Discussion: Email

Is that seriously being considered? What's the complexity?

Apparently having 3 days for non-elites and 4 days for elites is a complexity. Eventor isn’t fit for that purpose. So they are thinking of changing the purpose, rather than Eventor (or using some really basic workarounds).

Alternatively the 3 day could become a 4 day for the non-elites, problem solved. There was a FB 'poll' doing the rounds straight after Easter, not sure if any conclusions were drawn.

At this stage the 4 days for all option is pretty unlikely, but if we want to avoid having the prologue killed off then the technical committee needs to hear pretty strongly from the NOL managers and elites.

Perhaps Cambridge Analytica can tell OA what to do then?

Bomb, are you saying that the technical committee is leaning towards killing it?

There are certainly some fairly loud voices among the state technical reps and event organisers that are looking to kill it - mainly from the logistical perspective of the 3 vs 4 day event. The technical chair thinks that the tail shouldn't wag the dog.

Why is 4 day for all unlikely?

Or why not a 3 day for all followed by a relay on the last day? Like the JK in the UK. It's pretty ridiculous that we only have one relay each year.

Sounds like they do want the tail (inadequate back end resources) to wag the dog (format of the competition for the last 10?) years to me.

Just seems odd as a reason - I can think of other valid reasons (that I don’t agree with) to ditch the prologue. But surely knocking up the start lists Sunday night and working out final results after Monday could be done in a spreadsheet in <1hr, so I don’t even get why eventor being crap matters.

Also sounds like not all elite course runners are being consulted.

Please consult as widely as you possibly can amongst anyone who runs NOL races, and give all feedback to Simon Uppill.

In fairness to the event organisers, this problem seems to have arisen since Eventor became the event entry system and the primary issue is incompatibility/ies with timing systems such as OE...and apparently the live results display is an issue too. It does frustrate me that every year the organisers say in advance that they think they have a workaround which will be ok, but then afterwards they complain bitterly about how unworkable it was.

OA has now received a formal request for a rule change to separate out the prologue from the 3-Days for elite classes, and while the OA technical director and committee chair do not support the rule change, it seems very likely that if the technical committee is asked to vote upon this, the vote will fall in favour of making it simpler for the "overworked volunteers"...so we really need to hear from elites who do want to retain the 4-day competition!

(The outcome of the survey of competitors at the 2016 Australian 3-Days was that non-elite age classes did not want to have the Prologue added to their 3-Day time.)

Sorry to hijack your log, Craney. Jennycas and Bomb, have any of the software devs in the community had a look at this event entry/event/display problem? We can't change OE or Eventor directly obviously but perhaps some code could merge/split/wrangle data from each to make it easier to manage (perhaps not in Excel but that's only because I'm not sure I could get Excel to do live results!)