To find out whether a race exists, where it is held and above all how long you have to enter, you had to dig through each organiser's site, one by one, and reconcile dates that don't always say the same thing. MushMate now has a page for that: /evenements, open to everyone, no account needed, made to be bookmarked.
What changes
A public page, with a real map. The list of races, grouped by month, on the left; a map on the right, where blue points are snow races (or mixed ones) and brown ones are on dry land. A search box finds a name, a place, an organiser or a country, ignoring accents. The filters: country, start and end month, terrain, discipline. All of it lives in the page's address: copy it and you share exactly what you see, and the browser's back button does what you expect. A race with no known position is marked “Off the map” rather than dropped somewhere at random. A “With MushMate” pill flags the races whose partner has a code; it says nothing more.
For each class, its entry dates, written out. A race has several classes (twelve dogs, six dogs, canicross…), and each has its own window. A race's page gives them one by one: opening, closing, late entry if there is one, the fee tiers, the link to enter, and the day the date was checked. One sentence says what to do next: “Enter before Oct 31: €400 instead of €450” (an example, not a real race). At the top of the list, a strip gathers the deadlines of the next 14 days, across all races.
The husky. Next to the status word, a small husky: it sleeps while entries are not open yet, trots while they are, howls as the closing approaches, waits when the race is full, and is content once you have said you have entered. It is decoration: you can't click it, and it vanishes when printed — the word and the date are always enough.
“I want to take part”. On the class you are interested in, the button opens your Plan's objective form already filled in, with the race and its date. You choose the class from this very gesture. Nothing is created without your confirmation. When you are signed in, the button is offered to the kennel's owner — they are the one who writes the Plan — and never on a closed class or one already in your Plan. If you have no account, the page offers to create one, then brings you back to the class.
“I've entered with the organiser”. Once you have entered on the organiser's own site, the owner ticks it, on the site or on the phone. The husky turns content.
Your race path on the map. When you are signed in, the map joins the races in your Plan with an ink line, in date order, each with a numbered marker and its date. A panel sums up the next stage, what there is to do for it, and the numbered list. “Hide” tucks it away; “Show your race path on the map” brings it back. The outings of your clubs also appear in the list, in their month.
On the phone, it is under Manage › Organization › Events, just below Club: the map, the search, the filters, one card per class, unfolded, “I want to take part”, “I've entered with the organiser” and your race path. It reads online, and says so when you are offline.
What others see
- The page is public: anyone reads it, no account. It is made to be found.
- It names no entrant. Never a kennel, never a name, never “12 kennels near you are going”. It says what the organiser announces, not who is preparing.
- Your race path stays in your kennel. The page says so — “Visible to your kennel, and to the coach or expert you invited”. That coach or expert already reads your objectives — that is where the path comes from. No other musher, no visitor. It has no sharing setting. What you tick as “I've entered with the organiser” stays in the kennel in the same way.
- A club outing is never on the public page. It appears only for you, once signed in, in your list.
What the page does not do
These are choices, not oversights.
- It does not enter you with the organiser. You enter on their site; the link is there to take you to it. MushMate sends them nothing, and does not check what you tick.
- It does not track places live. A class is “Full” or “Waiting list” with the date it was read, not with a counter that would move without anyone having checked it.
- It does not give results. No ranking, no times.
- It guesses no date. Each date is read at the source, checked by hand and dated; otherwise it is “to be confirmed”.
If a race is missing: “Is an event missing?” at the bottom of the list, then “Propose an event”. A MushMate admin checks every proposal before publishing it (An event missing from the calendar? Propose it).
Choices that run against the obvious
The status is per class, not per race. The obvious: “the race is open” or “the race is full”. But the twelve-dog class is full while canicross is still open, and their closings don't fall on the same day. A single word per race would make one of the two lie. Each class therefore has its own, and the list's line shows the most pressing one.
“To be confirmed” rather than a guessed date. The obvious: show the best date we have. But an unchecked date that looks sure makes you miss a closing. Until a date has been re-read at the source, it carries “to be confirmed” (or “announced” when the organiser said it but hasn't confirmed), next to the date, and the page writes “Not checked”.
The husky never looks surer than the date. When a date is “to be confirmed”, the husky is pale, and it never howls. A husky howling over a guessed date is a false signal: better that it stays calm than send you running for nothing.
It howls before the closing, not before a price rise. The obvious: howl as soon as it is about to cost more. But a price rise is not a door that shuts: entries stay open, at another rate. The rise is written (“€400 instead of €450”); the husky only howls when the closing, or the end of late entry, falls within 7 days and the date is sure. In the same way, “Closing soon” only shows on an open class, never at the end of a fee tier.
“Before Dec 1”, not “until Nov 30”. The obvious: copy what the organiser says. But “until Nov 30” is read sometimes as “until the morning of the 30th”, sometimes as “until midnight on the 30th”. The page writes the closing date itself: a closing at midnight on December 1 reads “before Dec 1”, and reads only one way — from the 1st on, it is closed. You never have to wonder whether the stated day is included.
The site is more complete than the phone. The obvious: the same screen everywhere. But the site is where you explore — a big map, every filter — and the phone is where you act. The phone keeps what it takes to find a race (search, the map, terrain, country and months), read its page class by class, say “I want to take part” or “I've entered with the organiser”, and follow your race path. It has no discipline filter, no strip of the next 14 days, no club outings in the list; an edition's trace only reads online; and the calendar is entered on the site, by MushMate. What only serves exploring stays on the site.
Your race path stays in your kennel, with no sharing option. The obvious: show it, to see who is going where. But a page that says who is preparing which race is a page where you can be spotted without having chosen it. The race path therefore has no setting and no public link. A page to show an itinerary is another idea, one we have not promised.