Searching and finding what you are looking for

Profixio has two different ways of finding things, and knowing which one you are using explains most surprises.

The tournament list at www.profixio.com/tournaments is the front door for the public. It lists cups and tournaments as cards you can filter by country, sport, district, date and whether registration is open, with a Search tournament… box that narrows the list as you type. It matches the competition's name, its short name, the arranging club and the town — so searching for a town or a club name works, not only the exact tournament name.

The search page is the broader search. It looks across matches, teams, competitions and clubs at the same time and groups the results by type. On a phone it is the magnifying glass in the bar at the bottom of the screen; the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on a Mac) opens it from the same bar.

What you cannot do: search the whole of Profixio for a person by name. There is no people tab and no player search box. You reach a player's page from a team's squad list or from a statistics list instead, and looking a person up by name or birth date is an administrator function.

The two searches do not behave identically. The search page reads a search index that is refreshed in batches, so a brand-new competition can take a few minutes to become findable there.

The tournament list at www.profixio.com/tournaments has two tabs: Tournaments and Federations. The Federations tab is a shortcut — pick a country, then a federation, and you land on that federation's own pages. The Tournaments tab is the searchable list.

Above the list sits Filter, and the filters are:

Each card carries up to three chips: the registration status (Open registration, Registration opens with the date, Registration closed, or Cancelled), the tournament status (Ongoing while it is being played, or a finished marker afterwards), and the number of matches. The match chip is left out when the competition has no published match programme — either because no fixtures exist yet, or because the organiser has hidden the match programme.

The list loads more cards as you scroll and is ordered by how close the competition is in time, so the nearest ones come first. Your search text and filters are remembered when you come back to the page, and they are also in the address, so a filtered list can be copied and shared as a link.

Series and league divisions are not in this list. It shows standalone cups and tournaments. Series live on the federation and district pages.

When the country is Sweden and the sport is beach volleyball, the tournament list works with the federation's competition periods (TP) and gets two extra filters.

• Quick choices: From now on, the previous, the current and up to the next two competition periods, and Ongoing. The current period is marked now, and picking a period sets the date range to it. When no date range is set, the current competition period is selected for you.
• Ongoing lists the competitions being played today, leaving out cancelled ones, and sets the date range aside. When none are being played, the list says "No ongoing tournaments right now" and offers a button that shows the whole current period.
• Level and class: two filters, "All levels" and "All classes", narrow the list on the ranking level and the class.
• District: the district filter lists the federation's districts, reads "All districts" until you pick one, and finds the competitions the federation has placed in that district.
• Cards: each card shows the start date with its competition period, and the levels and classes the competition has. Arrangements the federation has approved but whose invitation is not yet published as a tournament are shown as cards marked Invitation coming. They are left out while a level is chosen or the registration filter is ticked.

When the federation behind the chosen country and sport publishes a beach volleyball ranking in Profixio, a Beach volleyball ranking link on the tournament list opens it.

The search page is reached from the magnifying glass in the bar at the bottom of the screen, or with Ctrl+K / Cmd+K from that same bar. Type into the box at the top; results appear about a second after you stop typing.

Results are split into tabs:

• Matches — with its own choice of Upcoming, Played or All. Matches are found by match number and by team name.
• Teams — team names. Each hit shows the team with its class and competition, and carries a star so you can start following it straight away.
• Competitions — cups, tournaments and series from roughly the last ten years, newest first.
• Clubs — clubs by name, short name or club number.
• All — a short list from each of the above at once.

Two things quietly narrow what you get. If you are signed in with a role in a federation, or you are working inside a tournament, results are limited to that organisation. Where a season can be chosen, results are limited to it; pick All in the season box to search across seasons.

Inside a federation's own pages the same search appears as a Search tab, but with only the Matches and Teams tabs, and always limited to that federation. If the federation pages have no Search tab, use the search page instead.

Team and competition searches tolerate misspellings and match on parts of a name.

Club search works differently: it does not use the search index at all, it matches text anywhere in the club's name, short name or club number, and it lists only active clubs.

Series and league divisions are not in the public tournament list. You find them on the federation's or district's own pages, under the Competitions tab.

That list shows one row per competition with its Category, its Federation/District and its Season, and it can be narrowed with Choose district, Choose season, Choose competitions and a Favorites filter that reduces the list to the ones you have starred. On a district's page the district is already applied, so the district picker is not shown.

By default the list shows the current season. If a series you remember is missing, change the season before concluding anything else — an old division is not deleted, it belongs to an earlier season.

See Federation and district pages for what those pages contain and how to tell whether your federation has them.

Clubs. Use the Clubs tab on the search page. It matches the start of the club's name, its short name or its club number, and only lists clubs that are active and belong to a federation that uses Profixio for its series. A federation's own pages also have a Clubs tab listing every club in that federation, which is usually the faster route when you already know the federation.

Teams. Use the Teams tab on the search page. A team is a club's entry in one class of one competition, so the same club can appear many times — each result shows the class and the competition it belongs to, which is how you tell them apart. Every result has a star for following it.

Players. Profixio has no general search by player name. You reach a player's page from a team's squad list or from a statistics list inside a competition. Looking a person up by name, birth date or licence is an administrator function — see Finding and creating a person.

What a club, team or player page then shows, and how much of a squad is public, is covered in Club, team and player pages.

The star button is how you avoid searching for the same team twice. Tapping it says Add to favorites; tapping it again says Remove from favorites. Stars appear on teams and players, and on competitions in a federation's competition list.

You do not need an account. A visitor who has not signed in can star things, and the choice is kept in that browser on that device. If you sign in or create an account later, everything you starred as a visitor is moved into the account and stays there — nothing is lost. Until then, favourites do not follow you to another phone or another browser, and clearing the browser's data clears them.

Favourites do two jobs beyond remembering:

• They fill My matches, the personal match list on the star icon in the bottom bar, which has tabs for Upcoming, Played and My favorites. It shows matches of the teams you follow, and — for referees who are signed in — matches you have been appointed to. It does not show matches from a competition whose match programme has not been published.
• They power the Favorites filter on a federation's competition list.

The My favorites tab of My matches lists the teams themselves under the heading Teams you follow, across every competition, which is the quickest way to check what you are actually following.

Push notifications, managing your devices and what else the app adds are covered in The Profixio app.

Rather than looking a fixture up again every week, you can subscribe to it. Where a list offers Add this to your Google Calendar, Outlook or iCal, opening it gives you Subscribe via Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Microsoft Outlook, plus Copy to clipboard and step-by-step instructions for pasting the link into Google Calendar.

Three feeds exist:

• A team's matches, offered on the team page.
• My matches, your own feed of favourite teams and referee appointments — only when you are signed in.
• A referee's appointments, on the referee's own pages.

The feeds update themselves: your calendar re-reads them, so a changed time or venue arrives without you doing anything. All three stop at 500 matches and only include matches that are publicly visible. The team feed and the referee feed also cut off history at one year back; the My matches feed does not, so it can carry older matches within the same 500.

Send the link only to the people who need it.

A tournament can show all of its locations on one map. It is reached with the Show on map button on the tournament's Facilities page, and the button only appears when the organiser has actually placed at least one pin.

The map shows three kinds of pin — the Facilities (arenas and halls), the individual Fields inside them where those have their own position, and the Lodging and check-in places. A list beside the map lets you jump to any of them, and clicking a pin gives you the location's name, Open page for its own page, and Get directions, which hands the coordinates to your phone's map application.

Two things to expect. A field that sits inside its arena is listed but not drawn separately, so it does not stack a second pin on top of the arena's. And lodging places only appear once teams have actually been assigned to them, so the map may show only arenas before a tournament has allocated accommodation.

Organisers place the pins themselves, and an Edit map switch has to be turned on before a pin can be moved, so pins cannot be dragged out of place by accident while browsing. Setting up facilities, fields and accommodation is covered in Facilities, fields, accommodation and on-site lists.

Most of search works the same everywhere. These are the places where it genuinely differs:

• Norway and Swedish beach volleyball: the district filter. The district filter on the tournament list appears when the country is Norway, and when the country is Sweden and the sport is beach volleyball.
• Norwegian volleyball and beach volleyball only: Show club tournaments. This checkbox appears next to the district filter for those two sports only, and it decides how the district filter reads: unticked, it finds the competitions the district itself arranges; ticked, it finds every competition in that part of the country, which is how club-arranged competitions come in. In every other sport the checkbox does not exist; in Norway the district filter then follows the competition's postal town, and in Swedish beach volleyball it follows the district the federation has placed the competition in.
• Sweden: series first. For visitors whose country is Sweden, the tournament pages start on series rather than on standalone tournaments — on the current list that also means it opens on the Federations tab, because that is where series are found.
• Swedish beach volleyball: competition periods. With Sweden and beach volleyball chosen, the tournament list adds competition-period quick choices, an Ongoing filter, level and class filters and cards for approved arrangements whose invitation is still to come. Where the federation publishes a beach volleyball ranking in Profixio, the list also links to the Beach volleyball ranking.
• Federations differ in what they have. The Search tab on the federation pages is switched on or off for all federation pages at once. A federation without them has no combined competition list of its own, and its competitions are found through the tournament list and through direct links.
• Otherwise nothing branches on sport. Apart from the volleyball and beach volleyball behaviour above, search treats every sport identically; the sport is only a filter.

Whether a competition is listed at all is a decision made by its organiser, not by the federation. Profixio does not automatically publish a competition on a federation's behalf, and whether a member club's competition appears in search is the organiser's own setting.

Closely related topics with their own pages:

• What a competition's public pages actually show once you have found it — the front page, the match programme, results, tables and team pages: The public tournament pages.
• The app — installing it, push notifications, managing your phones, and what the app adds beyond the website: The Profixio app.
• Federation and district pages — the competition list, the club list and the combined match list on a federation's own pages: Federation and district pages.
• Club, team and player pages — what those pages show once search has taken you there: Club, team and player pages.
• Why matches or results are missing although the competition is easy to find: Hiding matches, schedules and results from the public.
• Finding a person by name, birth date or licence, which is an administrator function: Finding and creating a person.
• Arenas, fields and accommodation, and how the pins on the tournament map are placed: Facilities, fields, accommodation and on-site lists.