Rallies on DetectID: organising an event, joining as an attendee

A Rally on DetectID is an organised event: a defined day on a defined permission with multiple detectorists turning up, signing in, and detecting together. Where Groups are the regulars, Rallies are the calendared. A charity dig, a club meet, a federation weekend, the once-a-year summer rally with a hundred attendees on a stubble field — all the same shape, all coordinated through one rally page.

What makes something a Rally

Three things distinguish a Rally from a Group:

• It has a start and end time. Rallies are time-boxed. The shared session goes live at the start time, closes at the end time, and the rally is archived automatically afterwards. The page stays accessible indefinitely as a record of the day.
• It has an organiser.The person who created it owns it — they can edit details, remove attendees, set permission terms, designate a charity beneficiary. A Group, by contrast, is flat.
• It scales to a crowd. Rallies are designed for ten to a few hundred people. Groups cap at ten on purpose. If your event needs a sign-in sheet, you want a Rally.

Organising a rally

Head to /rallies/new. The create form is short:

1. Name.“Mid-Anglia Detectorists Spring Charity Dig”, “Norfolk Federation Weekend”, “Sunday Beginners’ Meet”. Anything memorable.
2. Date, start time, end time. A normal rally might run 9am to 4pm with a 5pm end-time buffer for late uploads on the drive home.
3. Maximum attendees.Default 100. Set generously — people sometimes turn up unannounced.
4. Optional: location label, description, permission terms, charity, public/private toggle. Public rallies appear on the /rallies index; private rallies are code-only.

Submit the form. DetectID generates a short alphanumeric code derived from your rally name plus a 2-digit suffix — for the “Mercia Detectorists” rally you might getMERCIA26; for a generic name it falls back to a random 8-character code. You land on the rally page with the code at the top, a printable A4 QR poster button, and the attendee list (empty for now — you’re first).

Joining a rally as an attendee

Two routes in:

• Scan the QR.Most organisers print the QR on an A4 poster from the rally page and stick it on the gate or the sign-in marquee. Point your phone’s camera, tap the notification, sign in if you aren’t already, and you’re joined.
• Type the code. Go to/rallies/join and type the code (case-insensitive, no special characters). Tap Join rally. Done.

Joining doesn’t cost anything — Free, Basic and Premium can all attend. Your finds during the rally come out of your normal monthly identification quota, so if you’re on Free and aiming for a fifty-find day, consider a Basic month or a top-up pack before the date.

What the heat map and stats do during the rally

Once the rally is live, the rally page shows:

• The live feed. Every find every attendee uploads, in reverse chronological order, with photo, verdict, and uploader.
• The shared heat map.All attendees’ finds aggregated onto one map. The density warms up where multiple people have found things — useful as the day progresses, particularly on a big multi-field permission where attendees have spread out and you want to know which corner is producing. The map honours the strictest privacy precision among attendees, never sharper than 1km on the shared surface.
• Productivity stats (organiser view).The organiser sees an additional panel: total finds, identifications per hour, highest-graded find so far, current attendee count, and a tally of how many of those attendees have uploaded something. Useful if you’re running raffles for “find of the day” or quietly tracking whether the rally is going to clear the Rally Captain thresholds.
• Attendee list.Who else is here, with a live dot showing who’s actively uploading right now.

The Rally Captain perk

Organising a rally takes real effort — permission negotiation, public liability checks, charity coordination, running the day. DetectID rewards qualifying rallies with the Rally Captain perk: three months of Premium-equivalent accesscredited automatically to the organiser’s account, plus a Captain badge on your public profile. The thresholds are codified in the codebase (ATTENDEE_THRESHOLD = 10 and a finds threshold of 20 in the daily cron at/api/cron/rally-captain-grants):

• 10+ unique attendees joined the rally.
• 20+ identifications uploaded during the live window.

Both have to be true. The cron runs the morning after the rally, counts, and if you qualify you get an email confirming the three months. Multiple qualifying rallies stack — a rally every three months keeps you permanently on the perk without paying. Full mechanics in the Rally Captain perk post.

What attendees see during and after the day

From the attendee side, the rally surface is essentially identical to the organiser view minus the productivity stats panel. You can see the feed, the heat map, the attendee list, request a group identification on a stubborn find, and toggle anonymous mode if you’d rather your finds not contribute a dot to the density map (the feed still shows them, marked “Anonymous attendee”).

When the rally ends:

1. Photo book. Premium attendees receive a PDF of their finds from the day, emailed within an hour of the end-time. Basic and Free attendees can browse the same view on the rally page indefinitely.
2. Your finds stay in your collection.Everything you uploaded sits in/findswith the rally as a session tag. Edit them, share publicly, count them in your stats — same as any other find.
3. The rally page becomes a record. The feed, the heat map, the attendee list freeze at the end-time and stay viewable. Good for a club archive or a charity publicity post.

Practical organiser tips

Promote a week before, not the night before

Most attendees join in the 48 hours before the rally, but the joining flow benefits from people signing into DetectID a few days in advance. Magic-link sign-in takes a minute. Doing it in a damp field with two bars of signal is a bad first impression.

Print the QR big

A4 minimum, ideally A3, in a place where the gate-keeper can wave at it. The bigger the QR, the less peering people do.

End-time later than pack-up

Set the rally to end an hour or two after the last attendees pack up. People often upload from the car park or on the drive home. Finds uploaded after the end-time don’t count toward the Rally Captain threshold.

Encourage the modern bits

Twenty identifications across ten attendees is two per person on average. Easy to clear if attendees upload the modern copper-alloy buttons and shotgun shells alongside the headline finds. Mention it in the sign-in briefing.

Where to next

• Detect together: groups, rallies and how to use both — the overview, with the Groups-vs-Rallies decision table.
• Detecting groups: 2–10 friends, one three-word code — the persistent companion to Rallies for the regulars.
• The Rally Captain perk — earning Premium for free — thresholds, stacking, and the email you’ll get the morning after.
• Setting up DetectID for your metal-detecting club — if you’re organising on behalf of a club, start here.