VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

Limiting the Number of Applications Submitted

VSys Live applications support limiting how many applications of a specific type can be submitted, automatically disabling the application when that limit is reached. This can be done with very simple rules or get more complex as needed.

Example 1: No more than fifty applications.

In your application's properties, check Limit how many applications of this type can be submitted and set Limit to 50. If you don't add any VSys Live max count rules, VSys Live will count all applications ever submitted of this type which have a Status of Approved or Pending. When that count hits fifty, no more applications will be accepted (see "continuing access" below), and anyone loading that application via VSys Live will see the message you set under Too many applications.

Since we haven't set any max count rules, applications that have been Rejected, Ignored or marked as Duplicate don't count at all towards our limit.

Example 2: Rolling counts

You want to onboard 250 volunteers this season, and you know that you accept - on average - 50% of those that apply. If we set a limit of 250 applications, VSys Live would stop at 250 and when you accept/reject these applications, you'll be left with an average of 125 volunteers, so that's not going to work. Not only that, next year when you re-use the same application, VSys Live won't accept any new applicants since the limit was already reached. To make this work we're going to define two max count rules.

Rule 1: Approved applications

Here we're looking at only Approved applications, and only for the current season. Note that Weight is 1.

Rule 2: Pending applications

Now we're looking at applications during the same time period, but only those with a status of Pending. More importantly, we've set the Weight to 0.5, meaning that these applications count as 1/2 of an Approved application.

To see how this works, let's look at a few possibilities:

When all of the applications are Pending, VSys Live will stop at 500, since all of those count at only 1/2.
You've got 100 Approved applications and 200 Pending. VSys Live will accept 100 more applications since 100 + (200 * 0.5) = 200, and again those Pending applications count as 1/2 each.
You have 230 Approved applications and 20 Pending. VSys Live will accept 20 more applications since 230 + (20 * 0.5) = 240.
250 (or more) Approved applications. No matter how many are Pending, VSys Live won't accept any more applications.

You may want to tweak the math as you accept applications each year: you know that statistically you accept 50%, but if this year's applicants are all very strong and you're taking 65% of them, change the Weight for Pending applications to 0.65.

Additional Options

There are a lot of filters and options available here - probably more than you'll reasonably use - but they provide flexibility in those cases where it's needed. In each rule, the number of applications that meet the criteria is multiplied by the Weight.

Minimum date, Maximum date	The earliest and latest dates of applications to look at when calculating how many have been submitted. You can use relative dates here.
New/existing people	Filter whether this rule applies only to new people (ones created in VSys by this application), existing people, or `(no filter)`.
Statuses	Statuses of the applications themselves. Keep in mind that when you change an application's Status it changes how (or if) it counts in these rules.
Approval statuses, Requested departments, Requested sites, Application handlers	(normal usage)
Weight	Determines how much applications meeting these rules count toward the total. A Weight of `0` causes these applications to not count at all.

Overlapping rules - where a single application could fall into two or more rules - will lead to individual applications being counted more than once.

As an exercise you could use these filters to deal with a situation where:

You want an unlimited number of applications for those applying to a specific department (hint: set the Weight for those to 0.)
75% of existing volunteers who apply are accepted, but only 40% of new people who apply are.
The approval rate for those applying to your South Campus is higher than those to the East Campus. And even then the existing volunteers have a different approval rate than new ones.

(Or, faced with these situations, you can always give our tech support team a call!)

Continuing Access

Any volunteer who loaded the application page in VSys Live before the limit has been reached can continue to complete and submit their application even if the limit is reached or exceeded during the time they're completing that application: they're given a special "cookie" that permits a temporary bypass to the limit with certain exceptions. These are intended so that, for example, if 50 applications are permitted and 49 already submitted, all three of the people who have started but not yet completed the application aren't throwing away their work or rushing to submit the application.

The menu items and other links to the application will disappear if the volunteer reloads the page, but access to the application will remain valid.
Closing the browser will delete the cookie.
The cookie is not available on any another device than the one they first used.
If signed into VSys Live, signing out will delete that cookie.
If not signed into VSys Live, signing out will delete that cookie.
Explicitly disabling the application, having the application's First date to show be in the future, or having the application's Last date to show be in the past will all prevent submitting an application regardless of the cookie.

These rules are only applicable to VSys Live applications with a Usage of New applicants only, Existing people only or Both existing and new people. They don't make sense for - and aren't available for - any other type of applications.