Improve Default Sorting of Homepage

[bmorrissirromb]

The Tabroom homepage is the most-visited page of the whole website, but it's surprisingly challenging to find the tournament you're looking for quickly. Tournament names and cities are not useful references for sorting (eg. "is a tournament listed as New York...or Queens?"). However, State is a pretty reliable way of sorting data (even with the "time zone" states use for virtual). But sorting by state causes lots of future tournaments to be sorted next to your state, making navigation difficult still! There has to be a better way!

Previously...

Tabroom's homepage displayed a single, large table with all tournaments, loosely sorted by Tournament Date. Sorting buttons exist at the top, but will sort hundreds of tournaments including tournaments several weeks in the future.

Now...

Tabroom splits the homepage's tournament list into Tournaments This Week and More Future Tournaments. Tournaments This Week is sorted by State as a default. More Future Tournaments is still sorted by Tournament Date.

Custom filter views, such as state/circuit, will be left unchanged (these are useful for looking up past tournaments and already contain filtered data)

Design Details

In order to achieve this, we need some mechanism for determining what is "this week" vs what is a future (or past) week.

I propose using Start Date as the primary field that is checked for this purpose, and a start date of Sunday as the cutoff for what tournaments live in each week. This is primarily to ensure that the NSDA National Tournament (which has a Sunday start date) is included as 'This Week' during the NSDA National Tournament's duration.

However, some tournaments will finish on the Monday of a week (eg. Glenbrooks, Stanford). If a user visits Tabroom on a Monday and wants to see their pairings for Glenbrooks, that should show as current week as well. Behind the scenes, we can think of these as 'Currently Active' tournaments, and always include them in the 'This Week' table.

In pseudocode:

# assume today/start_date/end_date/anchor_sunday are integers representing days -- eg. epoch days (it is currently epoch day 19689 since Jan 1, 1970).
today = today()
anchor_sunday = get_most_recent_sunday_on_or_before_today(today)
# Case for active tournaments
if start_date <= today and end_date >= today:
    return "current"
# Case for past tournaments
if start_date <= anchor_sunday:
    return "past"
# Case for future tournaments
if start_date > anchor_sunday.add_days(6):
    return "future"
return "current"

Here's a small table that illustrates how this filter will classify tournaments as past, current, or future. For reference, we'll use dates surrounding Sunday, December 10th, 2023.

Today's (Access) Date	Tournament Start Date	Tournament End Date	Classification
Saturday December 9th	Saturday December 2nd	Saturday December 2nd	Past
Saturday December 9th	Friday December 8th	Saturday December 9th	Current
Saturday December 9th	Sunday December 10th	Friday December 15th	Future
Saturday December 9th	Monday December 11th	Friday December 15th	Future
Sunday December 10th	Saturday December 9th	Saturday December 9th	Past
Sunday December 10th	Saturday December 9th	Sunday December 10th	Current
Sunday December 10th	Sunday December 10th	Sunday December 10th	Current
Sunday December 10th	Monday December 11th	Sunday December 17th	Current
Sunday December 10th	Saturday December 16th	Sunday December 17th	Current
Sunday December 10th	Sunday December 17th	Sunday December 17th	Future
Sunday December 10th	Saturday December 23rd	Sunday December 24th	Future

References

This design sort of mirrors what Speechwire does, but without the clunky state sillhouettes:

[bmorrissirromb]

file to update would be https://github.com/speechanddebate/tabroom/blob/master/web/index/index.mhtml