cubecomps.com - for delegates and organizers

[Luis]

I've been working in a website for official competitions management: cubecomps.com

My main goal in this project has been helping as much as possible to delegates and organizers in their tasks. Some of the benefits of using cubecomps.com are:

• Three separate ways to use the web: as an administrator (all permissions), as a score taker (different password) and as audience in the public live results sub-domain: live.cubecomps.com
• Uniform, easy and fast way to input scores, omitting "." and ":"
• Allows concurrency: unlimited number of score takers can multiply your speed entering scores.
• Allows importation of WCA's .CSV registration file.
• Prints personalized, customizable 'time sheets' including competitor name and id, event name, round number and the exact number of boxes for scores (plus one).
• The results will be available for the public as soon as you submit every one of them.
• Statistics for special podiums/prizes, like youngest and oldest competitor, females, etc.
• And the very best feature: One-click production of the .XLSX file to export all data to the WCA.

Delegates and organizers who could like test the website, please contact me through http://www.facebook.com/cubecomps

A sample of the public part (live results) can be seen at http://live.cubecomps.com/live.php?cid=11

Finally, here you are a short video showing main features. This video is a week old and some things have been added, changed or improved, but all in all it will be fine for a first contact:

[antoineccantin]

I'm not sure about the data entering part, but it seems very similar to live.cubing.net

[Luis]

Well, maybe that someone who used live.cubing.net can say whether it is similar or not. I didn't use it. Previous to make this website, I searched for webs working for organizers, instead of making organizers work for them. I always found webs focused on live results, what usually means an extra task for organizers. (Please note: I'm not meaning anything bad for any web out there. I don't know what those webs have in its inside; I just got an idea from their instructions pages.)

Then I stopped searching and decided to built up this site (for the fun of it) and offer it to anyone who could wish to make use of it. That's all.

But in any case, my web is focused in making easier the work for organizers. Live results come 'naturally' as a result of putting all the information in the internet from the very first beginning of the organization of the comp.

[Lucas Garron]

Well, maybe that someone who used live.cubing.net can say whether it is similar or not. I didn't use it.

Supersede as you wish, as long as we use something good and reliable (and permanent).
From navigating around live.cubecomps.com, it seems to do the same as live.cubing.net, although not with as much "getting out of your way" in the nav as I might like to see.

My main gripe here is that "cubecomps" sounds like slang, and might not sound very official, especially to non-cubers.

Yeah, cube-COMPS. Like competitions. Comp, s. No dash between cube and comps.

[Luis]

If the domain is a problem, I will change it, of course. No problem. In fact I thought of something including "wca", but didn't decide to use it without permission.

About the real difference with other websites, don't expect to find it in the live results part. As I already mentioned, I focused in the organization tasks. And for this, you need a test competition and a password. I will be more than happy providing both to anyone who might wish give it a try.

[Anthony]

I took a chance and relied completely on cubecomps to run the Hillsdale Winter 2012, and I must say that a system like this should be implemented on a broader scale as soon as possible.
The interface is very easy to use and it sped up the entire data entry process. It also was very convenient in other aspects - such as printing personalized score sheets, adding events on the spot and displaying live results.

The only major issue I see with it that it requires internet access. Mike dealt with the system more than I did so I'll leave the rest to him.

Overall, Luis has done a fantastic job and cubecomps is certainly a step in the right direction.

[Mike Hughey]

I agree very much with Anthony's overall assessment.

I think it is probably true that the other delegates and Anthony were probably sick of me raving about the cubecomps system by the end of the day. All day, I kept saying, "I can't believe how nice this is" or "I can't believe how easy it is to use it".

The day of the competition, the system proved valuable immediately. We were able to make adjustments to the registration very quickly, and changing the registration page automatically enters the competitor in the results page for each event, which is so much nicer than is true with Excel. Since we had a computer lab nearby, we could have actually printed timesheets for the late registrants on the spot, but we didn't take advantage of that. The system makes it very easy to do that.

Data entry was much faster than anything I could have done in Excel, and it is much less error-prone. It has a couple of quirks that might be nice to fix, which I have mentioned to Luis, but even with those quirks, it took me no more than a few minutes to get comfortable with working with it, and I would say I was probably entering results at least twice as fast as I would have been with Excel.

Handling extra rounds was especially nice. A single click and entry of a number selected the people for the next round, and we were immediately ready to go. We were also able to print timesheets for the later rounds with competitor names, which took less time and was less error-prone than writing names onto blank timesheets. Adding an extra event was also outrageously easy.

People loved the fact that they could see times enter on the live results page as I entered each person's times. When I wasn't too busy doing 4x4x4 BLD, most of the times the results for a given round were finished and available for people to see five to ten minutes after the round ended. And I had so much extra time that I was able to double-check almost all the results as I went.

Generating the spreadsheet to send to the WCA also went very well. I neglected to copy Ilkyoo's Korean characters in for his name, and there was an issue with a country change that was again my fault, but other than those two things, it went in without any corrections being done by me to the spreadsheet.

I agree with Anthony that the biggest concern I have is what to do if Internet access is flaky (or even worse, unavailable). Currently the approach to deal with unreliable access is that you download the spreadsheet often, and if access goes down, you start running off the spreadsheet as you normally would. But then I don't think there's an easy way to go back to using cubecomps once you've done that. And if Internet access is unavailable, you can't really use cubecomps to run the competition.

I was very impressed with how professional the interface felt overall. There were a couple of strange things visually with the interface, but for the most part it was very nice and clean, and very efficient and streamlined to use. It was also very reliable. A very nice job by Luis.

Overall, this experience was so nice that I must admit I never want to have to deal with Excel at a competition again. This is a much better way to run a competition, and I hope cubecomps or something like it will be used at all future competitions that I attend. Especially since it's not that pleasant to see a grown man cry, which is what will probably happen if I have to go back to using an Excel spreadsheet again.

[Luis]

Can't help writing a few lines to thank Mike and Anthony for their dedication this weekend. I couldn't have dreamed a better and more enthusiastic debut. I will consider all the valuable comments and suggestions you sent me by email, Mike. I've got new ideas from this first competition that will make CubeComps even better shortly.

[Lucas Garron]

We didn't end up using this for Stanford Winter, mostly because we already have a working system in place.

Data entry was much faster than anything I could have done in Excel, and it is much less error-prone. It has a couple of quirks that might be nice to fix, which I have mentioned to Luis, but even with those quirks, it took me no more than a few minutes to get comfortable with working with it, and I would say I was probably entering results at least twice as fast as I would have been with Excel.

I was wondering about that, because there's a lot of room for improvement from Excel. I can't seem to log in to the test page. How did it work?

In particular, how do you find a competitors' name?

People loved the fact that they could see times enter on the live results page as I entered each person's times.

Trivia: The first live results in the US had this. And basically none since then. :-P

(People went into a frenzy over the fact that one of Dan Dzoan's times was entered incorrectly - which immediately went online.)

Generating the spreadsheet to send to the WCA also went very well.

That's good to know. When I tried to do this with the Polish system for SF09, Bob got so annoyed at my formatting that I've stayed away from generating spreadsheets with results on them.

I agree with Anthony that the biggest concern I have is what to do if Internet access is flaky (or even worse, unavailable). Currently the approach to deal with unreliable access is that you download the spreadsheet often, and if access goes down, you start running off the spreadsheet as you normally would. But then I don't think there's an easy way to go back to using cubecomps once you've done that. And if Internet access is unavailable, you can't really use cubecomps to run the competition.

This was also a big motivating factor for the spreadsheet uploads powering live.cubing.net. A lot of organizers who were initially interested in our system had very spotty access.

Overall, this seems like great progress.

Which leaves my biggest qualms at the following:
- While cubers might get used to it, "cubecomps.com" still doesn't feel like a *great* name to me. I'm not trying to disparage Luis's choice, I just feel like there could be a better one that goes with his great work. (But it's a hard problem. It took me months to find cubing.net)
- URLs are still of the format http://live.cubecomps.com/live.php?cid=12 . I think it would be a *great* benefit to have the competition name in the URL, even if it's just inserted as a useless parameter (like thread titles in speedsolving.com URLs).
- The layout of the site still feels a bit gimmicky. Which can be okay, but I like simple pages that get right to the content.
- There's some opportunity for usability and practicality improvements. In particular, it would be great if result entry could be cached offline in case of lost internet access (using localstorage).


Luis: The only reason I'm being picky is because I want organizers to end up with the best system in the end. And there can certainly be disagreements about how it should be done. But if you want to ask me, I could talk some more about the points above.

Also, is your codebase public / open-source (/ on GitHub)?

[Mike Hughey]

I can't seem to log in to the test page. How did it work?

I think you need to get a password from Luis to log in.

In particular, how do you find a competitors' name?

I guess this is one thing that I forgot to mention to Luis that I thought might be able to be improved. (It really wasn't a big deal, so I forgot about it until you mentioned it.) The competitors that have not competed yet are always sorted by first name at the bottom of the list. So if you were running a big competition, you would have to scroll down to that competitor and click on it, which might involve scrolling pretty far for a 200 person round. (Unless there is a keyboard shortcut that I was unaware of.) You can also type in the competitor's ID number, but that seemed impractical. With just 50 competitors, it was always very easy for me to click on the competitor's name - I never had to scroll very far. Also, the entry form is in a fixed place on the page, so if you have to scroll to the bottom of the list to click on the name, you might then have to scroll back up to see to enter the data. I wondered if making the entry window float might help, but I liked the fact that the current method was very simple and hence very reliable - I've seen some of those floating windows act up sometimes. Anyway, using the scroll wheel on the mouse made it pretty quick to scroll down to select a user and back up, so it really wasn't a big deal for me. I could see this being a little slower for a big competition. But it is very nice that the names were always alphabetical for the people who hadn't been entered yet - it really was still pretty nice.

- The layout of the site still feels a bit gimmicky. Which can be okay, but I like simple pages that get right to the content.

I guess this sort of thing is a personal preference thing; to me it didn't feel gimmicky at all, which is part of what I liked about it. It seemed to be very simple and get right to the content.