The show log
The paper log a stage manager keeps: the show stops, the holds, the near misses and the things that ran late, each with a time against it. On the Monday it is the show report. Six months later, when somebody asks why the headliner went on forty minutes down, it is the only account anybody has.
Everyone on the box can read it and everyone can write to it. A lighting tech who watched the same thing happen from a different angle can add what they saw while it is still fresh, which is worth more than tidy authorship.
Filing an entry
Log an entry, then the words. Everything else already has an answer:
- Kind — show stop, hold, delay, technical, medical, crowd, security, weather, or a plain note. Nine, so the list is one glance. Anything that doesn't fit is a note and the words carry it.
- How bad — note, issue, or serious. Three, because a scale with more points is one nobody applies the same way twice at two in the morning. Only issue and serious get a colour; if everything is highlighted, nothing is.
- Where — offered from the stages already on the running order, so nobody types "Main Stage" and "Main stage" into the same night.
- When — the one worth a moment. Now, 5 / 15 / 30 min ago, or an exact time.
An entry filed in four seconds with the wrong label beats a perfect one nobody had time to write.
The log records when it happened, not when you typed it. You deal with the thing first and write it up once there is a hand free, so an entry written up later says so on its own line — "logged 30 min later". Anyone reading it back can tell a note made at the time from one made afterwards, which is exactly the distinction that matters if it is ever read in earnest.
What was on stage at that moment is captured with the entry, so the log says "during Night Bus" — and keeps saying it even after somebody corrects the running order or deletes the act.
Corrections, not edits
Nothing in the log can be edited or deleted. That is the point of it.
Got a time wrong, or a name? Add a correction on the entry, and write what the record should say. The correction appears underneath the original, indented, and both stay — the crossing-out in a paper log book, which never removes the line underneath it.
Reading a long night
The log reads backwards, newest first, because the question during a show is nearly always "what just happened". Filter by kind, by how bad, by stage, or search the words — the search also matches the act and whoever wrote it.
Nights are grouped by the show day, which rolls over at 06:00: the 00:30 entry belongs to the night that started at 19:00, not to the following morning.
The show report
Show report downloads the night as a single HTML file — no internet needed, nothing to fetch, opens and prints anywhere. It reads forwards, because that is how a report is read, with the corrections under their originals and a count of the serious ones at the top. Attach it to the production email or file it with the paperwork.
Offline
Entries file with no signal. They are held on the phone that wrote them — through a reload, a dead battery, a walk out of Wi-Fi range — and go to the box the moment it is reachable. The pane says how many are still waiting rather than pretending they have landed.
Because the log is the box's, not the phone's, an entry only reaches the rest of the crew once it has arrived. What you cannot lose is the entry itself.
Turning it off
The module ships on by default. A box that doesn't want it runs without:
CREWBOX_MODULES=schedule,patch,lighting,networkEntries already filed stay in the box's database and come back if the module is turned on again.