TAM logo, a skewed hand drawn blue ticket with TAM printed in white on it.

Ticket Auction Manager

A simple and elegant solution for managing your in-person benefit auctions.

Instructions

Installation and Setup

First before you get too deep into installing Ticket Auction Manager for an event, you should ask yourself a few questions regarding its setup. This will dictate how you should proceed.

Your network setup should look a lot like the diagram below:

TAM Network Diagram

To explain it via text, you essentially want all of your TAM Clients on the same network or LAN as your TAM Server.

Installing the Server (If more than one client is needed)

From the Releases page, select the latest release. Then you can download the server daemon for your distribution if you have a Debian-based distribution or RPM-compatible distribution. If you don’t have a supported distro, as long as it’s using Systemd you can use the install script in the “portable” .tar.gz file.

Enabling TLS

As mentioned before if you’re going to be having tam-clients run on an insecure wifi network, you will want to enable TLS. If you’re running the tam-server daemon manually, via startup script, or via an unsupported launch system (if you’re doing this you probably already know what you’re doing), then you can just add " -tls" to the end of the command as an argument, if you’re specifying a custom addr, change the port to 8443 like “-addr :8443” in the line as well, and then restart/rerun the daemon, and it should now be in TLS mode.

For the Systemd services you’ll want to edit the ExecStart parameter, daemon-reload, then restart the tam-server service. Start with the following command:

sudo systemctl edit tam-server.service

It should then open your default text editor to edit a modification file, this is so that it will stay in place when updated by the package manger. In the space above the line that says: “### Edits below this comment will be discarded.”, add the following:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/tam-server -addr :8443 -tls -tray=false

If you’ve installed from the script in the “Portable” version, you may have to change the “/usr/bin/tam-server” to “/usr/local/bin/tam-server” instead. Rest should be the same.

For distros which don’t use standard paths for binaries, you can use the “command -v tam-server” to see where the tam-server executable is.

After changing the service you will have to do a daemon-reload and restart the service.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart tam-server.service

Setting Admin Password

In a web browser, go to http://ip_to_server:8000/admin or https://ip_to_server:8443/admin if you’ve enabled TLS. For the latter it may say that it’s insecure and you may have to click Advanced, and Proceed anyway, or similar language depending on your web browser.

Once your through, it should prompt you to set and confirm your password. Keep said password in a safe place, because that is how you will access the admin panel if needed and it is used to pair clients to the server.

Installing Clients

For each computer you have entering data you’ll need to install a client to do so. Each client keeps a copy of the data entered on that client so if you have an issue with the server, you can install the tam-server daemon on another one then push each client’s data back onto it.

You have options for running Ticket Auction Manager on the client side:

Setting Client Options

There are various client options you can set to network them via a tam-server instance or to adjust your venue name, default contact preference, or disable main menu attributions.

On the main menu you can press and hold Alt, then press A with Alt held down (in other words “Alt + A” combination). This will toggle the Admin mode features. In the future I may introduce the ability to password protect this but for now, this has been safe enough in practice.

Then the Settings button should bring you into settings.

Settings page showing default options

Creating Prefixes

At the top of the Settings menu, there’s a button that says “Prefixes.”

Once your networking is setup (if applicable) then you can click Prefixes and add the Prefixes you desire or need for your event.

Prefixes are essentially a set of ticket and item/basket type that matches together to form a unique identification of each ticket or item/basket. So if you have overlapping numbers between two different prefixes, then it doesn’t matter as they won’t overwrite or be confused for each other.

The prefix creation is pretty straightforward. You type in what you want the prefix name to be, then select what color you want the buttons to show up as when that prefix is selected, then set the weight. The weight determines sorting priority. The higher the number the lower the priority.

Prefixes with some values populated

Because the primary identification of tickets and items/baskets depends on the uniqueness of prefixes, only one prefix can bear the same name. Attempting to create another prefix with the same name will overwrite it with a new color and weight assignment.

Entering Information

Now you’re off to the races to enter information.

The links to the forms show up on the main menu after you select a Prefix. Prefix selection is enforced at this point to keep people from confusing which prefix they’re already in with the one they’re supposed to go in.

TAM Main Menu with forms highlighted in a red square

This is where most volunteer actions will happen.

Forms:

Other than being for different purposes each form follows a similar design, button placement, and even shortcut keys.

Form header from Ticket form

To reinforce being in the right prefix, the prefix is highlighted by a thicker border around it as the top, as you can see in the above screenshot.

First and last number of the page should be entered in at the top. Clicking Go populates the form with existing or a new item for each entry, depending on if it already exists or not.

Functions are as follows:

Generating Reports

Creating reports with Ticket Auction Manager is much easier than many spreadsheet based ways of doing it.

It can be accomplished by clicking the the report that you need, with a prefix selected:

Main Menu with reports highlighted by a red square

Reports:

Each report can be adjusted at the top for contact preference of the winners.

Subreports by contact preference

Printing can be done by clicking Print or pressing Ctrl + P combo.

Printer setup is dependent on OS and printer model. Please refer to your printer manufacturer’s documentation regarding installation on your OS.

Backup and restore

Backing up and restoring can be done within the client in Main Menu -> Admin Mode (Alt + A) -> Settings -> Backup/Restore.

If you’ve used backup/restore functions of other sites this should be pretty familiar to you.

Resetting for another event

Backup your data first, this will remove it from the primary service.

Then you can start the services again by either rebooting, reopening, or running the commands “sudo systemctl start tam-server” or “sudo systemctl start tam-client”.

After a reset you do have to setup your network connections and preferences again.