This user has no status.
This user has no status.
Member
For someone who doesn't know the most accurate rating system story of Rating Centrals.
fatt
skip
David Marcus (AUTHOR OF RATING CENTRALS)
fatt
He might have lost interest. He wanted to be part of the American table tennis adventure but he also pursued a wider audience re. tt ratings: the world!When a PhD is willing to spend their time on a ping pong rating system for a small association like USATT, they should be given all the leeway they need and I suspect USATT wanted to keep DM on a leash (telling him what to program lol) which he declined.
It's a shame, his system is the best in the world; waste at its best! but he put the work in, it is there available and he can pass it on or just wait for a better opportunity.
More to come.
skip
As ITTF new ranking system completely screwed up players' playing level, higher ranked player doesn't mean higher playing level - world-wide TT fans will be more interested in RC system than ever before.
Don't know if RC no longer updates ITTF sanctioned events is due to the system's creator (Dr, David Marcus) lost interest on his own creation/technical difficulty to capture the match results from the new ITTF database or the funding problem.
If it is the former, not much we can do about it. If it is due to the latter, funding problem, then there is something we can do (or try): (A) The world-wide TT fans can write to TT equipment mfrs (Butterfly, DHS, Donic, Nittaku, etc.) asking them to advertise on RC's site. (B) And we can launch a donation program and get world-wide TT fans to donate to RC. (Personally, I will donate.)
David Marcus (AUTHOR OF RATING CENTRALS)
Don't see much, if any, advertisements by Table Tennis equipment
companies.
See
http://www.ratingscentral.com/SupportRatingsCentral.php
Hope they are alright.
Sean and I are fine.
I have no connection with the company that operates the site,
Unfortunately, there is no company. It is just a hobby for me and Sean. See
http://www.ratingscentral.com/SupportRatingsCentral.php
They probably got pissed off at the ABS ball and quit the sport completely
Sean still coaches and, I assume, plays. I haven't played in a couple of
years, so I haven't tried the ABS balls.
DM occasionally comes on the forum to chime in on something RC related
being debated... I would be patient.
Hope he will show up and let the TT fans know.
I don't read this forum. Using it to communicate with me is playing "Six[/FONT]
degrees of separation"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation. Someone told me
today that there was this thread.
If you want to communicate with me, I don't think I'm hard to find: I have a couple of websites with contact info:
http://www.davidmarcus.com/Personal.htm
http://www.ratingscentral.com/Problems.php
Posting to this forum is not a reliable method.
Might be something to do with all the ITTF's website changes and how this
makes the transferring of results to RC trickier.
About a year ago, ITTF unveiled their wonderful new site. It looked all
cool and was probably written in AngularJS. However, it was hard to view
the draw sheets: you could only see one match at a time. You wonder who
thought that was a good idea. Probably other things were messed up, too.
However, they left the old site up, so you could still find the results
there. And they soon added links from the new site to the draw sheets on
the old site.
In October, they sent out this press release:
http://mailchi.mp/d1e7fe0e4fcd/ittf-...l?e=57190ec215
So, another disastrous IT project bites the dust. At that point, the old
site disappeared and the new site stopped even having its one match at a
time results. Now, it only has PDFs of the draw sheets.
Scraping the PDFs wouldn't be a lot of fun, and it sounds like ITTF will be
trying to make changes to the site. We've seen a couple of other sites that
have ITTF data in a more usable format, but we don't know how official they
are or how they get their data. So, I'm waiting to see if things stabilize
before spending a lot of time trying to rewrite my scraper to grab data off
the current site.
We have no contacts in ITTF, so if anyone knows anything, feel free to pass
it on. I have no idea if ITTF intentionally makes the data hard to get or
it didn't occur to them that people would like to be able to get the data.
> For ITTF sanctioned events: This requires work on RC's part
It took some effort to write the scraper program. But, it generally only
took me about five minutes to submit each event (except when ITTF did
something weird with the data, like had matches where the winner was
neither of the players or made up new event codes).
> For League events: The League Director enters the data, with no work
> needed on RC's part
Yes, although it is impressive how many things event directors can do wrong
or need help with. For example, despite the instructions clearly saying
that event directors should make backups of their data, I get a steady
stream of directors telling me that they don't have the data for their old
events because they no longer have the computer they used to submit the
events.
> I suspect USATT wanted to keep DM on a leash
They mostly ignored us. The original project was suggested by Sean and the
USATT Ratings Committee. Before spending 2000 hours developing a new
system, I wanted some indication that it was wanted and would be adopted.
Some board members seemed supportive. But, words are cheap. I said that to
do the research and development, I'd need some better computing resources
(remember, this was long ago when computers were primitive). I said USATT
should pay for a decent computer and software that I could use for the
project; this would cost around $5,000. I would contribute the 2000 hours
for free. The board declined. I wasn't in the room when the Executive
Director and board discussed it, but I'm pretty sure it was because the
Executive Director didn't want to spend the money. The Executive Director
then said we could get a grant from the USOC. Perhaps foolishly, I agreed,
and we did that. Skip ahead a couple of years, and the system is ready and
the Ratings Committee recommends USATT adopt it. By this time, the few
somewhat-friendly people on the board had been voted out, and the board was
full of nutty people. We attended the board meeting where it was decided
whether to adopt the new system. The discussion was completely nutty with
board members saying things that were ridiculous (with ridiculous
PowerPoint presentations to back them up). I think the vote was 7-5 against.
In retrospect, I'm happy to not be involved with USATT. They are very hard
to work with. Tangential to Ratings Central is Zermelo, my tournament
software. This supports USATT tournaments. Twice in the last few years,
USATT has changed how they handle digital submissions of tournament
results. The first time, they emailed the three people who had tournament
software and said the system would be changing in one week (they were going
to go live with the change and announce it in literally one week) and they
were sure we would be able to modify our apps to support the new formats by
then. This was the first we had heard of this, and they didn't provide any
sample data or specs for the new formats. After several months of
discussion with them, I did manage to get them to tell us (decide) what the
new format would be and modify Zermelo to work with their new setup. Then a
year later, they changed it again, and again did not coordinate with us.
it is there available and he can pass it on
That might be hard. There are quite a few interconnected parts.
(A) The world-wide TT fans can write to TT equipment mfrs (Butterfly,
DHS, Donic, Nittaku, etc.) asking them to advertise on RC's site.
We have sometimes had people pay for ads, but not regularly. I doubt you
will be able to convince companies to spend their money by writing to them
(B) And we can launch a donation program and get world-wide TT fans to
donate to RC. (Personally, I will donate.)
We welcome donations:
http://www.ratingscentral.com/SupportRatingsCentral.php
We accept donations in any amount, so you are welcome to donate based on
what the site is worth to you. If you are curious what our expenses are
this may help:
We could cover our out-of-pocket expenses
* if each director who submitted an event in the past year donated
US$5.91,
* or if each director donated US$0.25 for each event that they
submitted in the past year,
* or if each player who played in an event in the past year donated
US$0.05,
* or if each player donated US$0.01 each time they entered an event in
the past year.
David
Last edited: