NEW Disc Golf group or league score keeper

I am a long-time software developer and have been playing disc golf for five years and love the sport. As a developer, I never had the opportunity to create a website. I decided to take an extended leave of absence to learn web development and decided that a fun project would be to create a disc golf league or group score keeper. I play twice week, with a few friends at Northside Park in Gainesville, Florida. We had always speculated on whether we were getting better and who was winning the most rounds. Thus the idea was born for a disc golf group score keeping program. The site allows players to be added, groups to be formed and then makes it trivial to record a round for the group. When a round in added, the players in the group are optionally emailed a summary of round. The site calculates lots of stats for the group including standings based on raw scores plus handicap scores. I have only entered a handful of courses close to Gainesville, but courses can also be added. There are options on how you want your group's handicap calculated, how many scores to include, whether the group is private or public etc. There is a help section at the web site that explains the features in more detail.

The site was available in March to a limited group for alpha testing. All the planned features are now complete. The site is now going into beta test. During beta-test, any problems found will be fixed and improvements to the site will be made. If anyone has any suggestions this is the best time to make them. Any and all comments (good or bad), or problems are welcomed and appreciated. My hope during beta test is to get at least 10-15 groups to use the site. My plan is to make this a free site, that allows a group of disc golf players to get an idea how they are playing over time, plus keep stats so you can share with the group and give each other some good natured ribbing. The site is www.rbqsoft.com/discgolf. If the sites starts to get some use, I will move it to its own domain.

So if you are interested in keeping stats for a league or group, please give it a try.

Thanks.

[Trevor Thorp]

Pete Crist already made a similar site called DiscGolfScene.com. Check it out. Sounds like yours has more options for handicaps. Maybe the two of you can work together on ideas.

[Rick Beery]

Thanks for the link. The site looks very nice. My site www.rbqsoft.com/discgolf is meant to mainly keep track of scores for groups of players and their standings within the group. I think both sites are meant to add some post round enternainment among friends. The DiscGolfScene.com site looks like is has other features as well as individual score keeping such as disc golf networking information concerning clubs and leagues.

[William Gilbert]

we currently use a program designed by our web guy Bill Brady.
We log members who pay there annual dues and then log all scores turned in by them, the program assigns divsions based on averages and awards points for how you shoot agaisnt your average within your division. 10, 9, 8 etc. points
Our league runs 22 weeks and the program tracks your 10 best pointed rounds and we award trophies or prizes at the end of the year to those people as well as having a party for our league members.
Scoring program is based on a singles league and we use it for both our leagues.

[Rick Beery]

This program is simply designed for a group of players who play regularly to keep tracks of their scores with and without handicaps. The standings are calculated by awarding two points for win and 1 point for a tie. All registered players can add or update rounds for the group that they belong. A non-registered player cannot add or update or round, but can be set up to receive emails the summarize that round when the group plays. Adding a round is trivial. A grid lists the players in the group and you simply fill in the players scores and click the submit button. The initial setup of the group, which you only have to do once, could use a little improvement to make it a bit easier. For an example of a small group look at the group, "Barr Minus One" at the course "Northside Park". This will give you a good idea of the information being kept. As far a season, there is no set limit on the length of a season. You can end the season with a click of the button. All stats are summarized and recorded for history and later viewing. Old rounds are deleted, thus the next round entered starts the new season. For our small group we make the winner of the round enter the scores. If there is a mistake it can be corrected by any registered player in the group and the entire group will be notified.

[William Gilbert]

Here are some suggestions / problems with the site.
I work in software and i am good at debugging
1) No instructions to access to tell you what to do in what order.

i added one of our courses it was a big pain in the butt
I think you need to put a lot of effort into the adding courses area it is way to cumbersome.

if i added a hole then went back in it did not retain my input data.

When i renumber or shuffle the holes i think the redundant and unchanged numbers to the left of the hole need to be hidden it makes it confusing.

when entering rounds i want to be able to enter the dates manually in particular during testing, i wanted to enter multiple test rounds but i couldn't i assume because of the date issue.

i couldn't see my club under many of the options so i couldn't see alot of the areas of the site.
I couldn't find myself in some areas either.

Good luck with your efforts.

[Rick Beery]

Thanks William for the suggestions. I appreciate the critique.
1) I will add a "Get Started" section in help.
2) I will work on making the hole updates for a course easier. But if you just want the to add rounds, you don't need to add the hole descriptions, but I agree that area needs work to make it easier to use.
3) I have not been able to reproduce your issue with a hole edit not being saved. That is strange, since the system creates all the holes initially and even your 1st edit, is an “edit” not a “create”. I will keep an eye on that to see what went wrong. I looked in the logs and did not see any database errors.
3) As far as the date for a round, you can change it. The form just fills in the current date time, but that is editable. I will give some thought how to make that more clear.
4) As far as not seeing your club under some of the options, my guess is that you are trying to see some of group related information such as stats, round info or handicap associated with the test round that you created for your group. After looking at the data you entered, the round was entered as an “Individual” round type instead of a “Group” type, thus you have no group data available for viewing under “Group Information”. The dropdown only show groups that have recorded rounds in the “Group Information” section. Your round can be seen in the “Player Information” section.

Although, the program is meant for groups, individuals can also add their scores. I envisioned this, just to give a player in the group a way to record a practice round that will not affect their group statistics. Basically a group’s rounds and an individual’s rounds are mutually exclusive. The “Group Information” section only looks at information where the round type was “Group” and the “Player Information” section only looks at round information where the round type was entered as “Individual”.

Since the system allows private groups, and private courses, sometimes your view of information changes based on whether you are an anonymous user or a logged in user. I know that was not the case in your instance.

Also, there is a 70 page detailed spec under Help that describes the system, but I don’t expect anyone to read that to be able to use the system, but it is there just is case.

I plan on working on usability during the beta test time period. My original focus was to make it easy to enter a round and get stats.

Thanks again for giving it a try, and I do appreciate the feed back.

[Rick Beery]

Hey William, I just thought I'd let you know that I added the "Getting Started" link and made a couple of changes to the "Edit Hole" page. I took your suggestion and removed the sequence number of the hole from Hole Summary view. 2) When you click save from "Edit Hole", you no longer will be redirected back to the hole summary view. Instead, you will be left in the "Edit Hole" page, which now has three addition links. One which brings you the previous hole, one that brings you to the next hole and the last that will return you to the hole summary page. I hope this helps a bit. I'll continue to try to improve that area. Thanks again for your input.

[Rick Beery]

FYI, in continuing to try to make improvements in the area of instructions and usabilty I have added a few sentences or a paragraph to most of the site's disc golf pages in order to better explain their functionality.

To others that may try the site, I do appreciate you pointing out problems or making suggestions. I will try to address the issues as fast as possible.

[Brian Niemann]

Rick,

You should bring your buddies out and play in the handicap league that I run at Northside. We've been up and running since last July. We are at Northside every Sunday at 10:30am.

The cost is $2 per round to establish and you need two rounds to get established. After that the cost is $5 per round. We usually have 10-15 people each week. Hope to see you out there. Maybe not this Sunday though with all the rain we're getting.

Brian

[Rick Beery]

Hey Brian, Maybe I'll join you sometime, my friends work in Gainesville, but one lives in Jax, and the other lives in Ocala. The Ocala friend plays with the Ocala group on weekends. You should be able to go to http://www.rbqsoft.com/DiscGolf/GroupInformation/Statistics and select the couse "Barr Minus One" and course "Northside Park" to view the stats on my rounds. Or just go to Rounds to see each individual rounds. Maybe those would be enough to get established?