ISSA - International Slalom Skateboarding Association

Does anyone have any suggestions on how we can use the forum to provide race sign up sheets?

Rick,

That's a good idea. You could always do it the way we do the Contest calendar, that's the "budget" solution. The advantage with such a standard solution is that people can comment their participation and make the sign up less static.

The other alternative is that we make use of a skilled php programmer and put something together exactly to our liking. Daniel Poweleit could do it. If he doesn't want or have the time I just hired a guy with good php programming experience. He doesn't know the forum so much yet, but I've already asked him to get started on learning the basics, because I have a few things I would want from him.

I'll add to the first question: How should the ultimate sign up solution be?

/Jani

I just got an idea:

We could build up an official inscription page here.

Advantages:

- A racer who wants to sign in can just check who's already signed in for each race.
- All-in-all, you've got a general overview
- Inscription for all races on one single homepage.
=> Organizers must put the link on their hompage.


rmn

Jani-
It would be nice to have fields in the sign up that are for the organizer, things we could check off such as "waiver on file" & "Entry Fee Paid".
For racers it might be useful to have a menu for race classification in which they plan to race (e.g. Elite, Ameratuer, Jr. Men, etc.)
Maybe Arrival and Departure info would help so that racers can coordinate on ground tanspo etc.
Another field for organizers would be a place they could put a download link for information packet, directions, schedule, etc. I know we put that in the race description, but I would rather provide some PDF's that are easily printable, and contain maps, etc.
Get manufacturers to sponsor the race pages if necessary. Take it off the dime of the individual promoter. I guess we don't do that on this site, but it's something to consider for sponsorship.

Gary,

These are great ideas. Now you got my hooked on the idea. With features like this you really add something to the regular sign up sheets. Then it really makes sense to do a common solution that many organizers can use.

I'll think about it and see what I'm ready to do.

Please add more thoughts and ideas.

I'm all for sponsorship. It's just a pity there's not enough money in the sport itself to support all the good ideas and events. We need to be able to address outside sponsors too.

/Jani

couple of more thoughts.
Don't restrict the contest results to a simple 1,2,3. It's never that simple with 5 divisions and 3 events.
Automatic link to the world rankings.
Seperate First and Last name fields, otherwise we get goofy screen names that are almost useless to me and Corky.
Country flag menu. That would be cool to see each racer's country's flag in the list. I've never seen this on a web form- good luck.
Other possible field; Best time, place, classification (Pro, Open, etc.)

How about a spreadsheet that the organizer puts together, and somehow the web links for "Signup" let the racer fill in his data which can go to the spreadsheet.

If this spreadsheet were standardized in some fashion, then it could also be used as a uniform method of reporting results. (e.g. For easy entry into World standings calculations...)

-- Pat

I have come quite far along these lines and have some pretty serious plans ahead. Have not gone out in public with the ideas since I have not been able to set off enough time to pull it through. Php programming skills needed. I have started to read some books to be able to lighten the burden of Daniel Poweleit who is helping out with the www.slalomranking.com web programming. But also to take on other interesting projects waiting in the drawer. As Jani said we now have a php programmer "in da' house". That will certainly come in use.

A new hectic skate season is approaching. Huh, maybe we can have something serious up and running before next season and use the time until then to do the specifications.

A full season has gone by and we still don't have a system for race registration.
I don't think Corky is about to release one and the php programmer in my office is dearly needed for other work and there's no way he'll do any work on this specific topic for another 6 months. But there's a lot of race planning going on for 2006 and we need something.

Couldn't we just take one of the existing race sign ups and just distribute it to those who want to use it? That would save each race organizer time.

We can host it here for all and at least for those events that don't have a dedicated web site.

Anyone has a suitable system and is ready to share the source code for it?
Anyone wants to volunteer for running it here on this site?

I liked Marcus system that was used in Stockholm as it showed racers grouped. I remember that there country groups but I guess we could configure (read re-program) our own groups if it's a race where international attendance is not the primary grouping.

/Jani

Here is our sign up system: http://www.pscontest.ch/index.do?menu=201

We changed some things in the sign up. There are three statuses temporary, provisorily, definitly

If you sign up then you are temporary in the database,
After one of us check your registration, than your status will be changed to provisorily
After you payed the entry fee, you are defintly registered.

Why this procedere:

Because there are many people who register and don't come.
If you have arround 100 racers and you have all them in the Spreadsheet and than at the race day you realize that somer aren't ther is a bit shit....

Our registration is combined with a racemanager. So we haven't to put the racer's twice in a sheet. The racemanager is based on php as the whole page. The results will be live on the internet, uploaded all 30 seconds...

We will not have our registration on ss.com cause we have a system which works well for us...

/J-Rad

Nice J-Rad,

I like the new status symbols.

Of course YOU don't need a sign-up sheet hosted on ss.com. You are one of those who has a valid site and is able to program a sign up system and post it on time.

But, would you donate it to the community for free use by others?
Would you spend some hours getting the sign up system part out of your site and into a generic system for all to use?

PS. What's it programmed in?

/Jani

Jani,

i don't know much about programming. All the programming of our websites is done by Stefan Bölsterli.

He is an electronic engineer and php moderator on diffrent Forums. He invest a half year to programming the whole site.

I think he programmed it in the text editor of Microsoft Windows, but i'm not sure.

Ask him about the using for the community, it's his work...
here is his e-mail adress:
(stefan@develop.ch)

/J-Rad

If we are talking about sponsorchips,

How much cash do we need to make a European Series happen.

PARIS
RIGA
HANNOVER
ANTIBES
ZURICH


Big Cities, with a big crowd are needed.
Did we have more locations ?

/J-Rad

I can help out programming. I'm a professional and certified PHP programmer who'd like to contribute to this project. I'm a student, so I don't have much spare time, but every little help is appreciated if I'm right? Tell me if you're interested in my help.

Off topic Jrad, but what about LONDON??? or another big UK city?

About subscription systems, I've began a system (php too) that I want to be generic, but don't have much time to advance on that (it's the base of the pirateslalom.online.fr system) and still have a lot to do to, not ready to share much for the moment.

You know what would be great? An open source project to develop this race manager we all need.
Using standards like PHP/mySql
everybody could share his knowledge and improve the system
but it's still a lot of work

Jani,

what you looking for is a matured registration system with support for many contests
and many users/moderators which can administrate only one or several or all registration.

our registration can do that, BUT it isn't ready for public use, that means it isn't
really suitable for 'easy' use by anyone. That is because it isnt made for that and
it is a module made just for my framework.

I have not the time programming it now, because i have to finish first our own
projects (racemanager). When these projects are finished i could programm it.


Now few questions about the Registration:
Until when should it be finished (Date for this/next season)?
What will we (PSContest) get for it (at least some ad on the page?)?
Where should it run on (PSContest server/ ISSA Server/new domain like skateboard-registration.com)?

For the time between it is finished and now, i can only offer to let it run on the pscontest page.
That means an additional menu item and a submenu item for each race.
And for shure for each race a user account which can edit the registration entries.


Greez Stefan

What exactly are all the features a slalom race manager should have?

The Racemanager is still in development. Planned functionality is:

Raceconfiguration (Creat, edit, delete):
Contest title, title of the race, DQ time penalty, cone penalty, category, racetype
-> category: now it's only planned to have only one category, but its easy to expand it to
more than one at a time.
-> racetype: possible options: auto, 32,16,8,4
auto means: the app. will choose the biggest race with a given number of riders (e.g. 31 riders -> 16 Head2Head). You could force it to a certain type (32,16,8,4). When not enough
riders participate, the first riders havent a counterpart -> they will win it.

Rider assignment:
Based on the created race configuration, all possible riders (from the selected category).
-> Not all registered riders show up

Qualification:
-> Each rider, which is assigned to the race configuration, will have two runs (a left and a right)

Head2Head:
Based on the qualitime the rider starter list will be generated.
After each round the new starter list will be generated, based on the first starter list (normal h2h).
-> just as a normal h2h with a spredsheet.

PDF generation of the Ranking
Time editing (for a mistyped time etc)
Rerun are possible

Information pages for the riders which provide:
The last few times
ranking (quali/h2h)
etc.


This is just the basic Version, i still have lots to do and when it is finished, then we will
refine it. After the refining process (optimize the flow, usability an so on) we will use it.

Just to say:

It is a web application. We will run it locally on a laptop at our contest.

Stefan,

I don't expect any system right now to handle this full out.

Doing an open source project, sharing ideas and programming effort on this task would be the best way to move forward. But by launching such a wide span project (doing this and everything else we want) will take time and we have no guarantee as to the time schedule.

What I was thinking was that we could do a quick and dirty version by taking something which is already out there and copy it as many times as we need for coming races.

a) Look at what's out there (already in use) (J-Rad, Marcus and other) and select one
b) Ask the developer to donate the software
c) Ask the developer to spend just a few more hours to make sure we can copy and paste (and just modify a few little things) for each race for which we need registration.
d) Host the whole thing at ss.com
e) Use one of the volunteer PHP developers to install and maintain these scripts and race registrations.

At this moment in time I would not even dare thinking about results registration. And if you do make sure you coordinate your work with Corkys to simplify his registration of results for the World Ranking.

/Jani

Jani,

What we used for European Championships and Stocholm winter clash is just a simple ASP solution. Super simple, 2 or 3 pages of ASP code, a SQL DB in the bottom with all the racers registered info.

I'm not sure if people noticed, but we saved a cookie with you info on the computer you used when you registerd for the competition so that you could go back to the site and update your info.

There's also an administrative page where you can update and delete riders. A lot of functions could of course be added to this, but for us it worked fine.

It's a very simple tool, and you can of course have it. As long as it's asp I could help you to develop this further.

My guess is that the ultimate solution would be if you could connect Corkys worldranking with this system, so that each rider got a password and then could edit their info and it would always be correct.

This summer I did put togheter a complete list of all riders in the world ranking DB and imported it to my timing software. That way you could choose class and then rider(s) when starting the program. Unfortunately there are a lot of riders that are registered in multiple classes, and also missing names so it's not very useful.

Do we have now a solution?

I've just finished the first version of my racemanager.
I'm wondering what kind of Information would be interesting for you.

(Links ain't valid any longer.)

Rappersville? Are you a gangster?

EDIT: That looks professional!

rmn

Good work Stefan,

I'm personally more interested in the registration of riders. But maybe you consider that done already?

When doing you result lists try to make them compatible in some way with the lists that Corky needs to update SlalomRanking.com to minimize the work needed when final results come out of your system.

/Jani

Hi Jani,

it's easy to create lists, i just have to know how the format should be.

For that we could build a flexible WebApp for next season (realistic time schedule).

Greez Stefan

Stefan,

There are 2 main points I would like to see in any race manager system that would simplify a lot for the collection of race results to the World Ranking.

1. Possibility to import the person list from the World Ranking system.
This will make sure names are printed correctly for all riders. This is a huge problem for the moment. It's often a mixture of nick names, misspelled names and only family or personal names.

2. Possibility to export results in a simple text format file.
This would make my life a lot easier when including results into the World Ranking database. Now I have to sort out the complete orders manually most of the time. There are detailed info on how I would prefer such an exported text file on www.slalomranking.com (here).