Live Results?

[Lucas Garron]

Rather than replying to individual parts: Thanks for caring. We are indeed headed that way, but there's only so much that we can manage in our spare time. It's mostly Jim working on live results and the competition manager at the moment.
It used to be that things were way less organized than this. (Until Bryan created cubingusa.com, competition website in the US were very messy. I'm tempted to start offering worldwide competition sites on a cubing.net subdomain, but there are some issues with that, mainly that I don't have time to do it properly.)

Two comments:
- Let's not overload "CMS" if this is not a CMS (although it might be).
- We should be careful about strong WCA involvement/integration. If something is codified by the WCA, it's hard to innovate in a different direction. Things can be made to work much better with the WCA, but I think there should be a clear separation between the worldwide organization and the competition organizers until we know exactly what to do about all these things.

 

[JBCM627]

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.

The Events/Schedule page suggestions I'd actually already worked on before you suggested that. The main problem with creating some sort of scheduling/event interface is making it flexible enough to be useful, and designed well enough enough to actually be worth using. So far I haven't been able to think of a way to implement this that would be better than just making a table/page in CKEditor, which CubingUSA uses (no HTML knowledge required). So I haven't worked on it since.

It's mostly Jim working on live results and the competition manager at the moment.

Bryan is also working on a Droid competition manager - a really good project with even more potential than suggested here. I know other competition managers (JCRA, I have a semifunctional one, I've heard rumors of others...), but Bryan's is probably going to be the way to go once it is up and running. I'll hopefully be working with Bryan to try and integrate live results (which I'm completely re-doing in very limited spare time), and this new version will hopefully include some sort of API, more features, more stable, more options, etc. If you're interested in contributing, let me know.

I also strongly agree with Lucas's second comment. Things tend to get really bottlenecked going through the WCA, and often just plain don't get done... I don't want this to stifle any innovation as Lucas said.

 

[FatBoyXPC]

Well, you already have checkboxes for the event list of which events to show on the registration page. Is there any reason we can't use this? We could include a textbox next to it for Number of Rounds. As for the scheduling page, is there any reason we couldn't just have a select box with all the events, then a textbox for duration (the start time would automatically be the starting time for the competition). We could keep having select boxes appear (jquery) until the end time of the competition has been reached. We could also use jquery to automatically total the start time + duration to give the next start time. Another suggestion would be to have jquery remove the already selected events from the new select boxes.

Regarding the Droid Competition Manager, I think the best bet (agreeing with what you said would hopefully include) would be an API, then build all the interfaces around that. Build an API so that we could easily port the competition manager to the iphone as well, and then building the website with the API would be not too much different (I wouldn't think) than the smartphone apps. I'm actually working on a project with a friend of mine where he's building the actual application as an API, then he'll build the actual "website" part of it using the API, and the Droid/iPhone apps will be written in Titanium; that way he can just build those apps in javascript, port them appropriately, and since he's hitting the same API, the data manipulation will stay the same.

I suppose my young/inexperienced eyes hasn't quite seen what sort of bottlenecks could be caused from doing things through the WCA One of my biggest points to making said Competition Manager is that we could do a bulk insert type of deal into the WCA database, then again, I'm not entirely sure of the current process. I'm just going off the (probably bad) assumption they are retyped from hand into the WCA databsae, instead of pulling from the competition workbook.

 

[Bryan]

Well, you already have checkboxes for the event list of which events to show on the registration page. Is there any reason we can't use this? We could include a textbox next to it for Number of Rounds. As for the scheduling page, is there any reason we couldn't just have a select box with all the events, then a textbox for duration (the start time would automatically be the starting time for the competition). We could keep having select boxes appear (jquery) until the end time of the competition has been reached. We could also use jquery to automatically total the start time + duration to give the next start time. Another suggestion would be to have jquery remove the already selected events from the new select boxes.

In theory that sounds good, but in reality, it doesn't work. You need time in the schedule for lunch. Sometimes events may overlap. Sometimes you have a break in the schedule. You may have two events in the schedule, and want to add a note. You end up building up a really complex GUI that allows someone who can't edit what is basically a Word-like equivalent that's going to give them all the flexibility they need.

Regarding the Droid Competition Manager, I think the best bet (agreeing with what you said would hopefully include) would be an API, then build all the interfaces around that. Build an API so that we could easily port the competition manager to the iphone as well, and then building the website with the API would be not too much different (I wouldn't think) than the smartphone apps.

Yes, the API is going to be a bunch of JSON calls to CubingUSA/live results. If someone can write iOS applications, they could make the same thing. If someone wants to buy me a Mac and a iPod, I could also work on it.

I suppose my young/inexperienced eyes hasn't quite seen what sort of bottlenecks could be caused from doing things through the WCA One of my biggest points to making said Competition Manager is that we could do a bulk insert type of deal into the WCA database, then again, I'm not entirely sure of the current process. I'm just going off the (probably bad) assumption they are retyped from hand into the WCA databsae, instead of pulling from the competition workbook.

Shoving everything onto the WCA site just for the data insert is way off. Right now the WCA site pulls the data from the workbook. But there's no reason why it couldn't have a defined file format that live.cubing.net or anyone else couldn't export to.

Here's a list of features CubingUSA has that the WCA site doesn't:

1) You can edit your registration
2) Paypal integration and option to not display non-paid
3) Configuration options to ask if you need volunteers
4) Allow the user to choose between 4 themes and edit the content of the page through a browser

And if the cookie-cutter script doesn't work, for example if someone wants to allow people to register for 5x5 or Megaminx, but not both, either Jim or I can make a quick change to the registration script to handle that, since each site is it's own individual deployment. We wouldn't have that flexibility on the WCA site.

 

[JBCM627]

In theory that sounds good, but in reality, it doesn't work. You need time in the schedule for lunch. Sometimes events may overlap. Sometimes you have a break in the schedule. You may have two events in the schedule, and want to add a note. You end up building up a really complex GUI that allows someone who can't edit what is basically a Word-like equivalent that's going to give them all the flexibility they need.

Similar with the event listings... adding in disclaimers, special notes, formatting, etc., would be restricted by a GUI.

Here's a list of features CubingUSA has that the WCA site doesn't:

1) You can edit your registration
2) Paypal integration and option to not display non-paid
3) Configuration options to ask if you need volunteers
4) Allow the user to choose between 4 themes and edit the content of the page through a browser

5) Psych sheet
6) Competitor Map
7) Competitor/organizer contact forms
8) Live Results integration
9) Etc...