Building a community

A community on bdr can be a few friends with a weekly race night, your clan, or a big league with hundreds of drivers. Whatever its size, it is a group of people who race together. bdr gives that group a place to see what they do together, brings it into your Discord, and runs the race days for you. It runs on bdr's machines or on servers you bring yourself. To start one, see Organising.

A group that knows each other

What turns a list of races into a community is knowing each other: who is quickest at Spa, who keeps getting faster, who you always end up battling. bdr shows your members what they do together. Only your members (your roster and your staff) see it:

• Feed: moments as they happen. A member becomes the quickest on a track, climbs past others, or comes onto the board.
• Quickest: a board per track and car class, by the average of each member's five best clean laps. Your target tells each member how far they are from the one just ahead. It is a practice goal for the evening.
• Stats: the members' week, month or all time, in sections: distance, pace, ELO, Safety Rating, wins and podiums, and the rivalries of members who keep meeting on track. Each comes with its top three.
• Weekly summary: every Sunday at 14:00 UTC, the week's figures and top lists. Sunday afternoon leaves time to go and do something about it.

Your drivers' laps count from anywhere on bdr: your races, open lobbies, other communities' events. So the boards fill even in a quiet week. You choose how many places on a board make a moment, from 3 to 25. See Communities.

Your Discord, where your group already is

Your community lives in its Discord, so bdr comes to it. It posts to your channels through webhooks, set up once under Settings:

• Highlights brings the group's moments into the chat as they happen: "Mia is now Pit Club's quickest at Spa in GT3: 2:18.412, 0.214 ahead of Tom." Every Sunday the weekly summary follows, with the week's numbers and top three in each section, and a link to the full Stats.
• Race results posts each race as a table, with gaps, best laps and places gained, while everyone is still talking about it.
• The rest keeps your staff in the loop without opening bdr: new reports and verdicts, bans, your machines, your open lobbies.

Topic	What it posts
Highlights	New quickest drivers, members climbing or coming onto a board, and the weekly summary
Race results	Each race's result as a table: gaps, best laps, places gained
Reports	New reports, accepted penalties, verdicts
Bans	A driver banned or a ban lifted, and a banned driver on your open lobby
Machines	Your machines down, failing or running short
Open lobbies	What your staff did to your lobbies
Platform	Decisions about your community, such as ranked status

Each topic can go to a channel of its own, for example highlights and results to your general chat and reports to a staff channel. Each message can be switched off. See Community setup.

Races that run themselves

You plan the racing; bdr runs each race day:

• Signups open 7 days before a race and close a minute before the start.
• The field is split by rating, and each split gets a server with its entry list.
• The servers start on time and stop afterwards.
• Results are published, standings updated and ratings changed on their own.

Host what suits your drivers, side by side:

Format	For
Open server	A lobby that stays open for days or weeks: practice, hotlapping, a relaxed evening.
Single race	One race at one time, with signups: a special event, a cup final.
Season	A league over weeks, with series, a track per week and standings.

A series can take signups from Community members only, for a members' night next to your open series. See Seasons and series and Single events.

Your machines, or ours

Races run on your own machines, with bdr's agent installed: it starts and stops the servers for you. If you don't have a machine, ask bdr for room on its machines; with a grant, you pick bdr's machines when you host. See Machines.

Or keep managing everything yourself and only send your results to bdr. You start ACC with your own tools and settings, and a small results agent sends each result file to bdr. Then bdr doesn't watch over your setup, start your race servers or show your races to other drivers on the platform, but you stay in control. Your results still show on bdr, but they don't change ratings: only races on servers bdr starts do. See Race servers.

One rating everywhere

Every driver has one ELO and one Safety Rating, wherever they race on bdr. Drivers who come to your races bring a rating that means something, and they take what they earn with them.

New communities start unranked: races, results and standings work, but don't change ratings. Once you have shown that you run fair races, ask for ranked status. A ranked community still chooses per series, so a ranked league and an unranked fun night can run side by side. See Ranked status.

Fair racing

Drivers report incidents from the race page. Your stewards decide, and a driver can appeal once to the platform's stewards. An upheld report can ban a driver from your races for some days, and you see the bans in force on the Members tab. See Stewarding.

Make it yours

• Name, description, Discord invite and website show on your community's page and on your races.
• Server names decide how your servers look in ACC's server browser: your Discord invite, the track, what the server is for. See Server names.
• Staff: several owners and admins, and stewards for the reports. See Organising.
• Members join with your invite link. Share it in your Discord. See Organising.

Getting started

1. Start a community. Its page shows a checklist to your first race.
2. Share the invite link in your Discord, so your drivers become members.
3. Add your Discord webhook under Settings. Highlights and the weekly summary start with your members' first laps.
4. Host a race and publish it.

See Community setup for the pages you use on the way.