Scioly.org

Hi scioly.org,
I've been working on a web app that helps tournament directors manage tournaments, called Scoresheets. This is something I've been working on for a while and now I've decided to share it with the community! An early prototype was run at UT Invitational 2017 and UT Regionals 2018, and will be used at this season's UT-run tournaments as well. It does:

• automatic score ranking and team ranking
• automatic awards presentation generation
• download results (as CSV)

Some things that planned:

• customize awards presentations (branding, fonts, etc)
• allow tournament directors to invite event supervisors with limited control
• open source the codebase

Note: Scoresheets is in a early open alpha, which means that what you see now will be changing as more features are added.

a boy wrote:

• automatic score ranking and team ranking
• automatic awards presentation generation

Can you describe either of these in a little more detail? Since there are plenty of existing similar solutions, what makes this one stand out?

I'm not aware if Ezra or Avogadro do automatic awards presentation generation, someone let me know if they do! Scoresheets is also free and I plan on open sourcing it eventually since much of my initial motivation for making this was to make running tournaments easier and cheaper.

Avogadro/Ezra does automatic awards presentation generation and scoresheet tabulation, however it's not free (unless if you're a student-run organization) and the user experience isn't great. So it's very exciting to see open-source work on this Let me know if you're looking for help

a boy wrote:I'm not aware if Ezra or Avogadro do automatic awards presentation generation, someone let me know if they do! Scoresheets is also free and I plan on open sourcing it eventually since much of my initial motivation for making this was to make running tournaments easier and cheaper.

fanjiatian wrote:Avogadro/Ezra does automatic awards presentation generation and scoresheet tabulation, however it's not free (unless if you're a student-run organization) and the user experience isn't great. So it's very exciting to see open-source work on this Let me know if you're looking for help

I can confirm that Chalker's does automatic awards presentation as well (and is conveniently free and extensible - the later of which is quite helpful). The only other significant scoring system that I am aware of - Scilympiad's native system, which I guess I can just refer to as Scilympiad - reportedly also does it, although my only personal experience with it is as an event supervisor (where the interface is harder to work with as fast as Chalker's). My preference for Chalker's is likely influenced by the unreliability of internet connection at tournaments I've run (it failed partway through the first time and didn't work at all the second time). Although, internet score transfer provides little benefit since the absence of score counseling is, in my opinion, much more of a problem, and internet score transfer makes it much more likely for an event supervisor to accidentally skip score counseling.

The concern with the lack of internet was something we worried a lot 5 years ago when we talked about having an online system. I think technology has progressed to a point where it's less of a concern because even if the host internet goes down for some reason, many of us have mobile hotspots that will allow for scoring. Of course, if both internet and mobile services suddenly go down, there may be bigger issues to worry about

IMO, not being able to update scores in real-time and allow multiple people to input scores greatly slows productivity and increases room for error. Chalker's system requires the score master to manually enter or copy paste scores since it's just a local spreadsheet with VBA macros (which don't work when converted to Google Spreadsheets). Copy pasting can be problematic if the user pastes the formula and not the underlying value (surprising number of people still don't know how to use spreadsheets). But of course, only Chalker's system / a spreadsheet will work if both the Internet and cellular network are busted

fanjiatian wrote:IMO, not being able to update scores in real-time and allow multiple people to input scores greatly slows productivity and increases room for error. Chalker's system requires the score master to manually enter or copy paste scores since it's just a local spreadsheet with VBA macros (which don't work when converted to Google Spreadsheets). Copy pasting can be problematic if the user pastes the formula and not the underlying value (surprising number of people still don't know how to use spreadsheets). But of course, only Chalker's system / a spreadsheet will work if both the Internet and cellular network are busted

What do you mean by having multiple people input scores? (I can't think why you would want that on the event supervisor's side, and don't see how speed is a serious concern on the side of the master scoresheet with Chalker's)

Although, for me the bigger issue was more difficult score counseling - it was hard enough for us to make sure an event supervisor didn't just drop off the scores and leave, handing us a bunch of unbroken ties or something.

fanjiatian wrote:IMO, not being able to update scores in real-time and allow multiple people to input scores greatly slows productivity and increases room for error.

For what it's worth, I don't have any issue with people using other programs / developing other software. I think it's great some people are willing to contribute to the SO ecosystem in this way and I'll be the first to advocate for using a truly excellent system.

At nationals we generally use my system, but have used Avogadro a few times in recent years. We'll be using Ezra next year since it's at Cornell. As the person ultimately responsible for ensuring scoring is as effective and error-free as possible, I do find fault with the statement I've quoted above. The main thing I emphasize over and over again is that we have a best practices PROCESS that is very important to follow (and is documented in this file available on the national website: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8n8i0ojswlk7n ... 1.pdf?dl=0 ). The actual tools used don't really matter (I happen to show my system in the guide, but it's easily adapted to other systems).

The key thing is we WANT to slow certain things down and have multiple eyes cross checking things at various steps. I've either run or been involved in scoring at about half of the National Tournaments over the ~3 decade history of SO and can tell SO many stories of mistakes, errors, and weird things that have cropped up. Most all the steps you see in our scoring guidelines are direct results of situations we've encountered in the past.

The biggest concern I have is that far too many people want to 'streamline' everything and get to the point of scores essentially going straight from the event supervisor / volunteers to the awards ceremony. That's a big mistake in my opinion and I'd strongly advocate against it! You have to have objective, independent score counselors checking what the event supervisors do, otherwise you are bound to have mistakes creep in.

chalker wrote:The main thing I emphasize over and over again is that we have a best practices PROCESS that is very important to follow (and is documented in this file available on the national website: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8n8i0ojswlk7n ... 1.pdf?dl=0 ). The actual tools used don't really matter (I happen to show my system in the guide, but it's easily adapted to other systems).

The key thing is we WANT to slow certain things down and have multiple eyes cross checking things at various steps. I've either run or been involved in scoring at about half of the National Tournaments over the ~3 decade history of SO and can tell SO many stories of mistakes, errors, and weird things that have cropped up. Most all the steps you see in our scoring guidelines are direct results of situations we've encountered in the past.

The biggest concern I have is that far too many people want to 'streamline' everything and get to the point of scores essentially going straight from the event supervisor / volunteers to the awards ceremony. That's a big mistake in my opinion and I'd strongly advocate against it! You have to have objective, independent score counselors checking what the event supervisors do, otherwise you are bound to have mistakes creep in.

I can testify that every problem I encountered my first time running scoring at a tournament was due to the deviations I made from that process for expediency (although, at least not that kind of more deliberate expediency).