FAQ
Common questions I get in the feedback form. Written in SHOUTY VOICE to make people
who ask questions sound silly. Click
here to toggle all questions/answers.
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Yeah, we probably are. But this one might be your fault, too. First step, go to
Bike Reg and find your name on the results. If you're not there, then you never
raced, as far as we know. Sorry bro.
Second step, is your name spelled correctly on the BikeReg results? Did you enter as "Dave" but your profile says "David?" Did they spell your name as "Daivd" because they were in a hurry? Third step, are the results for that race formatted in the standard bikereg way? Do they have crystal-clear columns? If not, then the whole race is probably being held up because I have to manually format the data. |
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That's right man, it's always their fault, it's never your terrible handwriting.
In any case, you don't have to play the blame game because you can FIX IT YOURSELF.
That's right. Head over to the report duplicate racer name page and fill out the
form.
1) Put your real name in the first box 2) Click your real name when it comes up 3) Put the misspelling of your name in the 2nd box 4) Click your misspelled name when it comes up 5) Click "Merge Racers" 6) Rejoice |
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Guilty as charged. Ok, so the graph on the right side of the racer history page
shows the "percent beat over time." This should be pretty easy to figure out, the
vertical axis is percent beat (0.0-1.0), and the horizontal axis is time. The one
catch is that the vertical axis might not go all the way to 1.0 because my php graphing
library is a little... finicky.
The graph on the left is wacky, I'll give you that. What it's showing is which "fifth" of the field you finish in, with what frequency. So there are 5 sections of the field you could finish in: top 20%, 20%-40%, 40%-60%, 60%-80%, bottom 20%. If you finished in the top 20% 5 times you'll see a value of 5 on the vertical axis above the 1 on the horizontal axis. 4 times in the 40%-60% range? That will give you a value of 4 above the 0.6 on the horizontal axis. Get it? Basically, if you're good there's a big spike on the right edge. If you're bad there's a big spike on the left. If you're average, the graph spikes in the middle -- and if you're highly variable (one day you win, next day you lose), the graph will be flat. |
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Depends. Are the result on a PDF? Because then the answer is no.
Are the results poorly formatted, inconsistent text? Probably not. Are they excel or nicely formatted text? Now we're talking! Email me a url and we'll see what we can do. |
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Oh, but it's scientific crap. Don't be a hater. Go to your racer page and look at
the points in bold, green and red -- those are what's being factored in to your
ranking. If you have less than 6 races in bold, your points are the average of those
races. More than 5, and we drop your worst and best points. Calculating your listed
points is actually pretty straightforward, eh?
The real trick is how you score points in a given race. Really to rock some math? Ok, open up a race you did with points in another browser window and click the "Show Points" link. Above each category will magically appear a table listing ten names and "quality" and "depth" scores. For each of those five names, the high and low score is crossed out. They don't affected the scoring. The other three are averaged to get quality and depth. For quality, we then multiply by 0.8. Now get out your graph paper. Make a 2D plot with a horizontal axis that starts at 1 and ends at the number of racers in the field. Now make a vertical axis that starts at "Quality" and goes to infinity (hope you have big paper). In the middle of the horizontal axis, make a point that is equal to "Depth". Now draw a line from the lower left corner straight through the depth point, out to infinity. The points each place scores are equal to the value of that line above wherever they placed on the horizontal axis. Linear interpolation! I'll add a picture here eventually. |
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Hey, you get to drop your highest points. If you've DNFed more than 1 in your last 10 races, then you're darn right your score gets hurt by it. Pulling out because you're sucking shouldn't be rewarded. Having frequent mechanicals isn't either. And besides, the points are just for fun anyway? |
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Other people either jumped over you or got added to the list. As the season goes on the list gets longer -- it's really hard to move up when guys like Trebon get added at #1 mid-season. Just holding your place is pretty good, really. |
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Tell them to read the disclaimer on the bottom of the racer page about upgrade points. In general, the number to the right of any individual race is our best guess as to how many upgrade points you could have gotten. This number *does* take field size into account and also category (i.e. Cat 3 races have different points than Cat 4) but it's not magic. If you did a 3/4 race with 31 finishers, that race might look like it's a qualifying event because it has enough people -- but how many Cat 4s were in the race? We don't know, but I don't think 3s can get upgrade points by beating 4s, so that field probably didn't have enough Cat 3's in it to qualify for points. But we can't be sure. The best bet is always to talk to you your friendly USA Cycling official, or to sandbag really hard until someone slashes your tires. |
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You probably added a url that went to a photographer's site instead of a gallery from a particular race. If I can't hit a gallery with photos from the race in less than 3 obvious clicks from the url, it gets deleted. |
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Darn right it is. Drop some feedback and we'll get in touch. The idea of making money beyond enough to cover hosting isn't really what this site is about, so you might be really impressed by our rates. |
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Awesome. Tell us about it. Even if your idea is kind of sucky we might do it. It's a long offseason... |
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And well it should. We're pointing out the people who will haunt your entire offseason,
after all. But maybe you're wondering exactly how that list is calculated...
First off -- data is limited to the last 12 months. I don't care whose butt you were whooping back in 2001 and you shouldn't either. Time heals all wounds. Next, we introduce a stat called "defeats." A defeat is when Racer A beats Racer B by ten or fewer places. This makes Racer B angry, and makes Racer A boastful. Why only ten places? Well, we had to draw the line somewhere -- when you're getting beat by 20 places, it's hard to call that person a rival, hmmm? Each defeat has an attribute called the margin, which is the number of places between the racers -- the best margin for Racer A is 1, meaning he beat Racer B by one place. So when we show Nemeses and Victims on a racer history page, we're showing who victimized you the most often/whom you victimized the most, and we break ties by lower average margin. Beating someone three times by 7 places might get you a note on their wall -- but do it three times by one place each time and they'll be having nightmares. |
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Oh no! Your points will be artificially high! The whole system is ruined!!
Just kidding. We actually have code to take care of this, but unlike the "duplicate racer name" function we don't trust you to do it yourself. Instead, kick us some feedback with your name, along with (1) what state you're from and (2) what team name we can expect to see on your results, and we'll take care of it. |