This release consists of an update of the platform and an huge increase in performance when calculating series results. Previously a very inefficient database query was making this painfully slow.
There's a new type of 'competition' - "Collect Images":
This isn't for competitions. For a long time now I've been using this website to collect images for member presentations, critiques and candidates for inter-club competitions. Often we've wanted to collect ten or more images in an order decided by the author, but, until now that hasn't been possible.
If you choose this option authors can upload images and when the deadline passes they are grouped by author and kept in upload order. Once downloaded they will be sequenced in that way as well. The display still shows a space for scores, just ignore that. One day I might get rid of the scoring columns for this type of image collection.
The main change is that images are now shown in the order in which the author uploaded them. Their first image in round one, second in round two etc,. The order of the authors in each round is random so there is no pattern which the judge could discern.
The main reason for this change is that in inter-club competitions clubs may wish to decide the round each image will appear in. It would make in interesting PhD study to see if the order has any consistent impact on the final result.
The inter-club competition flow broke when a new club was added, this is now fixed and all works smoothly.
The spammer check was set to brand everyone a scammer. It now takes notice of the result from Turnstile.
Nothing for users to see here!
The contact form captcha (turnstile) is now working, it was turned off and I was deluged with spam.
Users in inter-club competitions are no longer being counted for billing purposes.
There was one package which I use which changed significantly some time ago and I chose then to stick with the version which worked and needed no changes in my code. It's never a good idea to stick with old versions so I bit the bullet and have changed this site to use the newest version. It's well tested, but if you do have any issues uploading CSV or Excel files please let me know.
The payment page was broken. Last year I thought that I had moved away from the deprecated method which I was using, and I had, except in one important respect. I now use the correct card entry form so payment will work again.
The site is now built and runs using Microsoft's .NET 8.
There was a problem with downloading competitions with a large number of entries, it has been a problem for me for a while, but it finally happened to another club so I fixed it. The issue was that I was using Cloudflare as a reverse proxy which means all of the traffic went through them and they issued the https certificate. The free account (which I use) has a fixed request timeout of two minutes, so any download which took longer than that failed. The site no longer uses Cloudflare as a reverse proxy, you now connect directly and I get https certificates from letsencrypt. If everything breaks in 90 days time then I've got the renewal wrong!
When entering the author in the image metadata was checked against the name of the author uploading the image. This was a hangover from the way Storrington used to work. That check is no longer performed so the 'Fix It' button should see a lot less use.
After one failed attempt at this which was far too complicated there is now provision for competitions which are based on awards (e.g., Highly Commended, Commended) rather than scores. Scoring Schemes are now called Judging Schemes.
Each entry still has a number which has to be entered, but when the results are shown the numbers are translated to the given text.
Here's an example:
