Tab Room Manager is available free of charge from Ben Olken. You may distribute Tab Manager to whomever you like, so long as this Read Me file is included. However, each person who receives the program MUST send me a notice that they are using the program. This notice can be sent either by U.S. Mail or by email--both are listed above. This notice is both for my information and for yours--if I come up with an upgrade to the program, I need a way of letting you know that the upgrade is available.
This program comes with no warranty, express or implied. If it crashes in the middle of your tournament, I am very sorry but there is nothing I can do. That being said, I have personally run 3 tournaments succssfully with this program, and know of at least 2 other people who have used it as well. It has undergone very extensive testing, and seems to function properly. If you find any errors, though, please notify me so that I can attempt to correct them.
Certain features, such as the tie-breaking scheme and the school sweepstakes scoring scheme, can be modified. However, it involves some time on my part (more or less depending on the complexity of your system.) I would be happy to make those modifications, and will usually charge a nominal fee for doing so (something on the order of $25 or $50). If you are interested, contact me and we will discuss details. The default schemes explained are listed below.
I have not yet documented the program. However, I believe that it is fairly self-explanatory. If you have any questions about how it works, feel free to contact me via email. I will respond as soon as I can.
While this program is free, I am a poor college student who spent hundreds of hours writing this program. If you use this program and would like to pay something for it, I will accept any and all amounts.
Tie-Breaking Information:
Right now, ties are broken using reciprocals. That is, if two people are tied on ranks (i.e. 1-2-3 and 2-2-2), then the system ranks the person who's reciprical ranks have the hier total. Therefore, 1-2-3 would be ranked above 2-2-2 because 1+.5+.33 is greater than.5 + .5 + .5. You have the option of using quality points as a tie-breaking measure of last resort.
If a tie cannot be broken, a black box will appear around the total ranks of the people in question in any report sorted by ranks.
School-Scoring Information:
The school-scoring is done on the Massachusetts Forensic League system (because I come from Massachusetts, and the program was originally developed for this league.) This system adds up the preliminary-round ranks for the top 4 students from each school, and ranks schools by whoever has the lowest total. If a school does not have 4 students, the empty slot is scored with a 5 in each preliminary round. The default number of preliminary rounds is 3--you may modify this in the Report-Sweepstakes scoring dialog box.
