Scoring-
Pick a heat. Lets say heat 10 of 45 for a day. The boats get two laps in and a flock of birds land on the course. We stop. Club policy. "We'll re-run it at the end of the day" Accept the software wont allow scoring of heats out of order. If you just run it at the end of the day and then add the scores in back at heat number 10 it deletes everything you've put in after heat number 10. Those scores are gone. We finally decided to give everyone 400 points for that heat, subtract it from the totals, then add in the actual scores manually at the end of the day. Workable. PIA.
Traditional heat racing is ran sequentially. RCRE was designed for traditional heat racing. Also, running heats out of order would jack up the round scores that are printed and posted between heats in typical heat racing. Final rounds that require accurate score would then be affected as well, such as runoffs or other formats.
In FE we have a number of classes we call "offshore". If you're not familiar, it's a timed race. 4 minutes, count the number of laps. Broken down into quarter lap increments. So for a given race you could get say 10.25 laps. This can't be input into RCRE because RCRE only allows 4 actual characters. We found a work around. We call 10.25 laps 1025 points and move the decimal point in our heads. Workable. All we needed was one extra character.
Again. RCRE was designed for traditional heat racing. FE clubs provided no input during is design and creation.
I'm told shifting racers around after the heats are generated is difficult.
Moving racers from one heat to another is done in the scoring app. Agreed it is not streamlined, but it is by no means difficult. it is just not a three mouse-click process. I will be streamlining this in the scoring app in the coming few weeks to make this as simple as it can be.
I also remember in Canada hearing that deleting an entry is easy but adding a guy late is a nightmare. Not sure what he meant by that. I don't usually mess with the actual scoring.
Both adding and removing racers from an event, class, or heat is a snap. It's a one or two mouse-click process that is as easy as it can be. It is done in the scoring app.
Black outs.
When the site goes down you're screwed. It's happened to everyone. Sometimes for extended periods. Both to entrants and to event organizers trying to download the entries. You can do heats and scoring manually but when you're committed to using the software you're not prepared for it to suddenly be unavailable.
True there were network connectivity issues earlier this year from mid April through early June. This was due to construction and upgrades being done in my area. This is no excuse, I acknowledge this. It has since been corrected. I will say this, In the previous years RCRE has had very little connectivity issues until then. And I have taken steps to minimize the chances of this from occurring. In the almost ten years of its existence connectivity issues have been quite good actually in contrast.
For our Michigan Cup we resorted to down loading the entries twice a day leading up to the race so that if we couldn't get to the data we would hopefully only be missing a couple last minute entries.
Typically the cutoff date for entries is 3-5 days before an event. Even with network issues this would still leave ample time to setup the heats and download them prior to an event.
No tech support.
When there is a problem there's no recourse. "Oh, crap the RCRE site's down". Send an email. Might get answered a week after your event. I've not personally tried to contact you but I'm told that is not easy to do. That isn't really criticism by the way. The reality is that it's not a career for you or even a source of income really. We get that. Well, most do. You shouldn't have to be at our beckon call 24/7. Doesn't change that we're hosed when there is a problem.
I suspect that this is because as you stated you don't frequent this site.There are many people here that can reach me. A PM here would even work. A post asking for my contact info would certainly get you my number and email without difficulty.
I will be updating my contact info in conspicuous places in the user section of the website and the scoring app. in the next week or so. In the mean time please use the PM function here in IW.
On a multi-day event you also have to stagger the registration dates. The race dates are different but if the registration dates are the same it will only allow you register fro the first day. That one was a bugger to figure out. No tech support on that one. Fred figured that one out on his own.
True. Because traditional heat racing clubs only have one event at a time. As an FE club using FE format racing you will need to treat each day as a separate event.
I will try to work with the FE groups as best I can and try to integrate the needed functionality, but at this point it will be difficult. It would have been much easier had there been at least some input from FE clubs.
Let me know if you need more info, or need clarification on any of the topics above. I will review all issues in this thread and post updates as they are addressed.
Bill