Frequently asked question about TipTool

You may find more information on TipTool when following these links:

• scoring rules
• glossary
• legal disclaimer
• logon
• register

You have two options:

1) Create your own tipster group and invite family/friends
2) take part in an existing tipster group

Decide with your friends and family who should create the tipster group and what name you want to give this group (eg. The Best Guess, The Jones Family, The Incredibles, etc). The one who creates the group will automatically be nominated as the Group administrator by TipTool. If you are ready to establish a tipster group, the group-administrator should first take the guided tour 'Setup my Group'. Afterwards, you can can take the guided tour 'Invite' to send each of the intended co-tipsters a personal invitation link through TipTool to join the group. The e-mail invitation will take the user directly to the group where he/she can start entering his/her tips.
If your tipster group is already set up and you have not received an Invite through tiptool you can, alternatively, take the guided tour 'Participate' to join to your group (you will be asked to choose a group to attach to.
Should you want to establish a new event (eg. Tournament or League in your area, etc), pls contact the Administrator with details and we will set this up for you.

TipTool is a Web-Application which provides a platform for placing and storing your match tips (predictions) for tournament style events (e.g. Football World Cup) and lets you take part in or set up an own team of participants (Tipster-Group) to compete for best tipster within your group. The tool will provide an automated ranking and scoreboard feature for each Tipster-Group. Have you ever maintained a spreadsheet of Football results with friends and experienced the hassle in keeping it all going? This is a breeze on the Internet with TipTool!

What is special is that, as a signed up user, you can attach yourself to one or more Tipster-Groups of your choice. The tool lets you place your tips with friends, (far-away) relatives and work mates instead of having to compete against thousands of anonymous tipsters. This means you can set up your own Tipster-Group and decide who should be allowed in or you can request to participate in other groups as you like. Originally, designed for Football World cup and the European Championship this tool will support all types of sporting events with a tournament style match system of points scoring. You can even set up your own sporting event (eg. Cricket-World Championship, Basketball World Cup, Handball World Cup, etc) where you can administrate a tournament and place tips with like-minded people.

Simply take a guided tour. If you want to try yourself without guidance, you must have a TipTool user-account. If you haven't, please register.
If you already have a TipTool user-Account, you need to logon, to actively participate. 

TipTool was built with the aim of allowing family and friends to administrate small and personal Tipster groups. Most of our users prefer to know who they are playing with. If fellow tipsters prefer to mask their identity, we at TipTool will not prohibit this but will take action if undesirable names are used.

If a user is not logged into TipTool, names are being displayed in a cut-off manner (only taking the first three letters from Version 4.2 onwards). Search engines will find and index the mutilated names only. The dropdownlist with the real names (in case you forgot your userID or pasword) is split into several pieces that are not of use to a search engine. Should you still find your name together with TipTool on a search engine's resultpage, it is due to the unmutilated real names being displayed before version 4.2. These resuts will vanish over time.

All placed Tips will be hidden to other users until after the deadline for placing Tips. Normally, the Tips will be visible again after the start of the match. This way your fellow Tipsters cannot copy your Tips and gain an advantage by this (eg. 1st place Tipster always places the same Tips as the 2nd place Tipster therefore the 2nd place Tipster has no chance to ever catch up).

A ranking is automatically provided for each Tipster Group. This is based on evaluating individual tips against actual match results whereby points can be scored. After the final round the Champion tip is included.
Here is more on scoring rules.

Each tipster can be contacted via the TipTool mailserver. Simply click on the group name and click on the tipster's name from the list of names to see the mail contact link - this feature will only work if you are logged on.
If you want to contact the group administrator just click on the group name and use the contact link provided. You can reach the TipTool Administrator even if you are not logged-in using the Link at the footer of the page.
TipTool will not reveal your fellow tipster's email address to protect them from unwanted spam.

TipTool allows a logged-on user to invite other people to the Tipping-Group he or she is participating in. The invitee may or may not be registered to TipTool already. To do so, please take the guided tour 'Invite' within the My TipTool section. . There you may either select a registered user or type the e-mail address of a non-registered user. Before sending the invitation to the invitee, you may add a few personal words and then send the invitation.

Go to the Logon-form and click on the Forgotten your User ID or Password. There you will be able to select your user name (alias) from the list to have your user ID and Password sent to your e-mail address. Prerequisite for a successful dispatching is that TipTool has your current and valid e-mail address. If in doubt, please contact the administrator by help of the link at each page's footer. 

If you'd like to order a TipTool-Group, please take the guided tour 'Setup my Group'. There you provide the name and a short description of the group.
To order your own event, a similar guided tour will be available soon - until then, please contact the administrator.

Go to the desired page (e.g. your Tips, Ranking page, etc). For printing there is a print icon at the top right side of the screen. When you click on this you should get a pop-up menu that will let you set the print format (landscape or portrait). It is recommended that you set to landscape format when printing your Tips.
If you prefer to export your data then you are advised to use the copy and paste method. You can mark the rows which you would like to copy and open the programme that you want to copy to (eg. MS-excel) and paste the data into that file.

TipTool now does not cost anything to users. To make ends meet at least in terms of running-costs, we have to rely on sponsors. Please take notice of our sponsors and buy there so that TipTool may stay for free
Should you receive an invoice that urges you to pay an amount to TipTool, please do not respond to this as this may be a phishing attack. Should you receive an invoice via e-mail, please immediately delete this e-mail without having opened any attachments and without clicking any link in it.

Even though it is not possible to get 100% security, TipTool implemented a few measures to get as far as possible. Of course, these measures are not being explained here. Should you come across a security hole, please report it to the Administrator by help of the link on each page's footer.
Be well aware of this: TipTool does NOT encrypt data ! Do never use a UserID or Password that grants you access to other, sensitive systems !
Your e-mail address will not be published - e-mail contacts all go via the TipTool mailserver.

TipTool's icons either show an object's status or an action you may perform.

The below listed status icons reveal the status of an object.

• The Object in question is locked.
• Tips that are not yours are denied from being vviewed before their Deadline to prevent cheating. Your own Tips may be viewed by you before their Deadline, if you are logged on.
• Error or access denied.
• Once you're logged on, editable Tips will be earmarked.

The below listed actions icons allow you to trigger actions.

• Expand all links of the table of contents with one click.
• Collapse all links of the table of contents with one click.
• Sort descending by date/time.
• Sort ascending alphabetically.
• Hide table of contents to make use of the full width for the subpage.
• Hide subpage's header data to make use of the full height, or show hedare data again.
• Print current subpage (The pages with Events, Tipping-Groups, Participants etc. cannot be printed from your browser manu).
• Send link to the displayed subpage by e-mail (provided you have an e-mail program available).
• Set a bookmark to the displayed subpage (Favorites).
• Send an Invitation to someone.
• write an e-mail to the person in question and send it via TipTool-Mailserver.

Almost all pages are held in blue for convenient reading experience. Some other pages (e.g Logon) are held in red to gain your full attention. The Sponsor page is held in grey in order not to mess with the colors of a Sponsor logo.

Please find the detailed answers in the legal disclaimer.

TipTool now allows a logged-on user to invite other people to the Tipping-Group he or she is participating in. The invitee may or may not be registered to TipTool already. To do so, you have to navigate to the Tipping-Group you're participating in while being logged-on. To the top right you see the icon-bar wit an open Hand. Click this icon to get to the Invitation window. There you may either select a registered user or type the e-mail address of a non-registered user. Before sending the invitation to the invitee, you may add a few personal words and then send the invitation.
You now may also tip in advance. All Games after the first round are set up with placeholder Teams (UN-flag, due to no Team being available yet). The names 'Final' and 'little Final' seem to be self explanatory. The other rounds are set up as SF (Semi-Final), QF (Quarter-Final) followed by games based on the Ranking of the preliminary Groups (e.g. '1. Group A' is the Team ranked first of Group A). These placeholder-Games have each a Team 'a' and a Team 'b'. You may place your Tip for each Game in advance, even not knowing what Teams will effectively be paired. Once the pairing becomes obvious, the Event-Administrator will updated it. You may update your Tips at any time before Tip-Deadline.

TipTool cuts off the Names of the Tipsters on the public pages until the user has logged on. This is an additional measure to protect the user's privacy from name search results in google. Over time, the user names of previous events under TipTool should dissappear from google.
The Event and Group administrators now have the opportunity to add a breaking news headline to their event or Tipster-group. The amount of time this headline is shown can be set by the administrator. This feature can be used to inform fellow tipsters about something important in connection with that Event or Group without having to email everyone.
The Tipster ranking table can now be shown before and after the 10 point score. To enable this just click on the field heading below 10Pts on WITHOUT or switch back by clicking on WITH.
The games schedule can be sorted by the Tip deadline date. To do this go to your 'My tips' list and click below the Tip-Deadline field where this will change the sort to ascending and switch back as desired.

If you are not familiar with TipTool, you may take a guided tour through the most common tasks. Just go to 'my TipTool' and click a guided tour there. While being on a guided tour, a breadcrumb shows you all the steps of the tour. The step you are curently in is being highlighted so that you always know exactly where you are on your tour.

Because of a lot of requests, Group Administrators now can add a missed Champion-Tip for the tipsters in their Tipster Group. An existing Champion Tip cannot be modified though.
The below mentioned Chnages are of a more technical character:
Invited Participants ar no longer being automatically logegd in; they have to login themselves.
Tips can be viewed after their deadline, but they cannot be modified though. This is useful when wanting to check the timestamps of of when a Tip was created or last modified and by whom; this applies to Champion-Tips as well. Also, when the Event-Administrator triggers the calculation of Points, its not the Modified-timestamp but the Calculated-timestamp taht is being updated now. This allows a clear differentiation between last modified and last calculated.
Upon registering a new User, its Alias is being scrutinized for multiple whitespace characters (space, tab etc) to prevent saving a technically different Alias that reads identical to an already existing one.

We are Daniel Hugentobler and Daniel Gubler and we both share the excitement of finding the master tipster of major sports tournaments. Together with our IT knowledge we have converted this excitement into a web tool designed to manage game predictions of championship tournaments. We feel that our neighbours and workmates should have the opportunity to create a tipster group with their families and friends without the hassle of collecting and updating the data. Even the long lost uncle in Florida enjoyed competing with his folks on the old continent. Not to mention is the fan club that raised money through their fellow tipsters.

Through feedback from Family and Friends we have been able to constantly improve the tool and add more features. As a result, we have taken the opportunity to open this up to the general public. As we are both employed TipTool is not working for profit. Nevertheless, we would appreciate having you on our sponsor page where you can make a contribution towards our running costs. You may contact us by using the e-mail link at the bottom of each page.

Many thanks to my wife Pia who had to endure the development of TipTool version 5.x over the last few months. Also many thanks to Daniel Gubler who initiated TipTool in the Autumn of 2003 and who did a lot of valuable beta-testing with his colleagues again.