Comment by tripleseven | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tripleseven | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for your reply!

> does this support players signing themselves up? Or do they have to show up in person and the tournament director signs them up?

Ah this isn't implemented yet as I haven't really come up with this idea yet, but it would be great to have this feature so I created an issue for it :) https://github.com/evroon/bracket/issues/1200. Feel free to leave more feedback there as well.

> I'm also curious whether you've considered integrating this with Twilio or something similar, to send text messages

Interesting idea as well! I haven't implemented any kind of notifications so far yet either. But it seems very useful, also from my experience with hosting these kind of tournaments. I'll think about what the best way to implement this is that would be easy (and free/cheap) to selfhost. Maybe it can be done using javascript serviceworkers that just send web notifications. That would be free. AFAIK text messages would always cost money to send.

Based on using the various solutions in this space as a player, text messages and mobile notifications are the norm (folks that don’t install the app will still need sms or similar).

It won't be easy to self-host.

I've integrated with Twilio. I pay a whole bunch of money every month for sending SMSs. And then recently they made me jump through a bunch of regulation hoops. Had to give them all my business documents.

So even if OP does all the work of integrating it, I assume OP isn't going to pay the fees for you, so then you have to create your own Twilio account and jump through the same hoops.

Hmm is there really a benefit of using SMS rather than email? Nowadays everyone just gets email notifications on their phone anyways right? Depending on the provider, you might not receive the notification as instantaneous as with SMS, but it should still arrive quickly. And emails are cheaper (or even free) to send than SMS.

> Nowadays everyone just gets email notifications on their phone anyways right?

Not everyone does. It's a typical 80/20 problem (the 80% being those who use the technology that's easy to develop for, the other 20% being the hard part). 80/20 not being the exact numbers, obviously.

That being said, you certainly don't _have_ to cover more than one way of sending notifications, but that's a decision to be made and the consequences acknowledged.

You could always just implement an interface such as apprise or webhooks and leave the complexity of SMS (cost) or other types of notifications up to the selfhoster.

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