Help and questions

Scan the QR code on the poster or on a dish's tent card. No app, no account. If your phone won't scan, go to cookoffchamps.com and type the 6-character code from the poster. Then tap your favourite dish in each category.

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Voting is blind. You see the entry number, the dish name and a photo, never the cook, so you vote for the food and not for your favourite aunt. Cooks' names appear for the first time at the reveal.

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Yes, until the organizer closes voting. Tap a different dish and your vote moves to it. You still have one vote per category.

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One vote per phone per category, remembered by your browser. It's a soft limit: a private tab or a second browser could vote again. That's a deliberate trade-off for a family event.

The organizer sees a live count of votes cast, so a pile of extra votes stands out against the number of guests in the room. We don't fingerprint phones, because two guests with the same model of phone could be turned away.

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No. Nobody sees the standings while voting is open, except the organizer, and only by tapping to peek. That keeps the reveal a surprise.

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The voting link shows "Voting is closed. The results are coming soon!" until the organizer runs the reveal. After the reveal, the same link shows the results for good: places, vote counts and photos.

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They share the place and are revealed together. A tie for first makes them co-champions. There's no tie-break and no runoff.

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Yes. The app starts in your phone's language, and the English / Español button at the top of each page switches it; your choice is remembered on that phone. An organizer's login and invitation emails come in the language they're using.

The names people type, like dishes, cooks and categories, appear exactly as they were typed.

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Family cookoffs are free, with no limit on events.

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1. Log in with your email address. We send you a link; there's no password.
2. Create the event: a name and, if you like, a date.
3. Add each dish: the cook's name, the dish name and a photo.
4. Print the voting poster, the tent cards, or both.
5. Open voting when people are ready to taste.

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They're optional, but they help guests find the right dish. Take them on your phone as each dish arrives. The app shrinks each photo on your phone before uploading it (to 1,600 pixels on the long side), so it's quick even on venue wifi.

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Two things, each on US Letter, and you can print either or both. The voting poster has the event name, a large QR code and the typed code for phones that won't scan. The tent cards have one card per dish with its entry number and name, plus a small QR code that opens voting with that dish highlighted.

Number the dishes on the table to match.

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Yes. Add categories such as Chili, Dessert or Sides, and each gets its own winner. Guests get one vote per category, and the reveal goes through each category in turn.

A new event starts with one category, and the category controls stay out of the way until you add a second.

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Yes. Invite co-organizers by email. A co-organizer can add dishes, open and close voting, peek at the standings, print, run the reveal and undo it. Only the person who created the event can delete it or manage co-organizers.

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Yes. While voting is open, tap "Peek at the standings". The panel hides itself again after 20 seconds, so a phone held up near guests doesn't give the game away. The votes-cast count is always shown.

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Yes. Tap "Reopen voting". Every vote cast so far is kept, and guests can carry on voting or change their votes. The app asks before closing voting, so it's hard to do by accident.

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No. Once voting closes, dishes and categories are frozen so the results can't shift underneath the reveal. If you need to fix something, reopen voting first.

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Open the reveal on a phone or, better, a TV. Each tap (or the space bar or right arrow) shows the next place, with the dish's photo and, for the first time, the cook's name: 3rd, then 2nd, then 1st.

The app asks before the reveal starts, because once the champion is shown the results go public on the guests' link.

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Yes. On the event page, tap "Undo the reveal". The results are hidden again, and the guests' link goes back to "results coming soon". From there you can reopen voting or run the reveal again.

The app warns you first, because if you reopen voting, the standings people already saw could change.

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For good. The voting link becomes a results page after the reveal, and nothing expires. The event stays in your list until you delete it.

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Yes, if you created it. Deleting removes the event, its photos and its votes permanently, and the link stops working for everyone. The app asks first.

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Very little. When you vote, your browser gets a random ID in a cookie so your vote can be remembered and changed. It lasts a year. We store that ID with your vote. No name, no email, no account.

Voting also runs Cloudflare Turnstile, an invisible check that blocks automated ballot-stuffing.

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Your email address and the events you run. Login links work once and expire after 15 minutes. Once you're logged in, you stay logged in on that browser for 30 days.

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Only as one-way hashes, and only briefly, to limit how many login emails one address can request and how many codes one address can guess. A hash can't be turned back into the address.

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Anyone with the event's link. The link uses a long, unguessable ID, so only people you share the poster or code with can find it.

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No. Phone photos carry hidden details: the location, the date and time, and the phone's make and model. We strip all of it from every photo before it's stored, so a dish photo shows the dish and nothing else.

What we can't remove is what's in the picture itself, so keep house numbers and faces out of the shot if that matters to you.

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No ads, and no analytics or tracking scripts.

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Hosted in the Barn, from a barn office in rural Texas. It started as the app for our own family cookoffs. The code is open source on GitHub.

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