Registration Process – looking for feedback
A few folks have emailed us suggesting different options for how to manage our registration process. For the past couple of years, our website has gone down due to what we believe is a combination of a bit of “ad” malware on our site + people “smashing” reload on their browser over and over again in a super short window via scripting. By way of perspective, for our January In Person Robot Game events where we posted the scoreboard + livestream on our site, we had ALOT of visitors and views, yet the site never went down.
Here are some statistics of views & visitors to norcalfll.org starting in the Fall before registration opened on Nov-17 and through to our January In Person Robot Game pages:
As you can see, for the weekends that we had the In person robot game scoreboard and livestream link on our site (including interestingly, the Jan-8th event when we had expected to be in person but had to pivot to remote), we had ALOT more views and more individual visitors.
One option that people think would be better would be to have everyone “offline” submit their tournament choices via a form (up to N choices – 5? 8? 10?) and then run a separate simulation that randomly selects a person and gives them their highest available choice. We don’t really like this option as we have repeatedly heard and seen that people will alter their choices based on what are the current options. If you don’t know what will be available and only have 1 or 2 choices that will work for your team (and are at the end of the randomized list), you might not get ANY option to register or any option that will work for the team.
But on the positive side, it would solve the “people smashing on the keyboard” issue. What do you think?
One thing that we are going to do is separate out our 3 main program websites to different ISPs after the May Rec League events so that norcalfll.org does not affect norcalftc.org or norcalflljr.org (and vice versa).
We would love to hire a company to move our customized registration process to a cloud-based solution that would give us alot of scalability – if you can help on that front due to your cloud knowledge OR you are willing to help us find an affordable solutions company (we need someone to maintain the solution – not just implement it – so are not looking for an individual to just re-implement) OR you are willing to fund this, please let us know.
Also, feel free to add your idea(s) as a comment below. Next year, when we get back to our regular seasons, we would really like to have this solved for good. …. asking people not to smash their keyboard or write scripts has not worked. [I was really hopeful that requiring the coach sign-in would have helped to solve this issue but it did not]
The *best case* is whomever picks first is random. Opening the website all at once is much worse than random: it makes everyone show up at a certain time, and it favors those who are discourteous and willing to click “refresh” more.
It may sound a little whiny to say it’s an inconvenience, but this is pretty stressful for me. I have to do it for 2-3 FTC events + 1 FLL event. I have to choose how much clicking ‘refresh’ is fair, knowing that people who click more than me are going to have a better chance of making it to an event. I have large school-associated teams, so I’m more constrained than most coaches in what events will “work” for the majority of my students.
Showing up at 7PM 4 times may not sound like that big of a deal, but often this is the night of a staff or robotics team meeting and it’s a stretch to get my kids fed and then show up in front of the computer. If we did something like the “lottery”, I could collect inputs from parents and enter them into a form, and not face the blame for not navigating the website as quickly as other people.
I am likely willing to implement a scheduling system and keep it operating for a few years if this is a direction PAL wants to go in (I’d need to know exact scope after requirements are gathered).