Pacing: Standard and Scheduled

Standard leagues

A standard league does not begin until the admin presses Start. Until then it sits waiting, however many people have joined.

Once it is running, a round moves on the moment everybody has done their part. If every member submits on day two of a seven day window, submissions close on day two and voting opens straight away. The same is true of voting.

If somebody does not turn up, the deadline does the job instead. Whichever comes first wins.

This is the mode for a group that wants to move at its own speed.

Scheduled leagues

A scheduled league runs entirely on the clock. It starts itself at the time you chose when you created it, with no Start button, and every phase begins and ends at a fixed moment.

Everybody submitting early changes nothing. The submission window still closes when it was always going to close. This is deliberate, because the point of a scheduled league is that everyone knows on Monday what will be happening on Friday.

The trade is that a scheduled league keeps moving whether or not people keep up. If nobody submits, the round still ends.

Schedule templates

A scheduled league is built from four durations, which repeat for every round.

The app walks those four numbers forward from the start time to work out every date in the season, then does it again from the end of each round for the next one.

Submission window

How long people have to pick a song.

Listening break

Time between submissions closing and voting opening. Can be zero.

Voting window

How long voting stays open.

Break between rounds

Dead time before the next round opens. Can be zero.

The listening phase

If a schedule leaves a gap between submissions closing and voting opening, the round sits in a listening phase. Submissions are locked, the playlists are built and live, and voting has not started.

The idea is to stop people voting on the first thirty seconds of each song. Given a day or two, the playlist tends to get played properly.

Set the listening break to zero and this phase never appears. Voting opens the moment submissions close.

Breaks between rounds

A break between rounds is dead time on purpose, for a league that does not want to run continuously. The home screen says the league is on a break and names the date the next round opens.

A gap you did not ask for looks the same from the outside but means something different. If a round is waiting on a theme that has not been chosen yet, the league is not on a break, it is waiting.

Clocks going forward and back

Schedule durations are counted in real hours, not in wall clock time. A round set to run for exactly a week will land one hour off after a daylight saving change.

If that matters to your league, the admin can rebuild the upcoming schedule from Edit League and put the times back where you want them.