Repeating Rides
Overview
The Ride Listing Tool has the ability to create rides that repeat on a weekly or monthly basis. For example, you can create a ride that repeats every Monday or a ride that repeats on the second Tuesday of every month. There are a few important differences in the way you work with repeating rides.
The definition of a repeating ride is stored in our system just once. However, the ride is displayed in the ride schedule as many times as it occurs within the time period being shown. In order to preserve an accurate ride history, we do not allow editing a repeating ride after the first ride in the series has taken place. Continue reading for how to properly deal with this.
If a ride repeats weekly or monthly, but with different routes or leaders, it cannot be created as a repeating ride. See the information on the Replace feature for some ideas about managing these rides.
Rain Dates
Repeating rides can have rain dates. The rain dates must occur before the next repeat of the ride. For both types of repeating rides (weekly and monthly) the rain dates for future repeats are calculated simply by finding the number of days between the original ride and its rain date, then adding that number of days to the future occurrence of the ride.
Suppressing Dates
After you create a repeating ride, you can suppress the ride for individual dates. For example, you can have a ride that repeats every Thursday, but then suppress the ride for Thanksgiving day. Suppressing a ride will also suppress its rain dates. Individual rain dates can also be suppressed without suppressing the ride itself.
Status Updates
You can create status updates (weather cancellations, etc) for individual occurrences of your repeating ride. This is done on the ride detail page, just like other rides.
End Date
You can enter an End Date for a repeating ride. After this date has passed, the ride will no longer display. To be clear, if there is a ride scheduled for the End Date, it will display and be the final occurrence of the ride. Sometimes when you want to enter an End Date, you will already be past the time when you are allowed to edit your ride. You may still be able to enter an End Date however, on the ride detail page. If so, the earliest End Date that you are allowed to enter will be displayed. The ability to edit and the earliest date are determined as follows:
- If the repeating ride has not yet been approved as complete, then allow editing of the End Date.
- Otherwise, if the ride already has an End Date, and if at least one ride was missed due to that End Date, then do not allow editing of the End Date.
- Otherwise, allow editing. The earliest acceptable End Date will be the current date.
Why not just delete the ride? Because that would also delete all the past occurrences of the ride, and we don't want to lose our history, as explained in the Overview.
Pre-registration
There are a few things to know about pre-registration for repeating rides. See the help page for Pre-registration.
Tricks and Tips
If your repeating ride has a special event or a day that is somehow different than your typical ride, it is easiest to suppress the ride for that date, then make a copy of the ride and edit it as a non-repeating ride just for that day.
To change your ride going forward after a certain date, for example a change in route or leaders, you should enter an End Date for your ride, then make a copy of the ride and edit it as needed with a new starting date.