As many of you know, we’ve had constant problems with MileSplit since switching from DirectAthletics, which was itself a royal pain. In an attempt to end up with a system that everyone can use successfully, I’m testing a new approach that relies on Webscorer, which works well for many FLRC races.
The trick is that we have to download the registration and seeding information from Webscorer and import it into HyTek Meet Manager to be able to run the track meet. My son has written a converter from Webscorer’s entirely sensible CSV export to HyTek’s insane semi-colon delimited, record-length-limited import format with inscrutable event codes, and we’ve tested it successfully with some sample data. But I’d be much happier with more sample data, and more examples of how people use the system in the real world.
So if you could do me a favor, I’d appreciate it if you could register for some events in this sample track meet. It has all the events we ever do, and I’ll duplicate it and delete all but the events in a particular meet for real usage, but feel free to enter yourself in as few or many events as you like. Also, see what it’s like to register kids—the Someone Else option at the start.
I’m interested in feedback about how the questions are written, if there are any confusions, and so on. You’ll note that you can only register for known teams—that’s intentional, and I’ll have to update that for any new teams. (People simply can’t be trusted to enter team names in exactly the same way.) Also, note that it’s not collecting any fees, despite what the FLRC and Non-member divisions say.
Take a look, and let me what you think here afterward Thanks!
My only comment is it’s not immediately clear that entering a seed time is how you register for a race. I was expecting another check box or pull down menu.
Maybe just restate the instructions “To register for a race you must enter a seed time in that race listed below….”
Maybe I just haven’t had enough coffee this morning but after years of writing test questions and instructions that’s where I think people will get tripped up.
Otherwise seems good!
Seems easy enough Adam. I entered some erroneous times like “2” for the 3000m event to see if it would alert me to an error or not let me continue until I entered a time within the listed parameters. Not sure if it’s possible to make that part of the program. I see it does give an error imessage f you don’t enter your parents name if under age and also sign the waiver. Other than that seems fine to me.
Thanks for all the testing and comments, folks and I’m glad to hear it’s generally working.
It would be nice, but I don’t have any more interface flexibility in the questions. However, your suggestion for the wording is good, and (working within the field length constraints), I’ve tweaked to this. How does that sound?
To register for an event, you MUST enter a properly formatted estimated seed time or distance for that event below. Note the formatting tips and ranges, and DON’T ENTER ANYTHING ELSE!
Unfortunately no, there’s no error checking in the time entries. Which is actually probably good, since people absolutely suck at formatting times correctly and they get frustrated with systems that reject their efforts (I heard from people about that with MileSplit and DirectAthletics). In a different scenario, I had popup menus for hours, minutes, and seconds, and people still go it wrong by putting their minutes time in the hours menu. But I’m already accustomed to receiving incorrect seed times, either formatted badly or just silly out of range (2-minute 800m seed times for a club of elementary school kids).
Luckily, HyTek Meet Manager is pretty good about throwing an exception report when it imports badly formatted times or times that are out of sensible ranges, so I go through and fix those in Meet Manager after the import.
Looking pretty good! I registered after your latest edits and had no difficulty. The system correctly asked me to enter an emergency contact name/number when I forgot to do so the first time through.
Adam, et al:
Just registered myself and found it straight forward…I wasn’t asked for emergency contact info, but I suspect that was because I logged onto Webscorer using my personal account.
I found the wording around the seeding clear, and easy to follow, but that is one data point. I probably should have entered some bad or unreasonable data for testing purposes, but didn’t think about it at the time
About the only disappointment - after I finished registering myself, there wasn’t a button to register another…which is probably a Webscorer limitation, not yours.
Yes, if your account has the information in there, it will auto-fill. I do see it in your registration.
I’ve tested a number of oddities, and Meet Manager seems to deal with them properly at import by refusing to bring them in and displaying an exception report. It’s not ideal, but in my experience, there’s no way to force people to get the seed times correct in every case.
Actually, that’s related to payment being turned off or the selections resulting in no payment. When there’s a payment involved, Webscorer does offer to let you register another person and pay for them all at once. Which is better than we were getting with MileSplit this summer!
