So I hate to revive an old thread like this, but it was after talking with Mike Hughey about some ideas, that this might be a better place.
I was reading the Future of Cubing Competitions thread, since I do not have access to post there, I PMed Mike and gave him some ideas. He said that given the way that topic had moved, and that the ideas were somewhat suited around Live Results anyway, this might be a more appropriate place. So here it goes (directly copied and pasted from my PM to Mike).
Since the trend seems to be that people would like for competitions to be more technological, I too fall into that trend, my idea(s) are centered rather heavily around that.
The cubing live results system (live.cubing.net) has always had me thinking about what more we could do with a solution like that. It finally hit me now that this could definitely be the thing to help make that kick off.
I think we should create a Competition Management System. I honestly think that if we are to use a CMS (I like how I stole that acronym
) that we should definitely keep it to non-country specific URL (ie: cubingusa.com would be ruled out), and should also honestly put it on WCA's domain. I like that live.cubing.net is the live results system, but the fact that right now US Cubers have 3 different domains to go to (not counting these forums) has always been one of those things that have just been on my mind (just how it would be more efficient).
Anyway, the idea is that this CMS would simply be given all of the data about a competition (date/time, delegate info, organizer info, etc), and we could only allow scrambles to be presented when events are to be done. We could build rules such as that once a scramble set has been generated, there are no more scrambles to be generated until a later round, etc. The scrambles would be automatically entered into the CMS and we could block access to change the scrambles.
Another thing we could do with this system is once the results are in, we could have them approved by the WCA board (or whatever the current approval process is for competitions), and instead of having to manually enter them into the WCA site (or whatever that process is), just do a direct insert from the CMS database to WCA's database.
Some ideas I have already shot to Jim for the current CubingUSA site (that would obviously be great ideas for said CMS) would be just better setup for the Events and Schedule page specifically. The organizer needs some HTML knowledge, or needs help getting this done. There is no reason why we can't just throw on a form of which events to include, then have the Schedule page pull the list of events and allow us select boxes with times in them.
Another suggestion I had was to take the data entry away from the spreadsheet(s)/workbook and just do all of the data entry directly on the site. I later realized that this might not be as liked of an option due to the fact that arrow keys/enter/tab are just flat out more convenient for those who are rather efficient with spreadsheets.
This was rather long, and I'm sure the community here can come up with a list of a lot more features to be added to said CMS if it were to be a popular hit. I know I had more suggestions than this, however, this is already a bit lengthy
