may be a workaround. Are you just interested in making sure that those numbers are accurate for their own sake, or are you using them for figuring out who is nearing an educational milestone, or has spoken how many times in a given timeframe, or whose turn it is to be assigned to speak?

In the last case you might want to take a look at DORA, or its new replacement, DARTS. Check out the DARTS demo at http://www.davearonson.com/darts/darts.html (but be warned, the site is rather unreliable lately). If you like what you see, copy the html file to your club's filespace, either public or private, and you're ready to roll! (You can also create a config file, which must be darts.cfg in the private files.)

-Dave, creator of DORA and DARTS

I have the same issue. Our club is doing our annual Speechcraft, and this year's class is overflowing -- we have 11 people in our class. If half the class does a speech each week, that means we have about 5 Speechcrafter speeches, plus one educational speech by a club member. So yes, I would like to have the facility for adding extra speeches too.

My other complaint is that I would like a template for contests.

With all that, thanks for FreeToastHost. It is a great service.

Hi Jenny!

What I usually do for contest agendas, is to "repurpose" existing roles where possible, and create temporary custom roles for others.

First I split the date into two separate rosters, one for the evaluation or TT contest, and one for the speech contest. I then tell the club: to be Contestmaster, sign up as Toastmaster; to be Chief Judge, sign up as General Evaluator; to be a Contestant, sign up as Speaker; to be a Judge, sign up as Evaluator; to be Timer, sign up as Timer; and to be a Ballot Counter, sign up as Vote Counter (which many clubs don't use a separate role for but we do). If you want to use the same CM/CJ for both parts, you can disable it on one. The fact that there are two parts, allows us to sign up two Timers and Ballot Counters.

Then come the Sergeants at Arms. I just create two custom roles for those, the "Door SAA" who guards the door so nobody enters or leaves during a performance, and the "Shepherd SAA", who shepherds the Evaluation or Table Topics contestants out to and back from the isolation room.

As an extra special bonus, if you do add the agendas to the historical data upon deletion, DORA (which I think you've heard me mention before), and DARTS (DORA's new replacement) will give the people credit for doing those roles, relieving them of some of the possibility of being assigned to do them again soon.

-Dave

Hello All!

Thanks for all the replies.

To Brian: How exactly do I manually update the history from my site admin page? I can click on the edit historical roles report link and it brings up a page where I can edit member names in a table, but that's about it. If I click on the Make Changes to Historical Roles button that is on that page, it brings up a table with counts for how many times each user has filled each role. This seems to be what I want, but the table is not editable.

To Dave: I checked out DARTS and it does look interesting. I'm not sure if it's something our club could use, as we have a rather small one, but it might be worthwhile to set up and play with.

To Jenny: We've had a few similiar situations where our club had a special speech contest where we might have a dozen speakers. We had the option of either not recording them or having to break them up into several days. I agree that freetoasthost is great, but it does have it's limitations. Perhaps we can put in a request to add this feature in? I'm sure we are not the only ones who have ran into this issue.

Thanks again everyone!

- Eric

http://islandfoghorns.freetoasthost.org/

You make the changes here

http://islandfoghorns.freetoasthost.org/admin/editor.cgi?historical+EDIT

Think out of the box, if all you want to do is give credit for a speech just put the name in an empty speech box.

Eric-

To give someone credit for extra speeches, you can either find an empty slot as Brian suggests, or add a fake meeting agenda, give the person credit there, and delete it, adding it to the historical data. I've done this a few times, using "dates" like "Fake for Correction" (since FTH doesn't enforce that the "date" is actually a valid date).

-Dave

I like that idea of having two duty rosters for the same meeting. That would work for both my clubs.

We never use the duty roster for the actual agenda (we prefer to use Word, where we can insert little pictures and play around with fonts), but it is useful for the Toastmaster of the Day to reference and for the historical record.

We have a similar need at Camden County for more than 4 speakers. Each month on the second Tuesday, we have a marathon meeting where we've had as many as 8 speakers on our agenda. Plus we nearly always have more than 4 speakers for contests.

I really wish the DB and the user interface were normalized to support a flexible number of speakers (including full info for the backup speaker), up to a limit set by the administrator at the time the roster is created.

Within the existing capabilities, I am proposing to our VP-Ed that we use multiple rosters for each marathon and contest meeting - and I will maually mark duplicated roles as "Do Not Use" on the second roster.

Gary Clayton, webmaster/secretary

camdencounty.freetoasthost.net

HI! Our club has added a fifth speaker slot because of membership. I hope that this option will become avaliable to add on to the duty roster.

Thanks!

Hi Ruth,

I'd like to see that option, too... but in the meantime maybe you can read over this thread to see the creative workarounds for the current limitations of the system. In summary:

• You can add a new "custom role" to your roster for another "speaker" (downside: no slot for speech title/manual, etc and no automatic entry in the historical data, though you might manually edit it).
• Check out DARTS (see Dave's posts, above).
• Think outside the box... there could be other ways to address your needs while still using FTH.

Best,

Lowell

espritdecorps.freetoasthost.org/

http://goldreef.freetoasthost.cc/

So I wonder what it is that I did wrong???

I tried to split the roster in two for contests, both with the same date, and whatever I entered in one also appeared in the other.

Can someone tell me how to solve that?

Friedrich-

What you did wrong (actually, what the programmer wrongly failed to account for) was to have the same date on two rosters. Brian will have to go in and delete one. (Or maybe Lowell can do it. I don't know if he's been granted behind-the-scenes data access. I haven't.)

-Dave

http://goldreef.freetoasthost.cc/

No, No, No,......... no need to go into our site to correct anything. I was stating what had happened a while back.

What I am asking is: How can I split the roster to allow for the use of contests, just as posted by davearonson on Thursday, April 2nd 2009 @ 10:05 AM

I tried it and it did not work

you put the same date but add something like a "B" to the second date

Sept 14B

Nope. I think we have the same access... just moderation of forum posts, creation of FAQs, etc.

I'll have to try that method next time we have a contest.

http://espritdecorps.freetoasthost.org/