Clicking this link in the dashboard main menu will display a button for each of the types of battles you can initiate.

You may either initiate a head-to-head battle or initiate a free-for-all battle.

Your pass phrases are pulled randomly from a huge list of song titles. You are given five at a time and they expire one week after they are assigned to your account. Each pass phrase can only be used once. Once you assign it to a battle, it is removed from your list of available pass phrases. Since they get used up and expire on a regular basis, we made it very easy to get new pass phrases. Simply click that "Get New Pass Phrases" link in your dashboard main menu, and a popup window will appear with five random pass phrases. These phrases are assigned to your account when you click the link. All you need to do is write them down. If you ever forget them, simply click "Initiate a Battle", choose a battle type, and then in the Pass Phrases select menu you will find all of your available phrases along with the dates they expire. We recommend plugging these pass phrases into your phone so that you will always have them available when you go trick.

If someone has challenged you to a battle OR if you have joined an OPEN free-for-all battle but still need to submit a video, then you will see the "View Pending Battles" link on the dashboard main menu. Next to the link will be a number which represents how many pending battles you have. Click the link to view your pending battles.

The fields to take note of in this table are the "Waiting on..." column and the "Deadline" column. If the battle is waiting on you to accept the challenge or submit your video, there will be a green button in the "Waiting on..." field prompting you take the appropriate action. You may notice the green border around the field containing your username. Most battles you will be in the "Contenders" field, but sometimes a user will create a battle with another user and select you as a private judge. In this case, since the battle is still directly associated with your account, it will show up in your pending battles table and you will be in the "Judges" field. The green border will always outline the field which represents how you are associated with a particular battle.

The active battles table is nearly identical to the pending battles table, except you will notice the "Deadline" and "Start Date" columns have been replaced with a "Judging Ends" column. Once battles become active, they remain active for one week. After that week has passed, the battle becomes archived and a winner is disclosed. Users can then go back and see how judges scored each contender and rate judges on the fairness of their votes, respectively.

Here you may turn site options on or off to fine-tune your experience at TrickerBattle.com. We made the extra effort here to ensure you are not getting Facebook notifications that you don't want. We understand they can get annoying to some users, which is why we let you choose specific notifications that you want, and turn off notifications that you don't need.

The user preferences should be described in enough detail to be self-explanatory. Simply click the slider-switch on to the right of any preference you would like to change, from YES to NO or from NO to YES. There is no "submit button" or anything; it will set the preference for you on the fly.

Below the preferences you will see, under the Profile heading, your current avatar with an upload button, as well as a text field containing your current username. If this is the first time you are viewing this screen, the avatar and textfield will contain the data which we acquired from Facebook the last time you logged in. If you do not have a Facebook username (an option on Facebook.com), the textfield below your avatar will be blank. Simply click the green button which reads "Upload new photo..." to do just that. Jpegs work the best. Animated gifs and/or transparent png's will probably look funny due to the simple resizing/resampling algorithm. If you want to change your username to override the one on Facebook.com, or if you don't have a username at all and you would like one, simply type in your desired username (slowly) into the text field. It will check for the username availablity as you type, and there is a slight dely so you might need to wait for it to catch up with you if there is heavy server load or if you are a fast typer. If the username you typed in is available, you will see a green button appear next to the field prompting you to update your username. Click it and you are all set.

Initiating a head-to-head battle is a direct challenge against another tricker specifically. Before you initiate a battle, you should have your video filmed and uploaded to either Vimeo or Youtube. To initiate a head-to-head battle, please follow these steps:

1. Login
2. View Dashboard
3. On the dashboard Main Menu, click "Initiate a Battle"
4. Click the "Head-to-head Battle" button
5. Name your battle, something descriptive and short.
6. Click the "Choose your opponent" field and start typing the name OR username of the tricker you want to battle. For example, if you wanted to battle Munks, you could type "Munks", OR "John" OR "McGahan". The autocomplete list of trickers will be populated as you type, but will not bother fetching any users until you have typed at least 3 characters. Following the same example, if you typed "Mun" you would see Munks appear in the list. You then click on him and he will replace that text field with his photo and name. You will notice a little red "X" icon, which will remove that tricker if you change your mind and want to battle someone else instead.

7. Provide your video URL. We currently support Vimeo and Youtube URLs.

   Example YouTube format: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsdVYOM0SX8

   Example Vimeo Format: http://www.vimeo.com/6628598

   Paste your video URL into the text field and then blur the field (click anywhere on the screen or select the next form element). If your video URL works, you will see a small-scaled video embed on the fly to let you know we are able to embed it. If something went wrong, you will only see the link which reads "Wrong video / no video?" - click that link to reset the video field so you can try again.

8. Select your pass phrase. If you do not want to require a pass phrase for this battle (an example would be if you want to battle your best cork ever caught on video and you are allowing old videos), then select the option which reads "DO NOT REQUIRE A PASS PHRASE FOR THIS BATTLE "
9. Choose your scoring method
10. Choose your judging method
11. Choose your credit type

12. Choose the structure for your battle - Tricks or Trick Types. If you select Tricks (default), you simply select all the tricks in the list below in the order of your combo. For example, say you are battling a cork -> swingthru double cork -> swingthru double cork. This is the combo you decided you want to battle. You select the following tricks: Corkscrew, Swingthru, Double Corkscrew, Swingthru, Double Corkscrew. You can tweak the order of the combo below if you need to and remove unwanted tricks if you accidentally clicked on one you didn't want. Now that your tricks are selected, with the "TRICKS" option selected above, this forces your opponent to perform the exact same combo, move for move.

    If you select "TRICK TYPES" above instead of "TRICKS", you will see a new list appear to the right of generalized trick types such as "Kick", "Twist", "Flip", etc. What you do here is select the trick types that match your trick combo. Using the example combo we just provided, in the trick types list, you would select the following trick types (in order): Twist, Transition, Twist, Transition, Twist. What this does is override the requirements for your opponent so he/she does not need to mirror your exact combo, but rather just submit a combo that follows the trick types template. An example could be: hyper btwist -> missleg hyper btwist -> missleg cali roll.

    If you do not want to battle a combo, just select a single trick. For example, if you want to battle a 540, you choose the "TRICKS" option, and then select 540 from the list. If you want to battle any kick, but your submission is a 540, then you would select the "TRICK TYPES" option, select 540 from the tricks list, and then select Kick from the trick types list.

    If you do not want any tricks or trick types to be defined as a single trick or combo in this way, and you would rather define your own battle parameters, simply choose the ** SEE BATTLE DESCRIPTION ** trick and it will override all the appropriate settings for you. This option is required if you want to host a single battle with many separate tricks or multiple separate combos. An example would be a 30 second battle featuring 1 kick, 1 twist, 1 combo, and a wildcard trick.

13. Click the "INITIATE BATTLE" button. If you missed any fields, they will flash yellow.

Assuming you filled out all the data correctly, your battle should have been created and you should have been taken to your pending battles screen. If you have your user preferences set to allow a Facebook notification when you initiate a battle, you will see a post on your Facebook wall from the TrickerBattle app. It is technically posted on your wall by you, so you should see your profile picture next to your post. The notification will describe who you challanged, and provide a bit of information about your battle. If your opponent had his/her preferences set to allow for Facebook notifications when challenged by a user, then he/she will also get a post on his or her Facebook wall. A third post is sent to the TrickerBattle application page's wall just in case either of you opted to not be notified.

Since the battle is now pending, it will be up to your opponent to accept the challenge. Your battle has a grace period of 1 week - in other words, your opponent has one week to accept the challenge and to submit his/her video clip. If your opponent fails to provide video and accept within the week, your battle will become void and disappear from the main battles screen. We do this to keep things moving and to create a sense of urgency. In reality, do you really want to be waiting around for more than a week for your opponent to submit their video? Probably not.

An alternative method for challenging a user (instead of typing their name in the opponents field) is to find them on the Leaderboard and click the green

button next to their name. This essentially just populates the opponents field for you as it loads the dashboard and the "Initiate Head-to-Head Battle" form.

Initiating a free-for-all battle is almost identical to initiating a head-to-head battle, except for one major difference, described below. Before you initiate a battle, you should have your video filmed and uploaded to either Vimeo or Youtube.

The main difference in this process is that instead of selecting one tricker to be your opponent, you choose your Opponent Method. You have two choices:

• INVITE: Choosing this opponent method will display five opponent fields. You use them in the same way you used the opponent field in the head-to-head battle initiation. Since this is a free-for-all battle, you must provide at least 2 opponents.
• OPEN: Choosing this option will allow your battle to be displayed on the main battles screen in the table which reads "JOIN THESE OPEN FREE-FOR-ALL BATTLES". Anybody can join. We may at some point implement a blacklist feature where you can ban certain users from joining your battles, but for now we want to encourage unity not diversity.

Assuming you filled out all the data correctly, your battle should have been created and you should have been taken to your pending battles screen. If you have your user preferences set to allow a Facebook notification when you initiate a battle, you will see a post on your Facebook wall from the TrickerBattle app. It is technically posted on your wall by you, so you should see your profile picture next to your post. The notification will describe who you challanged, and provide a bit of information about your battle. If your opponents had their preferences set to allow for Facebook notifications when challenged by a user, then they will also get a post on his or her Facebook wall, respectively. A third post is sent to the TrickerBattle application page's wall just in case any of you opted to be notified.

Since the battle is now pending, it will be up to your opponents to accept the challenge. Your battle has a grace period of 1 week. This grace period differs from the head-to-head battles in one very important way. In head-to-head battles, the battle will start immediately when the challenged opponent provides a video. In free-for-all battles, the battle will not start early, but rather start automatically after the week is up - assuming one or more opponents have accepted your challenge or joined your OPEN battle. If, after one week, you have zero opponents, your battle will become void and disappear from the main battle screen.

From the pending battles screen on the dashboard, under the "Waiting on..." column, you will see the tricker(s) who have been challenged and have either not yet accepted the challenge OR have accepted the challenge but have not yet provided a video. If you see "You" in any of the fields in this column, then you will see one of two green buttons.

• If you have not yet accepted this challenge, you will see a green
  Accept Challenge!
  button. Click this button to popup a window with the details of this battle, including the date which your video is due and the pass phrase which you will need to say, if the creator of this password chose to utilize pass phrases.
  
  The first field is the video URL. Treat this exactly the same way you would when you initiate your own battles. The difference here is that this field is optional when you accept the challenge. Accepting the challenge without a video does NOT extend the grace period, but rather it simply lets the battle creator (and any other opponents) know that you are in, just not quite ready yet. If you DO provide your video URL when you accept the challenge, then the battle will update itself. If it is a head-to-head battle, it will activate and allow people to start judging. If it is a free-for-all, it will become qualified to be activated at the end of the grace period since it will have at least two contenders.
  
  If the battle creator selected the TRICK TYPES option, then you will see a trick selection list below the video URL field. Select your trick(s) to match the trick type template, in order. For example, if the template is Kick->Twist->Flip, then you choose your 3 tricks which match that template which you either filmed or plan to film before the grace period expires.
  
  As long as the tricks you select fit the template, we will accept them. For example, a boxcutter is both a twist and a kick, so it would work for either trick type. It should be noted that we do NOT automatically screen or filter your trick selection to match your trick types. We assume you are not an idiot. If you select a 540 when you should have selected a flip, our system will accept it, but you will lose a lot of cool points and we will refer to you as an idiot from then on.
• If you have already accepted this challenge but did not provide a video, you will see a green
  Submit Video!
  button. Click this button to popup a window with a field to provide your video URL. Paste it in there and click the "SUBMIT VIDEO" button. If it is a head-to-head battle, it will activate and allow people to start judging. If it is a free-for-all, it will become qualified to be activated at the end of the grace period since it will have at least two contenders.

The main battles screen will display all OPEN free-for-all battles if any are available. In the "Contenders" column you will see green buttons which read

. Click any of those to join the battle and follow the same steps as you would accepting any other challenge.

This scoring method will allow judges to score specific elements to each trick, such as the kick chamber, the flip inversion, the twist angle, etc. We recommend only selecting this scoring method for single trick battles or for 2-3 hit combos. Judges will not want to score your battle if you have 50 sliders per contender.

This scoring method adds up all the values that would normally be distributed over many sliders in the technique-breakdown scoring method and combines them all into one slider for each trick. We recommend using this scoring method for large combos so judges can quickly score your battle while still giving you measurable feedback and awarding you battle points for your entry.

This scoring method replaces all the sliders with a single button for each contender which reads "THIS TRICKER WON". While the above two scoring methods will potentially earn the contenders lots of battle points, win/loss buttons only award 1 point to the winner. Once a judge clicks the win button, his/her judging is completed. Another way to look at this scoring method is like a voting system. The judge votes for you, and moves on to the next battle. After the battle is completed and archived, you can see which judges chose you as the winner. This scoring method is mandatory for the wildcard ** SEE BATTLE DESCRIPTION ** trick for obvious reasons: if you don't select any real tricks, then no sliders can be rendered.

This judging method will let anybody (who is not a contender in your battle) with a non-negative judge score judge your battle. This is the default and the recommended setting. The more people who judge your battle, the more battle points you can potentially earn and the higher you will rank on the leaderboard.

If you choose this judging method, our system will select 5 random users who have at least 100 judge points to judge your battle. This does not guarantee that they will actually judge your battle, but they will receive a message and the battle will appear on their pending battles screen.

If you choose to have a private judge panel, you will be prompted to select up to 5 judges. Your opponent(s) will ALSO be allowed to select up to 5 judges. This is only recommended for head-to-head battles, as a 20+ contender free-for-all battle may end up recruiting 50 judges which implies that you might as well just select OPEN JUDGING instead.

Everytime you judge a battle you will earn judge points. Different types of battles award different point values, as described below. If you judge unfairly, users will notice and take action so you lose judge points. As long as you have a positive judge point score, you will be able to judge battles. If you lose enough points to go into the negative, you will lose your judging ability. Every day that you are negative the website will automatically award you 5 judge points until you are positive again. The deeper negative you are, the longer you stay in the hall of shame.

Technique-breakdown scoring renders a point slider for each scorable element of each trick. The sliders are self-explanatory and you MUST at least click on each slider before you can submit you score. You will know when your score has been acknowledged because a checkmark will appear to the right of the slider. Each slider will have a unique point value. This is because some aspects of tricks are worth more than others - some are more important and some are more critical to making you a better tricker. Some tricks also have difficulty bonuses applied to the maximum potential score for each slider. Very difficult tricks like a boxcutter will have a higher potential maximum score than lesser tricks like a corkscrew. Once you adjust all applicable sliders, you submit your scores. You will earn 1 judge point for each slider and people will be able to rate your judging ability based on fairness, so BE FAIR!

Overall trick scoring renders a point slider for each trick. The sliders are self-explanatory and you MUST at least click on each slider before you can submit you score. You will know when your score has been acknowledged because a checkmark will appear to the right of the slider. Each slider will have a unique point value, which is the total accumulated value of all the broken down technique elements, all combined into one slider. Once you adjust all applicable sliders, you submit your scores. You will earn 1 judge point for each slider and people will be able to rate your judging ability based on fairness, so BE FAIR!

Win/loss scoring provides a button which reads "THIS TRICKER WON" below each contender's video entry. Simply click the button which represents the tricker who you feel "won" the battle. You can only click on one button - you can only vote once per battle. Once you click the button, your vote will be logged and the page will refresh. You will earn 5 judge points for judging a win/loss battle.

Fair judging is mandatory on TrickerBattle.com. We won't tolerate anything else. For this, we have added a post-battle judge rating system. When users browse completed battles and see who won and how judges scored the contenders, they will be able to give those judges a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to indicate how the judge scored the battle - FAIRLY or UNFAIRLY. When a user clicks the thumbs-up icon, that judge earns 5 judge points as a bonus for being fair. If the user clicks the thumbs-down icon, the judge loses 10 judge points as a penalty for abusing his/her power. When a user gives you a thumbs-down, he/she will be prompted with an "Are you sure..." alert, which he/she must confirm. You will also receive a message if someone rates you as a judge so you know who did it. If a user abuses this feature and gives out too many unjustified thumbs-downs, he/she will be banned by a moderator.

No. This site is integrated with Facebook's database and website. Join the rest of the world and make a Facebook account.

We use oEmbed to display all the videos on this site. During testing, we had one video giving us problems and we couldn't figure out why or what was causing it to not work. It was a Youtube video and everything seemed fine. The error being returned was not descriptive enough for us to determine the cause. That being said, if your Youtube video is not working and you can not figure out why, contact us right away so we can use it for testing and see if it returns more descriptive errors. Other things to check are correct video URL formatting; use the formatting examples we provide in the tooltip next to the Video URL field title on the form where you submit your video.

Make sure you are not blocking scripts from your browser. Firefox's noscript plugin will prevent these. You must enable embed.ly, since our videos are being embedded with oembed via http://api.embed.ly.

This has to do with oEmbed placing the video on a really high z-index. After the video is embedded, we have a javascript function in place to re-embed the video at a lower z-index. We need to do this so that your dashboard will be on top of your videos if you open it. The double-embed action creates a quick flicker.

One of two reasons. The first being that your opponent has turned OFF the notification preference for when someone challenges him/her in the user preferences screen. The other reason would be that you are not friends with your opponent on Facebook. Facebook will not give you permission to post on someone's wall if you are not friends, regardless if you use TrickerBattle or try directly on Facebook.com