Here's the basic idea... Generally, when somebody wants to advertise and inform players of an upcoming tournament, they do the following:  1) Create a flier, 2) Publish the flier on shuffleboardcorner.com and eshuffleboard.com, post the flier in bars and lodges, and possibly, direct mail fliers to potential attendees.

One thing that Lorraine and I have done in recent years to publicize our upcoming tournaments is to use the ComputerPeas.com site.  Instead of just displaying the flier the website includes the following:
1) A cover page that includes general information and buttons allowing you to go to the following subsections:
    A) View the Flier
    B) Chck out the current Attendee List
    C) Get hotel info and make reservations
    D) Get airport and airline information

A sample of such a page can be found at...
http://www.computerpeas.com/Web%20Sites/WEB_SITE_2006/Tournaments/upcoming.htm

My idea is this... what if, instead of simply sending in a flier the tournament director/advertisor came to the site and filled out a form.  The form would look similar to the tournament settings window in Computer Peas (for a snapshot of the Computer Peas settings screens go to http://www.computerpeas.com/Web%20Sites/WEB_SITE_2006/CompPeas/PeasOct06/peasfiles/html/p2.htm).

Upon entering the information, the site would then automatically generate the flier (just like Peas already does).  This does NOT mean that you could not submit your own personalized fliers.  You could include a copy of your flier OR, perhaps you could just supply a logo and/or pictures to add to the flier we generate for you.

The "template - auto generate flier" concept is really NOT the crux of this idea.  As a matter of fact, perhaps you would just submit your usual flier and that's all there would be.

The website could generate the basic format and allow you to fill things in, in an effort to standardize the way tournament advertisements are presented.

HOWEVER, here's the real heart of the idea... the section we include in our tournament promos that I have never seen anyone else do is the "Attendee List".  

What if anyone could go to a tournament directors area (flier, etc) and enter his/her name and a popup that would say "Definitely will attend", "Will Probably Attend", "Might Attend".  Then the current list of probable or potential attendees would be available for, not only the tournament director, but others who are considering attending.

And... another section that would go hand-in-hand would be a "Looking-for-Partner" section.  A list of players looking for partners would appear, allowing others to click a button (and possibly add a note) to "ask" another if he/she would like to partner up.

Oh... one last part of this idea... back to the idea of filling in the template to generate a flier...  One of those more tedious tasks in using Peas is actually setting up the tournment, namely, filling in the settings window.  You need to enter each event, starting and ending times, entry fees, rating limitations, format (2/3 sing/dub), etc, etc.  Well, if this was all on a website in a simple-as-possible format, you would then hit the "Generate Peas File" button and a Computer Peas file will automatically be sent to the tournament director.  This would avoid the need for the tournament director to have to reenter all the information in Peas (if in fact he was using Peas for his tournament).  OR... it could work in the opposite direction.  A tournament director/Peas user could fill in the information in the settings windows in his copy of Computer Peas, just like it's done now, and hit the "ADVERTISE" button in Peas which would automatically send all the info to the website, generate the flier, set up the attendee list, etc, etc.

Confused?  I can understand... but I think this one could be reallycool.  Not only does it make it easier for attendees (I don't know about you but I like to have some idea of who's gonna be there before I decide to attend a tournament), but it also let's the tournament director have a better idea of the number of attendees (a critical factor in putting together a tournament), and it is an additional way of getting more people to come to the tournament.

Thoughts?