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Before smashgg existed, most of the big FGC events relied on the online form service Wufoo for handling registration & payments. Wufoo wasn't free, and paying an annual fee just to run 1 event a year didn't make sense, so several tournaments would share a single subscription
Although it was a paid service, Wufoo had plenty of issues. For one, the form-building options it had were extremely basic, more basic than Google forms even. For another, Wufoo offered no way to implement a cap on entrants. This became a very big pain point as tournaments grew.
For events that hit cap, the TO would want to prevent any later registrants from entering it, since they would then need to be refunded. However, TOs couldn't delete any options from the form, as Wufoo would also delete the corresponding column from the database on the backend.
Instead, TOs would need to disable or hide the checkboxes for capped events on the form, but this could only be done through uploading a custom CSS file and hoping no determined registrant attempted to "inspect element".
An even bigger problem with Wufoo that some events experienced was that occasionally some records wouldn't make it to the database. Some players would pre-register, only to not see themselves in the bracket come event week.
There were likely more issues with Wufoo that I'm forgetting, and it was likely to become entirely impractical to use as events blew up in size in the last half of the decade, but at the time it was the best (if not only) option we had.
I've seen some people ask why all the FGC tournaments moved to smashgg in the past 4 years? Why use a platform that where brackets occasionally decide to shuffle all the seeds? Why use a website where pages can take a full minute to load?
