ERAU Speedcubing used scrambles from a previous competition - Incident Thread

[weatherman223]

https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/incidents/13

Oh no! All results are being nullified.

Making this thread as a discussion with some talking points.

1. Were they too harsh with nullifying all results?

2. How could we have prevented this?

 

[TDM]

I don't think this is too harsh; it's not all results being disqualified:

The WRC has decided that all affected results of ERAU Speedcubing Spring 2018 will not be accepted as official WCA results.

And it's definitely necessary given the situation. There's no way scrambles should be re-used, especially if there were any competitors present at both competitions.

But how will they determine what was affected and what wasn't? I'm assuming they must have caught it at the competition, otherwise it might have been a while before anyone noticed. Did they attempt to do anything at the competition after they realised?

I'm not sure if we can suggest anything to prevent this if we don't know how it happened. I've not heard of this happening before anyway, so it's not a common problem. Maybe scrambles should be in a password-protected folder, with a different password for each competition? That would completely avoid a wrong folder being opened.