Class Booking Guide: Slot Sign-ups with Caps, Every Setting, and Real Use Cases
This is the next in a series of deep-dives into the nine poll templates Whocan offers. Each post covers one template end to end — what it does, every setting available, what voters see, and the real situations people use it for. The previous post covered the Online Poll; this one is about Class Booking — the template for when people claim a spot rather than vote on one.
Class Booking is the template you reach for when you offer several slots — yoga sessions, language-course dates, swimming lessons, parent-teacher appointments — and each slot can only hold so many people. 3,490 of these ran on Whocan in the twelve months to September 2026. It’s the template built around a hard cap per option: when a slot is full, it’s full, and the next person picks a different one — or joins the waitlist under it.
What is a poll type?
A poll type on Whocan is a pre-configured combination of answer formats, default settings, and visual theme that fits one specific situation. All nine templates run on the same underlying engine — they just expose different parts of it. You pick the template that matches your problem, type a title, share the link. The engine handles the rest. For the wider overview, see the parent guide to all nine templates. If the three words template, sample poll and theme sound similar, the glossary post sorts them out.
What Class Booking does
Class Booking asks one question: “which of these sessions do you want a spot in — while spots last?”
You — the host — list a set of sessions, each one a date or named slot, and give each a participant limit. You share a link. Each person clicks “Will you join?” on the slots they want. A live counter shows how many spots are left; when a slot reaches its cap, its button is disabled and people pick another. You see the registration list filling up in real time.
It’s the difference between a sign-up sheet on the studio wall — where you cross out a name and hope nobody double-books — and one link where the maths is done for you. The “max 8 per session” rule isn’t a note at the top that people ignore; it’s enforced by the form.
See it live
Below is a real, interactive Whocan class booking embedded in this page. Click a slot to see how registering feels, including what happens as spots run out — and the waitlist under each session. Nothing you do here changes anything in your own polls — it’s a public sample anyone can interact with.
Every feature, in order
This section is the whole spec — settings on by default, settings you can turn on with one click, and what voters actually see.
What voters do
A class-booking voter sees a list of sessions, each with a count of how many spots remain. For each slot they can:
- Click “Will you join?” — they claim a spot in that session. The counter ticks down.
- See “Limited to 8 participants (3 spots left)” — the live cap, shown right on the slot.
- Hit a full slot — once a session reaches “Participant limit of 8 reached”, its button is disabled. They pick another slot instead of overbooking it.
- Join the waitlist on a full slot — if the host added one, a number field under the session asks how many spots they’d need. More on that below.
- Register for more than one session — nothing stops a voter claiming a spot in several slots, if your situation allows it. In practice most people book exactly one: the median is 1.0 sessions per response.
- Get a confirmation email — if the host has it on (it is, by default, on class bookings), a copy of their registration lands in their inbox right away, with a link to change it.
- Leave a private comment — visible only to the host, for things like “I have a knee injury” or “can I switch if a later slot opens?”.
Voters don’t need an account. They get the link, they claim their spots, they’re done. The host sees the registration list update in real time.
Settings on by default
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Theme: Register People | A registration-styled visual, pre-set for Class Booking. Hosts can switch to any other generic theme or upload their own background image. |
| Participants can see how others have responded | Every voter sees who has already registered for each slot, and how full each one is. Switch it off if you’d rather keep the list private. |
| Participant limit (per slot) | The defining feature: each session carries its own hard cap. The host sets it once per slot (“max 8 per yoga session”); the form enforces it for everyone. |
| Notes per session | Each session can carry a short note under its date — “bring a mat”, “beginners only”, the price. Voters see it right on the slot. |
Settings you can switch on (advanced)
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Ask for email / phone number | Collect contact details from each registrant — only you see them. It’s one of the most-used settings on class bookings (36% ask for an email, 26% for a phone number), and the reason is rarely marketing: it’s for telling people a session moved, or that the course won’t run because too few people signed up. |
| Email participants a confirmation of their response | Sits under the email setting and is on by default for class bookings you create while signed in. Each registrant immediately gets an email with their registration — session, number of people, comments — and again after every change, with a link to edit it. Replies go to your address. Details below. |
| Set ‘Response deadline’ | A registration cut-off after which sign-ups close. The list stays visible but locks. |
| Set ‘Location’ | A venue field that gets written into the calendar export — useful for a single-venue series of classes. |
| Theme picker & custom background | Swap the Register People theme for any generic theme, or upload your own image; pick font family, color palette, shadow style, and separate desktop/mobile sizing. |
| Get notified via email about new votes | The host gets an email each time someone registers — handy for watching a popular slot fill up. |
| Allow participants to receive email updates | Voters can subscribe to changes (“your Tuesday session moved to 7pm”). |
| Duplicate | Copy a booking you already ran — the fast way to open next term’s sessions. |
| CSV export | Export the full registration list once sign-ups close. |
| iCal / ICS export | Each registrant can add their session to Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar. |
Editing sessions after you create them
Two host-side tools that save real time once you have more than a handful of sessions.
Repeat a session as a series. On any slot, pick Repeat from the slot menu — the dialog asks for a pattern (daily, weekdays only, weekly, every two weeks, or monthly) and an end date, and generates the rest of the series for you (up to 52 occurrences in one go). This is the term-long-program tool: a weekly yoga class for a semester, a language course that meets every Tuesday, a swimming block — set one session, generate the term.
Bulk-edit multiple sessions at once. Select several slots with the row check boxes (or Select all) and open the multi-edit dialog. For each attribute — date, time, label, participant limit — there’s an opt-in check box: tick what you want to change, leave the rest untouched, save once. Capping every session at 10 participants, or shifting a whole term by a week, becomes a single save.
Managing the registration list
Once sign-ups start, the results table is where the host actually works. Three host-only tools sit in it.
Edit any registration in place. Click the pencil icon on a row and it becomes editable — name, which slots, comments, email and phone if those fields are on. Useful when someone writes back to switch sessions and you move them instead of asking them to re-register.
Tag registrations with a flag. Every row has a free-text Tag column visible only to you (hidden from voters). Mark paid-vs-unpaid, members-vs-guests, special requirements — whatever you track alongside the sign-up. Sort by the Tag column to group like with like.
Add a registration on someone’s behalf. Below the table there’s a Response on behalf button — it inserts a row in edit mode so you can register someone yourself. It’s flagged internally as “added on behalf” but counts toward the slot’s cap exactly like a self-registration. This is the workflow for “a parent signed up by phone” or “I’m holding a spot for the coach’s kid”.
Confirmation emails: what participants receive
Since September 2026, Class Booking sends participants a confirmation. It’s the answer to the most common follow-up question a host gets — “did my registration go through?” — and to the second most common one, “which session did I pick again?”.
How it’s switched on. Participants should provide an email address is on by default in this template; directly underneath sits Email participants a confirmation of their response, also on by default when you create the poll while signed in with an email address (that address becomes the reply-to). Without an email on your account the setting stays locked — adding one is free.
What’s in the email. A copy of the registration as the participant submitted it: the session(s) they picked, the number of people, their comments, plus your event title, description and location. Underneath: a link that opens their own registration for editing. The email is sent immediately, again after every change, and once more if the registration is removed. A waitlist entry is not part of it — that stays in your results table. Replies go to you, not to a no-reply address.
What it isn’t. It’s not a reminder before the session and not a newsletter — one email per action, nothing else. And it’s not customisable: there is no free-text field for the host. Whatever participants need to know beforehand — address, what to bring, how to pay — belongs in the description, which the email includes.
Answer format under the hood
Class Booking exposes a single answer format: each option is a session you register for, with a live “spots left” counter and a hard cap. That cap per option is what this template is built around — it’s why this is the right template for capacity-limited sign-ups rather than the Scheduling Poll (which finds one shared time) or the Invitation (which collects yes/no/maybe). If you need to mix this with sliders, free-text questions, or other answer types in the same poll, switch to Advanced and the full toolkit unlocks without losing the registrations you already have.
What happens when a session is full? The waitlist
Almost one class booking in four hits this: in the twelve months to September 2026, 23% of the bookings with a cap had at least one session fill up completely. Until now, hosts improvised — a renamed poll (“registration closed — waitlist”), a tag in the results table, a second list in their inbox. Since September 2026 the template has a waitlist of its own.
Add a waitlist to a session. Under any session, click Waitlist. It adds a line with a number field, pre-labelled “Waitlist” with the note “Please enter the number of people if the date is full” (edit both if you like). When the session is full and the sign-up button is disabled, people type how many spots they’d need. You see the total next to the session and every entry as a column in the results table and in the Excel export. (The confirmation email doesn’t include the waitlist entry.)
Two things it deliberately doesn’t do. It doesn’t move anyone into a freed spot: when someone drops out, you message the next person and register them via Response on behalf. And it isn’t tied to the “spots left” counter — it’s a list, kept where the sign-ups are, instead of a second list in your inbox.
Add one under every session that might fill up, not only the ones that are full today. You rarely know in advance which date will be the popular one, and a waitlist under an open session simply stays empty. The live sample above has one under each session.
Themes
Visual theming on Class Booking uses Whocan’s generic-theme system.
The default: Register People. A registration-styled look that reads as “claim your spot” rather than “vote on something”. Pre-set for Class Booking — keep it if you want the page to look like a sign-up sheet.
Bring your own: custom background. Upload your own image and the header carries it instead of a preset. About 16.3% of class bookings use a custom background (530 of 3,254 in the twelve months to June 2026) — the second-highest share of any template after invitations, because a yoga studio or a language school usually wants the page to feel like theirs. You can also pick font family, color palette, shadow style, and separate desktop/mobile sizing.
The picker exposes the full generic-theme set — neutral, sports, food, seasonal, and more — so you can match the look to whatever you’re running. A few looks are reserved for other templates (the Calendar theme belongs to the Scheduling Poll, Buffet to Potluck) and don’t appear here. If you want one of those, or any setting Whocan has that this template doesn’t expose, switch the poll into Advanced mode and the full library unlocks without losing the registrations you already collected.
Real-world use cases
These are clusters distilled from the real class bookings that ran on Whocan in the twelve months to September 2026 — anonymized by intent. The thread running through all of them: each is a situation where a paid event platform would be overkill, and a free link with a cap per slot is exactly enough.
1. Yoga / pilates / fitness studio sessions
The classic. A studio offers several class times a week, each room holds a fixed number of mats, and they need members to book a spot without paying a platform to do it.
Typical tweak: set the participant limit to the room’s capacity (“max 12 per mat session”), keep show participants on so members see how full a class is, and use repeat to roll the weekly schedule out for the term.
2. Language-course session enrollment
Adult-education classes, evening courses, conversation groups — where each session has a topic and a seat limit, and the teacher wants a clean roster before the term starts.
Typical tweak: turn on set ‘Response deadline’ so enrollment closes before the first class, and keep ask for email on so every enrolment comes with a confirmation email and the teacher can send materials. A label per session (“Week 1: past tense”, “Week 2: conversation”) makes the list self-documenting.
3. Kids’ swimming lessons
Pools cap each lesson by instructor and lane. Parents book the slot that fits their week, and the moment a lesson is full, the next parent sees it’s full instead of showing up to a packed pool.
Typical tweak: keep the participant limit tight (a swim class might be “max 6”), and use private comments for the details parents always add (“she’s a beginner”, “afraid of deep water”).
4. First-aid and safety courses
The most visible non-sport use. A first-aid course for parents offered on eleven dates over four months, twelve to fourteen seats each; a workplace safety training; a lifeguard refresher. Participants need exactly one date, and the host needs a clean list per date because a certificate depends on it.
Typical tweak: participant limit per the instructor’s maximum, ask for email so you can send the pre-reading and reach people if a date moves, and a line in the description saying “choose one date only” — the form allows several, and hosts write this sentence almost every time. A waitlist under each date catches the overflow from the popular ones.
5. Sports-club training sessions
A club runs more training slots than any single session can hold — indoor court time, coached practice, a limited-equipment drill. Players claim the sessions they’ll attend, capped by what the venue allows.
Typical tweak: participant limit per the venue (“max 8 for the indoor court”), show participants on so players see who’s already in, and repeat for a recurring weekly schedule.
6. Workshop & event registration
A one-off or short series — a craft workshop, a community course, a museum group tour, a school project sign-up — where seats are limited and you just want a registration list, not a ticketing system. The same template works without dates at all: a company health day with four parallel workshops and fifteen seats each, a school’s project week with twenty-one ateliers — each workshop is a named option with its own cap.
Typical tweak: participant limit to the room size, get notified via email so you know the moment it’s full, and CSV export to print the attendee list on the day.
7. Volunteer & parent shift slots
Kindergarten parent-volunteer rotas, event-day setup shifts, school-festival booths — each shift needs a set number of helpers, and you want every shift covered without over- or under-staffing it.
Typical tweak: set the participant limit per shift to the number of helpers you need, turn on allow participants to receive email updates so volunteers get reminders, and use the slot label to spell out what each shift involves.
The pricing point ties these together. Eventbrite, with its ticketing and payment processing, is built for selling seats to the public — it’s the wrong shape for a free yoga session, a parent-teacher evening, or a volunteer rota. Class Booking is free for exactly the cases where a paid platform is too heavy: small, capped, recurring, no money changing hands.
How do people actually use Class Booking?
We looked at every class booking with a cap and at least one session that ran on Whocan in the twelve months to September 2026 — 178 bookings, 2,340 registrations, anonymized. Five patterns cover them all:
- One session, limited spots — 39%. A single pilates class, a trial lesson, a workshop. One date, a cap, often an email field.
- A weekly series — 28%. Five to thirty-five dated sessions on the same weekday and time, one cap for all. This is what Repeat is for.
- Several dates to choose from — 24%. A first-aid course offered on eleven dates over four months; participants pick one. Hosts write “choose one date only” in the description because the form allows several.
- Slots on one day — 6%. Presentation slots every thirty minutes, swim lanes every hour, tutoring appointments. Caps of one to four.
- Named options with a cap, no date — 4%. Workshop choice at a company health day: “pick one of four, fifteen seats each.”
A few numbers behind the patterns: the typical cap is 4 spots (half of all capped sessions sit between 2 and 12); participants book 1.0 sessions per response; 36% of hosts ask for an email address and 26% for a phone number; and 23% of bookings had at least one session fill up — which is what the waitlist is for.
Honest limits
Things the template doesn’t do, so you can plan around them:
- The waitlist doesn’t promote anyone. It collects who wants in and how many; when a spot frees up, you message the next person and register them yourself. The “spots left” counter and the waitlist are not linked.
- One poll per course. Hosts running three rooms or three weekdays create three polls with near-identical titles. Duplicate makes that fast; there is no grouping view across polls.
- No payment. Prices go in the description, and money changes hands elsewhere. The private-comment field or the Tag column works as a “paid / not paid” note — the 62-person event write-up shows that in practice.
- The series is yours to maintain. Repeat generates the dates; moving the whole term is a bulk edit; participants who booked are not notified automatically unless they opted in to email updates.
- The confirmation email is fixed text. Title, description, location and the participant’s own answers — no paragraph of your own. Put joining instructions in the description; they’re included.
- One spot per registration. Class Booking counts registrations, not persons: there is no adults/kids counter and no “maybe” answer in this template. A parent with two children registers twice, or you add the second child via Response on behalf.
How it compares
A handful of tools come up alongside Class Booking. Here’s the honest version.
Eventbrite is built for ticketed public events with payment processing, promotion, and check-in. If you’re selling seats, it earns its cut. For a free studio class, a parent-teacher evening, or a club training session, it’s a lot of machinery — and a fee — around a problem that’s really just “cap each slot and collect names”.
SignUpGenius is the closest in purpose: it does slot sign-ups with caps. The differences are the account it asks of organizers and the way its useful extras (no ads, reminders, themes, larger sign-ups) sit behind a paid tier. Whocan keeps the cap-per-slot core free, with no account for the people registering.
Cognito Forms (and form builders like it — Google Forms, Jotform) can collect registrations, but a form doesn’t natively enforce a cap per option: once you need “max 8 per session, and close the slot when it’s full”, you’re bolting limits onto a form rather than using a tool that does it out of the box. Class Booking does the cap as its core behavior.
Inside Whocan, a few neighbours:
- Scheduling Poll — when you’re trying to find one shared time for everyone rather than offer fixed sessions people register for, that’s the Scheduling Poll, not this. The same goes for a running attendance list — “who’s coming to training this week?”: many weekly dates, “maybe” allowed, everyone ticks the evenings they can make. A class booking counts spots; a scheduling poll counts availability. It’s the most common mix-up we see.
- The full pillar pages for this job live at the Event Registration tool page and the sign-up sheets page — both go deeper on the registration use case.
- For anything that doesn’t fit — a single event with RSVPs, a bring-list, an opinion vote — the parent guide to all nine templates maps each situation to the right template.
What it costs (nothing)
Every setting above is on the free tier. There is no paid plan, no per-poll fee, no per-registrant limit, no cap on how many sessions you list. Whocan runs on light advertising on landing pages (not inside the poll itself) and on word of mouth. Over 57,000 polls ran on the engine in the last 12 months without anyone paying for them — and Class Booking is the one where “free” matters most, because the alternatives charge for the exact thing it does for nothing: capping a slot.
Try it yourself
The fastest way to learn what Class Booking can do is to make one:
No signup, no email required, no card. Set your sessions, give each a cap, share the link. If you want to come back to your registration list later from a different device, you can save the access link the app gives you — that’s all.
Next in the series: Assign Tasks — Whocan’s template for handing out who-brings-what and who-does-what across a group (deploy 2026-07-03). Follow the poll-types hub to catch the next post.