Agree with the suggestions above. CNOC would certainly like to see the online entry system continued and improved upon. It has immensely cut down on admin work pre and during events - we had 230 entries at Donadea which would have been a nightmare if they were all EOD.

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Some small wishlist improvements: 

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* Saved details with your login, so you can quickly populate the form 

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* Dropdown Fields for Class and Club (with options for "None")

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* A way of seeing in the exported list which entries entered in a single group, for purposes of allocating SIs. We often see families entering, but they only want one or two SIs for the kids - so some way of indicating (for each entry) if an SI is required or not.

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* Club member discounts baked into prices.

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Dave

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Double posted for some reason - apologies

Hi folks thanks for responding.  Personally I am strongly of the view that on-the-day should be retained in some form or other.  

Thanks to all the contributors for the input. The club & class will be high on the list (but Martin's latest version of Ór allows you to sync with the SI Archive). I particularly like Angus' wording online discount suggestion...!
There is an ID beside each exported entry but I'm looking at it now and it's not the easiest to work with.
As it currently works the system can do EOD and pre-entry online (the Organiser just has to put a Comment saying that EOD is available - note Angus' positive wording!)

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I've a few questions/comments people might respond on here (or email me directly on webmaster@orienteering.ie if you prefer):

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- how can a centralised system recognise or confirm that someone is a club member? Maybe take it on trust?
- how would the virtual SI cards work? Do you mean that people get the same rental ones again? Or just find a way of making their life easier by storing their details for easy re-use?
- if not all entrants need an SI (I don't know what kind of cruel parents would deprive some children of the 'bleeper'), would the charge be reduced? should we do the same for maps?

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While I can't guarantee that stuff will get done quickly (or at all), I'm happy to hear all comments.

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Gavan

BOC typically use SI for Brown, Blue, Green and Red courses but controls cards for Orange and Yellow courses. The reason for control cards is that a lot of events are held in busy parks so any obvious controls are potential targets for mischief makers. The controls for Orange and Yellow need to be highly visible so we can't put them out of sight of people walking along paths. I recently tested securing controls with wire but it is a nuisance.

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This creates a few issues with the online entry system.

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1. We have to disable SI rental because SI is not used on Yellow and Orange courses so we have no rental charge at the moment and it is acting as a disincentive to buy one's own SI card for those on the SI courses. Furthermore, a typical family with kids aged under 10 will walk the course together and give control cards to the kids only. Similarly, in woods, if we use SI for Orange and Yellow, the parents will give SI cards to the kids only and maybe none to the 3 and 4 year olds who walk half of the course and are carried for the other half.

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The solution is to have a checkbox for each participant (which is active if no SI card number is entered and the course requires an SI card (a configuration option)). The box should be checked if the participant wants to rent an SI card.

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2. Given that Orange and Yellow courses typically do not use SI, we have a situation at popular locations that we may have up to 40 people with their own SIs, another 20 on rentals and another 100 using control cards. That means that about 25% of people have their own SIs. (On a very technical area, the numbers would be much smaller and most would have SIs and we may not use control cards so no issue).

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The problem with this is that most of the other 75%, who have no SI, participate maybe 5+ times per year and we want to simplify the entry process for them. We have a database of past participants to match the online entries against but a lot of them mis-spell their names or have different versions of their names, use a fada sometimes and not other times, use different character sets (ASCII versus UTF8) so matching names to pull in other data like age and club is not very successful.

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A simple solution is to use an unused range of SI card IDs (100,000 to 200,000) as member numbers with a range for each club. A club would assign somebody a number in the clubs range (potentially becoming a club membership number) and configure their details in the SI database. The only request of the entry system is to consider an SI card ID of between 100000 and 200000 as being the same as no SI card ID entered and some coordination of usage among clubs of this range of SI card IDs would be required.

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An alternative option for the entry system is to not use the SI database but rather have an official membership number for every orienteer using the login suggested by Dave earlier. This login would contain private details like email and contact number as well as SI number, club, age, normal course and a membership number. When entering an event online, a competitor enters the membership number of each person (not necessary to login) and it displays their name and SI number only but not other private information.

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it is not important how this is implemented but simply that the goal is to have as many people as possible in a database to cut down on work when organising events.