Connecting live races to club races
How a private BENZING Live race attaches to the official club race - the 5-day search window, what data gets copied, and what disconnect undoes.
Good to know before you start
- Your private flight always belongs to you - it lives under My Loft → My Races and nobody else can edit it.
- The club race is the official one - distance, release time, and liberation point all come from there once a connection exists.
- Connecting and disconnecting is fully reversible. When you disconnect, the club race goes back to the state it was in before you joined - as if your data never touched it.
Your race and the club race are two different things
It helps to picture two separate boxes. The first box is your private flight. As soon as you basket your pigeons through your BENZING Live device, MyPigeons creates a record under My Loft → My Races with your basketing list, your release point, your release time, and your arrivals as they come in. This box is yours alone.
The second box is the club race. Your race administrator creates this one in the race plan: it has the official liberation point, the official release time, and the official distances calculated for every loft in the club. Without a connection, your private flight has no idea this club race even exists - and the club race has no idea about your arrivals.
Connecting the two boxes is what bridges them. Once connected, MyPigeons takes every arrival from your private flight and inserts it into the club race - exactly as if the race administrator had typed them in by hand from your clock. From that moment on, your pigeons appear on the club leaderboard, get their nominations counted, and earn prizes.
Where to find it
The whole feature lives under My Loft → My Races. Pick the private flight you want to connect, switch to the Management tab, and look for the Connect to Club flight panel below the race details.
If MyPigeons cannot find a matching club race for the day you basketed, the panel simply says No club flights available for this date. That usually means the club race plan does not yet have a race on (or near) your basketing date - your administrator has to add one first.
How MyPigeons looks for matching club races
When you open a private flight, MyPigeons does not search the whole season - it looks at a small window around the day you basketed. The window starts on the basketing day itself and reaches five days into the future. Anything outside this window is ignored, even if it is the same race name.
This matters for races that span more than one day. A long-distance race basketed on Friday and released on Saturday morning is well inside the window. A two-stage race where one liberation is on Saturday and a second one on Monday morning - both still fit. The window is generous enough to cover normal pigeon racing, and short enough to avoid grabbing unrelated races.
On top of the date, MyPigeons checks all your club memberships for the current season. If you race for two clubs and both have a race in that 5-day window, both will show up as candidates in the connect panel. You decide which one your pigeons actually belong to.
Two-stage races (two flights, two club races)
When your race plan has two club races on the same basketing - for example a short race and a long race released on the same day - both of them appear in the connect panel of your private flight. You can connect one private flight to one club race only. Each pigeon belongs to one race; the basketing list decides which.
In practice you will usually have two private flights for a two-stage basketing - one short, one long - and you connect each one separately to its matching club race. Both connect panels show both candidate races, so you pick the right one in each.
What connect actually does
A connect is more than just a label. MyPigeons walks through every arrival in your private flight and copies it into the club race - the same way the race administrator would type it in from your clock during a normal evaluation. The pigeons land in the club race with their ring numbers, arrival times, calculated speed, and your team number.
At the same time, MyPigeons updates the club race so it knows you are competing: it adds you as a fancier, records how many pigeons you basketed, and (if your federation tracks them) counts your hens and yearlings. Distance from the loft to the liberation point is recalculated using the club race coordinates, not the ones you had on your private flight.
Your private flight gets locked - the distance, the release time, and the liberation point are taken over by the club race so the two records always agree. If the administrator later moves the release time or fixes the liberation point in the club race, your private flight follows along automatically.
And the on-the-fly leaderboard - the live one anyone can watch during the race - starts including your pigeons within a minute.
What disconnect actually does
Disconnect is the exact opposite operation. MyPigeons opens the club race, finds every arrival you contributed, and removes them. It then either drops you from the fancier list (if you only had pigeons in this one flight) or subtracts the pigeons you took back, leaving anything from a different flight in place.
Your private flight is unlocked - the distance, the release time, and the liberation point go back to whatever they were before. The arrivals on your private flight are kept; they are simply marked as "not yet processed" again, ready to be connected somewhere else.
A small flag is flipped on your private flight to mark it as manually disconnected. This stops the autoconnect logic from grabbing the same flight again the next time it runs - you opted out on purpose, MyPigeons remembers that until you connect manually.
Think of disconnect as the administrator opening the club race and deleting your rows by hand. Connect copies them in, disconnect copies them out - nothing else changes.
Autoconnect - the hands-free version
Most fanciers never click Connect by hand. As soon as your basketing list arrives from the BENZING Live device, MyPigeons looks for a matching club race in the same 5-day window and connects the two automatically. By the time you log in, your pigeons are already on the club leaderboard.
Autoconnect only triggers when there is exactly one obvious candidate. If two club races match (a two-stage day, or two clubs with overlapping plans) and the race numbers do not unambiguously line up, MyPigeons leaves the choice to you and shows the connect panel waiting for a click.
You can switch autoconnect off in Fancier settings → Enable autoconnect. Some fanciers prefer manual control; others have a community loft setup where the right club race is not always the obvious one. With the switch off, you connect and disconnect by hand from the Management tab.
Who can connect what
Only you - or someone with admin access to your loft - can connect or disconnect your own private flight. The race administrator cannot reach into your My Races page. They can move the club race around (release time, liberation point), but the connection itself is yours to make.
You also cannot connect to a club race in a club you do not belong to. Membership is checked on every connect call, even for autoconnect. If you race for OZ Bratislava, you can only connect to OZ Bratislava's races - not to a neighbouring club's race that happens to fall into the same 5-day window.
A third rule: once the club race is locked for results, the connect and disconnect buttons stop working - the race is closed and the standings are final. You will see "Locked" instead of the buttons.
Connecting step by step
Here is the normal flow when you basket on a Friday afternoon and want to be on the club leaderboard the next morning.
Open the private flight
Go to My Loft → My Races, find the flight by name and date, and click it. You will land on the basketing list for that flight.
Switch to the Management tab
On the race page, click the Management tab at the top. The race details on the left show your distance and release time; the connect panel sits in the middle of the page.
Pick the right club race and click Connect
In the Connect to Club flight panel you will see one or more candidate club races - each with the race name, the date, and the distance range for the club. Click the green Connect button next to the right one.
Watch the leaderboard fill in
Within a minute, every arrival from your private flight is also on the club race - and on the live on-the-fly leaderboard everyone in the club can see.
Changing your mind: disconnect and reconnect
If you connected to the wrong race - it happens, especially on two-stage days - just click Disconnect race in the same panel. The arrivals are removed from the wrong club race, your private flight is unlocked, and the other candidate becomes available to connect.
You can connect, disconnect, and reconnect as many times as you want, right up until the club race is closed for results. There is no penalty and no audit trail anyone else sees.
Common questions
Does the club race show my arrivals before I connect?
No. Until the connection exists, your arrivals live only in your private flight. The club race shows a smaller pigeon count, no speeds for your pigeons, and your loft is not in the standings.
What if I forgot to connect and the race is over?
If the club race is still open for results, you can still connect - your pigeons get added with their original arrival times and speeds, and the standings are recalculated. Once the race is locked, the connect button is disabled and only your administrator can re-open it.
Why are two club races showing in the panel?
Most likely a two-stage race or two clubs whose race plans overlap. Check the race name and the distance range - the club race that uses the right liberation point and matches your race plan is the one to pick.
Can someone else connect for me?
Only fanciers with admin access to your loft can. The race administrator on the club side cannot - the connect button only appears when MyPigeons recognises you as the loft owner.
I connected but the leaderboard is still empty.
Give it a minute. The on-the-fly leaderboard refreshes itself once the club race is rebuilt with your arrivals. If after a few minutes nothing shows, check that your private flight actually has arrivals (some live devices are slow to push the first one), and that the club race is still open.
