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The manual
Best & Fairest is a voting app for sporting clubs. Each round, the people a club has asked to vote pick their best players; nobody sees the count as it builds; the winner is read out at the end of the season.
This manual is organised by who you are, because almost nobody needs all of it. The README is the other way round — organised by feature, and aimed at whoever is working on the code.
The service is run by Michael Josem. He does it for free; hopefully you find it useful.
Which of these are you?
- You set one up and keep it goingRunning an awardSetting up, the squad, the fixtures, the panel, chasing votes, finishing the season and publishing it.
- You are a coach or an observerVoting on the panelGetting on the panel, casting and changing a ballot, and what the club can and cannot see.
- You were handed a code or a slipVoting with a codeFor players, umpires, parents and anyone at the ground. No account, no app, nothing to install.
- You are running the eveningCount nightDriving the count, letting the room follow along, and what to do when the projector will not.
- You are deciding whether the club uses thisFor the committeeWho can see what, what the club is asked for, junior teams, what it costs, and the awkward questions.
- Something is not workingTroubleshootingSymptom, cause, fix — for voting, running an award, count night and the result.
If somebody sent you a link
A link to a club's page (/c/something) is public and needs no account. It shows that club's winners: the season just gone, the placings behind the winner, and any honour board the club has typed in from the wall of the clubhouse. Beside each award there is a How the count works link, which explains that award's scoring, who voted and how the tally was kept. Nothing on either page shows a count in progress.
A link with a code in it (/v/ and ten characters) is a ballot. It needs no account and no app. Open it, make your picks, send it. It works once. See Voting with a code.
A link to follow a count (/live/ and a ten-character code) shows a count night as it is read out in the room, and never gets ahead of it.
An invitation email means a club has asked you onto its voting panel. Follow the link, sign in, and you are on it. See Voting on the panel.
The whole thing in one page
If you are setting one up and want the shape of it before the detail:
- Set it up. Pick your sport — that fills in the scoring, the award name and roughly how long the season is. Name the club and the team.
- Add the squad. Paste your team list in; numbers and names are read out of whatever format you have.
- Add the fixtures. Paste the league's fixture list in. Optionally let the app work out the voting windows from the match dates, so each round opens and closes itself.
- Invite the panel. The coach and whoever else votes. They sign in with an account they already have; there is no password to invent.
- Let it run. Rounds open and close on their own. You can see who has voted; you cannot see what they voted, and neither can anyone else unless the club says so explicitly.
- Count night. Read it out round by round on a screen, or print it.
- Finish and publish. The season's record opens to the panel, the club gets a public page, and the winner card is something to post.
Then next season, in one act: roll it over. The squad, the panel, the scoring and the fixtures come with it; last season stays exactly as it was.
Two things worth knowing before anything else
The count is sealed, and that is the point. Nobody sees a running total just because they set the award up. Seeing the tally is a separate permission, granted to a named person, and every single look at it is recorded — by the database, in the same operation that reads the votes, so it cannot be read without leaving a mark. If your club has ever argued about who saw what, this is the part to read out loud.
Nothing here can be un-said. A finished season cannot be reopened, a published result cannot quietly change, and a ballot that has been set aside is never deleted — it stops counting and the reason stays with it. The app is built so that the club's record of what happened survives the club changing its mind.