BRS

As a competitor to BRS I'd love to come on here and to lambase them but to be fair the past few weeks have been crazy for all suppliers the sheer number of traffic is massive. Clubv1 have no support in Ireland, all the staff furloughed, IG crashed for two days in the UK and Chrono allowing 6 people on a 3 ball line. Its hard to scramble to get settings ready for each Phase, I'd imagine all the suppliers are finding it difficult to keep up at the moment.

We have about 110 clubs on ClubNet (30 on the tee sheet), there are about 60,000 Irish club golfers using the platform, I think today we had almost 150,000 page views alone. For a few days we had issues with speed at 6pm to 7pm but that is now sorted

At its heart BRS is a very good product and they pretty much invented the tee booking market here its their barter model that I hate.

I'd say give them some time, I'm sure it will come good

J

Fair enough , well explained.

But they just caused a major issue with no waiting list.
Unless this is sorted quickly enough

Seems extraordinary we have lost our much loved and needed waiting list.

Maybe I'm missing something but the waiting list is working for me on the new website.

FixdePitchmark wrote: »

Fair enough , well explained.

But they just caused a major issue with no waiting list.
Unless this is sorted quickly enough

Seems extraordinary we have lost our much loved and needed waiting list.

Pro in Kilcock said it just wasn't available outside of comps. It would still be worth having all the time though. Valuable slots are going unfilled due to late withdrawals and I've played twice in 2 balls in past 5 days.

youcancallmeal wrote: »

Yeah working for me as well except that I can't figure out how to remove myself from a waiting list on the app, not a big deal though as it works on the website.

With regards why it was updated I would guess it's an IT manager/consultant of some sort needed to use up budget/get a promotion and this process started well before coronavirus. I've seen it so many times before, websites or apps that are working perfectly fine getting updated(often very poorly) for no apparent reason. The consultancies that do the work are only too happy to oblige for a hefty fee, sometimes the budget means not everything can be brought over from a legacy site/app in the first phase so of course the end user loses out and the consultancy gets to keep the project going longer.

With respect.

The old BRS system was designed before mobile phone browsers (iPhone, Android) came to prominence.

I’d expect that upwards on 80% of BRS traffic is now on mobile devices. Minor patches have been made to cater for this over the past 10 years, but they have been minor.

If you believe that only reason to rebuild software made for 18” screens, is “consultancy, commission, promotion”, then you shouldn’t be speaking on the subject.

You may have gotten used to working it in mobile to the point that it felt normal. But for new users and irregular users, on mobile devices, it was a far, far from optimised experience.

And a competitor could explain this to a golf club in less than minute.

This redesign has been long overdue.

youcancallmeal wrote: »

So they had a website designed for laptops/monitors and a mobile app for ios and android devices. If they had traffic analysis that indicated most or even a large proportion of users were trying to use the website on a mobile device(Instead of the app) then doing a responsive redesign would be much easier and cheaper than a complete overhaul of the platform. But I get what your saying that any half decent IT sales person would be able to sell the idea of an overhaul and probably not even mention they could just do the responsive redesign as a workaround

It’s not a responsive redesign. It’s a rebuild of the user journey to optimise it for smaller devices. You can’t patch the latter directly on top of the former as the steps, pages and components will differ greatly.


I would expect any associated apps will either be retired or replaced by something completely different in the next few years. Having a booking app alongside a mobile optimised booking site makes little sense.

youcancallmeal wrote: »

So they had a website designed for laptops/monitors and a mobile app for ios and android devices. If they had traffic analysis that indicated most or even a large proportion of users were trying to use the website on a mobile device(Instead of the app) then doing a responsive redesign would be much easier and cheaper than a complete overhaul of the platform. But I get what your saying that any half decent IT sales person would be able to sell the idea of an overhaul and probably not even mention they could just do the responsive redesign as a workaround

The new web interface is responsive :rolleyes:

This was 20+ year old platform using a technology stack that reflects that. Legacy software and infrastructure gets to the point it's too expensive to maintain (and add new features) over replacing with more modern stacks. You can't just put lipstick on a pig.

I also suspect (or at least that would have been the first thing I would have done) the entire backend was moved to a cloud provider over maintaining their own infrastructure too. Which is in the current climate could be a stroke of luck because things that are build 20+ years ago don't tend to scale quickly.

You know that statement about a little bit of knowledge...... I think that probably applies here.

Ok to fill in what i suspect BRS have done.
As they are a division of GolfNow (NBC Sports Group) they have migrated to using Kubernetes on Google Compute Engine.
This would have involved both a complete shift of the infrastructure and code base of the website.
GolfNow moved to using Node.js and MongoDB from the old on premise C# and SQL Servers a couple of years ago now so i fully suspect
BRS have followed the parent company to this DevOps model.

that level of work is a massive undertaking as you are completely redoing the entire companies systems and not just a straight forward website redesign.

anyways back to golf, i think the website is fine cause it means we are actually back playing golf!
i was delighted to play my 1st round saturday since the 6th of march.

Kiith wrote: »

Sorry, couldn't resist, even though i understood most of that :P

trust me i was thinking the same as i was writing it
it's the curse of my day job

bustercherry wrote: »

The new web interface is responsive :rolleyes:

This was 20+ year old platform using a technology stack that reflects that. Legacy software and infrastructure gets to the point it's too expensive to maintain (and add new features) over replacing with more modern stacks. You can't just put lipstick on a pig.

I also suspect (or at least that would have been the first thing I would have done) the entire backend was moved to a cloud provider over maintaining their own infrastructure too. Which is in the current climate could be a stroke of luck because things that are build 20+ years ago don't tend to scale quickly.

You know that statement about a little bit of knowledge...... I think that probably applies here.

It was required but rolling it out during the busiest period for bookings in those 20 years, was a crazy decision. It wouldn't have taken much foresight to see a huge surge once golf opened up again and that this would ease over the following months as people return to work.

prawnsambo wrote: »

I'm a bit confused about this. Are we talking about a change from this interface?

Nobody actually answered this, so I'll explain why I asked and maybe then get a definitive answer.



Our club has been on a newer interface of this for over a year. I've seen the above older one on other club websites in the intervening time. So if that's the case, the rollout didn't just start in the last month, but has been tested on a number of sites for a considerable period.

bustercherry wrote: »

Am I missing something, the new site and app was available before Covid-19?
Unless there was some sort of A/B testing going on but our club was using the latest prior to lockdown.

I'd say they dodged a bullet by having this out. I wouldn't have liked to try and scale the old BRS to accommodate the current loads on the system.

Exactly what I was saying. We've had that running since the end of January last year. And running concurrently with the old one for a couple of months before that.

bustercherry wrote: »

Am I missing something, the new site and app was available before Covid-19?
Unless there was some sort of A/B testing going on but our club was using the latest prior to lockdown.

I'd say they dodged a bullet by having this out. I wouldn't have liked to try and scale the old BRS to accommodate the current loads on the system.

Our desktop & mobile site only changed about 10 days ago so it must have been staggered/testing going on.