February 17, 2025 Product Updates | Anonymous Submissions

This sprint was spent entirely focused on enabling officials to apply without needing to sign up for an account on Roller Derby Calendar.

Anonymous Applications

Previously if an official would visit an event page and they weren’t logged in (or didn’t have an account) they would be presented with the following message.

Having accounts makes a lot of things much easier, however not everyone wants to sign up for another service and we totally get that. Though there are tools in place to make it easier to stay up to date on all your applications, it’s possible an official doesn’t want an account or isn’t quite ready to sign up.

Now if you aren’t logged in you’ll be presented with the following.

On the event page, not a lot has really changed though a new procedure has been introduced to enable anonymous applications.

Application Confirmation

First things first, by opening up applications to anyone on the internet we’ve just introduce a whole vector for abuse. Organizers could get flooded with garbage submissions, or worse, get a bunch of bogus applications filled with hateful messages.

To help with this we’ve introduced an extra step for officials applying anonymously. Once the application has been submitted they will receive an email to confirm their submission. If that submission isn’t confirmed in a timely manner we’ll simply delete it. Also, until that submission has been confirmed, league organizers won’t even know an application has been submitted!

Reporting Abuse

Now it’s also possible that abuse could be coming from the other side. Someone could be signing up for a bunch of events on someones behalf, with the hope of sending them a bunch of emails. Since again, this is a vector for abuse the applicant will receive a generic email about an event they applied for. There’s a little bit of information provided, such as the event name, but otherwise it’s an informative email about the application that was just submitted.

However, if this application wasn’t submitted by you and you definitely do not want to be participating in the event, there’s the option to report abuse.

Once we know about the abuse we will take steps to prevent it from happening and (in the future) prevent applications from being anonymously submitted on your behalf. This will not prevent you from using the application in the future; you’ll just be required to create an account instead.

I’m a league organizer can I use this?

As of right now, yes this could be used for signing up other officials who do not have accounts. We strongly encourage sending the signup link to the officials who are interested instead of filling the submissions for them.

There is a separate feature planned in the future for league organizers to manually add officials to rosters for their bouts. This approach will be designed around entering the information for several officials faster than resubmitting the same form over and over again. It also won’t require the official to confirm anything, though with drastically reduced functionality available for those officials.