Goat

Goat is a tournament organiser assistant that caters primarily to email-organised tournaments. This software is designed to facilitate the smooth running of lengthy tournaments, as exemplified by Toulouse's Permanent Go Tournament. The tournament timetable is monthly, and players must organise their meeting times and venues. However, based on past experience, player engagement and management had become particularly daunting, as it requires constant babysitting.

Fortunately, Goat steps in to handle the pairing of players, and significantly ease the management burden. After pairing the players, the administration inputs the data into Goat, and this software provides automates all the necessary actions from thereon. Presently, Goat operates completely in French, but its source code is in English. The creator anticipates adding multi-language support in the future, after the software has been fully tested. Users seeking support for additional languages can still contact the developer to receive assistance.

The latest Goat release is a substantial rewrite that includes many upgrades. The data format has been improved for smarter file storage, which enables all tournament rounds to be stored in one file. In the previous version, Ssf was used to store data, but this has been replaced with Data::Dumper, which is more efficient. The codebase has also been reorganised into modules to enhance performance, and helper programs have been developed to assist registration of players list from an address book, export games status in HTML format, and create new rounds from a Gotha pairing file.