Online Entries - The Future - Have your Say?

[Patrick O'Hara]

Sounds really good, thanks for adding this important capability. We won't have an event to use this on until June next year but I'd be happy to try it out from both a competitor and organiser point of view if you were able to provide me access to a dummy event.
Patrick

[CeeBee]

Thanks Dee - I can use this as an incentive for whoever takes on our Div 4 event next year. We'll certainly sign up.

[Dee]

Working on sign in sheet

At top of each page will be risk statement and promise to return bib

Pre completed columns (where data available)
- Bib (if something other than 999, otherwise blank)*
- Name
- Age Cat
- Club
- Bc number

Columns for completion on day
- Chk- to indicate membership validated or day membership applied for (narrow column)
- bib allocation (to denote bib handed out)
- signature
- bib returned

*when div 4s are added to a race they default to 999 as 'bib'. Organiser can overwrite this to pre allocate bibs. Or leave as is and then sort out bib allocations on the day. This needs to be manual as organisers have different bib sets.

I have NOT put email addresses on the list as the list will be too public (and there is not room). Emails are still available to organisers though.

You can choose which divisions to add to the list and also to include any paddlers added as non ranked. The list can therefore be used for allocating official/open bibs as well as div 4s and for double checking guests or paddlers who have sent in a postal entry received pre bib allocation.

The lists are all sorted by name (i.e. First name as we don't distinguish surname), within division and class, as sorting by bib number will be meaningless!

RTCs will need to be handled separately with a separate list, simply because of the logistics of fitting all the columns in.

Where paddlers are competing in the same event on two days they will only be on the list once. If they are in two events, say div4 C1 and div4 K1, they will be on the list twice. This is based on the assumption that they might need different bibs for different classes, but if you allocate bib 23 to a Div4 K1M on Sat they will keep the bib for Sunday.

Does this all make sense?
Have I forgotten anything/made any silly assumptions?
(I've only run one div 4, and although I've helped at others it's not the same)

[Patrick O'Hara]

Sign in sheet sounds good to me.

[CeeBee]

All looks good to me too. Thank you for all the hard work setting this up.

[Mike Mitchell]

Its all excellent to me Dee.

One comment. I just signed in to pay my HPP entry as that had just got accepted from the waiting list.

Then noticed that my Llandysul entries for the Sunday only, had been declined. If I hadn't signed in then that would have gone un noticed. I am expect Gareth would have got me on the weekend but should there be an email to say payment declined.

[Dee]

Hi Mike, you were sent an email to let you know that the charge had been declined on 16th September at 10:36am (GMT). (Is it in your junk folder?)

Llandysul organisers were then emailed on the 19th September to tell them that one or more payments had failed with a recommendation that they contact you to chase for payment, though obviously I don't know if they did so or decided to catch up on the day. They can see that payments have failed as they are highlighted on the payment pages, so in their case this is about helping organisers around the system.

I believe that most emails do go through ok, but suggesting organisers contact paddlers direct is the only way I can think of to get around the occasional email going to junk.

Id recommend that paddlers do occasionally check the "my entries" page which will show payment status including when they have failed.

Looking at the patterns we frequently get a few failures. Some of them are probably to be expected (card stoked/insufficient money in account) but some seem to be 'random'. I'm thinking of adjusting the process to retry failures 24hrs later before sending a failure email. I'm open to other ideas if you or anyone can think of any.

Good luck at Llandysul and HPP

[Dee]

A quick query.

Now we have div 4 online entries - what about those who are not ranked but occasionally race as officials?

Could they just enter as a div 4 official or do I need to set up a "non-ranked official division" to select?

[JimW]

A quick query.

Now we have div 4 online entries - what about those who are not ranked but occasionally race as officials?

Could they just enter as a div 4 official or do I need to set up a "non-ranked official division" to select?

Probably a question for the kind person who compiles the officials ranking (Mrs C P Paddler?), after all that is the only reason the division is really needed.

Might need a change to rule B6.4 to add a division D, non-ranked, for the officials competition, perhaps with no points applied to div D?
After all some of these non-ranked officials may be recently retired Prem paddlers!

[Dee]

It is clear, I think, that when a paddler is promoted and no longer eligible to compete then the simplest and most obvious action is to cancel the original entry. However, at a div 2/3 competition a div 3 can be promoted and is still eligible to race, but in the higher division.

The current handling of this in the online system is, I realise, a bit cumbersome, so thoughts and ideas please!

Some of my problems:

• Div 2 is more expensive than div 3, but we have told the competitor how much we will be charging - we would need some form of agreement before charging more. Worse still, if the promotion occurs after payment has been taken then they would have to be charged a second transaction fee
• for those promoted before payment is taken, is it practical to just cancel the original entry and request paddler to re-enter or is this likely to cause confusion/frustration - what happens if competition is already full.
• suppose we put some sort of caveat on the entry form to say that we could charge more than quoted, would this be acceptable to paddlers - it is, sort of, asking them to give us carte blanc to charge what we like!
• How many of these promotions do we see - is it practical/workable to just flag them to pay on the day.
• if a paddler is promoted from div 3 to div 2 do they have a right to cancel their entry if they do not want to race in the div 2 event
• do we need to record the change - e.g. Create a cancellation record for the div 3 entry and a replacement entry for div 2 for tracking purposes or can we just update
• should this be an organiser only action (as per cancellation) or do we make it something the paddler has to do - the latter would mean we could ask for permission to charge the additional fee, but it will also mean more 'how to' questions or processing just not happening.
• The simplest option could be to allow organiser to transform entry to div 2 and automatically flag for additional payment on the day. BUT if the competitor subsequently adds an entry in another class, say, then the system will charge the extra payment for the transformed entry at that point (the complicated fee structure means we only ever look at 'total due for comp - total paid to date' as it's impossible to charge by entry). The flag might not be removed and the paddler could end up being asked to pay the increase in fee twice!

All a bit garbled but any thoughts from div 2/3 organisers as to how you'd like this to work would be welcome

[CeeBee]

So we want to keep this simple for both the paddler, the organiser and the online system.

If a paddler is promoted, the onus is on the paddler to sort out their revised entry. Would they need to have their new bib number to do this ?

I think we should do break this down into 2 scenarios

Promotions before on line payments taken i.e. 3 weeks before race

These would be handled through the online system with 2 options

1. "I've been promoted - i want to race" option or
2. "I've been promoted - I want to cancel" option

If they select option 1, this would then notify them that an additional entry fee will be due which they need to accept.
Could we also allow option 2 for all races so if a paddler has entered a Div 1 but is promoted to prem, they can cancel online?

Promotions after on line payment is taken i.e. within 3 weeks of race or offline entries

These would be handled through the organiser.

[Dee]

A lot of the things that came up in this thread should now be resolved - not all, but I'm getting there.

One request that came up somewhere was to do with knowing when payments would be taken and also the option to update card details. So:
The 'My Entries' option on the menu has been replaced with 'My Accounts'
This has two tabs - entries (the original list) and payments.
The payments lists all your authorised payments and the date we expect to take the money. You can then choose to see more detail on the payment - entries covered, refunds against the payment, the card details used for payment (last 4 digits only as we don't have access to the rest) etc - and update your card details for an individual payment.

[lesf]

Another great bit of work Dee. Thanks.

And as an organiser using the system for the first time, it saving me oodles of time already

[Mrs C P Paddler]

As far as officials go, I give them the last division they were ranked in. It does help if Organisers put the division on the results sheet as that saves me so much time in looking up the previous ranking. If they have not been ranked or I cannot find a ranking, then I usually go by their result in comparison to the event to see how they would have done if they had entered the race. I can then use this to allocate the points. As it cannot be computerised, and the points are done manually, how they enter doesn't matter to me. If they are a ranked paddler could it not pre-populate their division? I would suggest one area to enter but with the provision that they can enter the last division they were ranked in. I only have 2 'divisions' in Officials, Prem/div 1 and div 2/3. You could perhaps put these divisions on the entry and get the paddler to tick which division he/she is paddling in?

[Dee]

As far as officials go, I give them the last division they were ranked in. It does help if Organisers put the division on the results sheet as that saves me so much time in looking up the previous ranking. If they have not been ranked or I cannot find a ranking, then I usually go by their result in comparison to the event to see how they would have done if they had entered the race. I can then use this to allocate the points. As it cannot be computerised, and the points are done manually, how they enter doesn't matter to me. If they are a ranked paddler could it not pre-populate their division? I would suggest one area to enter but with the provision that they can enter the last division they were ranked in. I only have 2 'divisions' in Officials, Prem/div 1 and div 2/3. You could perhaps put these divisions on the entry and get the paddler to tick which division he/she is paddling in?

When ranked officials enter online then their ranking details are included in the data extracted for the timing team (added to age cat column) and for simply slalom (in the cls column). Non ranked officials can only enter online as Div 4s - they could put their previous ranking in the sponsorship field (which gets attached to club column) but probably won't.

The real issue is that the vast majority of officials entries just don't come through online entries at all, so are manually added to start lists at events This means that collecting normal ranking is totally dependent on those running the event on the day. I know from personal experience that the majority of officials cards are only ever partly completed - often just a name if the paddler is local, so when they get entered on to the results system they just go in as a name - no other info.

Would I be right in thinking that this is mainly an issue at div 2/3/4 events? If so then the only think I can think of doing is to get Ken to highlight the requirement to complete the info on Simply Slalom.