Crew Manager Support Forum

Especially if the name of the race is long, the remaining characters available to communicate something about the cancelled race is very limited, and may go unnoticed by the skipper sending the message. A cancel message like "This race cancelled in favor of another, please resign up for xxxx race" (or) Race cancelled for weather, instead we will party here Johns Brewery

Suggested implimentation:
1. Warn the user the max characters that can be typed in the cancel message (perhaps 80?)
2. Different message format, giving priority to the cancellation reason
a. J/109 Strider Cancelled
b. Date/Time
c. Comment
d. Name of the race at the end of the message, or not at all.

Before:
(J/109 Strider Canceled: Indian Harbor Gearbuster Distance Day Race to Stratford Shoal Sat Oct 5th @ 7:15AM EDT) = Removing Gearbuster in fa

After:
(J/109 Strider Cancelled Sat Oct 5th@ 7:15am: Removing Gearbuster Day Race to Stratford Shoal in favor of Vanderbilt Race. Race= Indian Haror

Dan,

This is a good suggestion, but I modified the approach slightly. Some Skippers will put multiple events on one day, so the event title needs a higher priority than you have assigned. My suggestion is you keep your titles shorter. I noticed on the Strider site that some event titles span multiple lines. Some of the words you use in your titles should really go in the event description.

Effective 9:30pm on 31 July 2024 all Crew Manager sites had the SMS event cancelation messages reformatted in a prioritized order with extra text labels removed to reduce the allowable character count.

The SMS cancelation message is now formatted as follows:
Boat Name Canceled: Event Title comment Skipper typed in pop up box was at location date/time
A second text message contains only the link to the canceled event to minimize the possibility that the link gets cut off. Since these are two separate messages, each has the maximum allowable character limit imposed by the carrier, which in your case is 160 characters for Verizon.

Over the coming months I will be testing text messaging through a third party SMS gateway, rather than using each mobile carrier's email to SMS gateway. If this is successful, the character limitation per message will no longer apply as it will appear to each incoming carrier as if the message originated on a phone, which is handled differently than the email to SMS gateway. The carriers will append multiple messages so all the content is delivered without the message being truncated. If testing is successful, an announcement will be sent to all Crew Manager subscribers.