Fidgrove Communities

Today we’ll explain the new Fidgrove Communities feature. In a nutshell, we’re allowing users to share their record lap times for any car-track layout combination with fellow sim racers in our platform. Instead of having one master leaderboard page, we decided to give the power to the users to create and join communities they’d like, or none, if they so prefer. 

We did create a public community Fidgrove Friends, which we invite you to join, and try to get the top spot for the best lap times for each of the different car-track layout combos. For both dry and wet conditions. However, you don’t have to. Alternatively, you can create your own community. If you make it private and not public, others won’t see it in the list of public communities and you control who’s in it. This makes it simple to have a small community with just your buddies with similar pace for example. You can invite someone to your private community from the community profile page. The invitation link will be sent to the email address you include.

Once you join a community, this community will automatically update the best lap time for a specific combo every time you log a better lap time. No need to do anything else. You can press the “Mute” button in the new Communities tab in the Engineering Station, if you want to pause sharing any data to communities. Users might want to do this as they prepare for an event and don’t want to give away their pace, for example.

The following data is shared with the communities you join: Lap Time, Sector Times, Date, Track Temp, Average Water on Track, Car Version, and Track Version Used. Information is shared only at the time data is being recorded, only to the communities you're in at that time, and only if “Mute” mode is not active. Just to clarify, setups are not shared. No data can ever be added back to the communities if it was not added at the time of recording. 

The way to access Fidgrove Communities, is to enter Fidgrove’s Engineering Station, and go the the tab “Communities”. Here you’re presented with the communities you joined. You’ll see 3 buttons on the right side. The first enables you to create a new community. The second gets you to the list of the current public communities. The third is the “Mute” button mentioned above.

We have been putting some effecting in managing car and track versions, and its implications when dealing with data. In the case of the Communities feature, we’re enabling you a simple way to see only the lap times from content versions you have. Just tick the boxes “My Cars” and/or “My Tracks” in the blue bar that shows up in the List of Communities. This is helpful to filter out other versions that you don’t have nor care (e.g., track lap time record done with a car version specific to an event, creating different physics and thus not comparable).

See you out there in the leaderboard of our Fidgrove Friends Community ;)