Doug has been working for several months on some enhancements and finally drew a circle around what he’d done so far and said “ship it.” If you’ve ever been a project manager, you know how… ‘risky’ it can be to tell a creator to go nuts without providing any kind of timeline or scope to rein them in. But we’re retired and Doug was having a lot of fun, so this did go on a bit, apologies for that. It’s here now!
But what IS “it”? If only we could remember all the changes (starting a change log tomorrow…) However, the big items are:
- We’ve added a log in/account creation. IMPORTANT THING TO KNOW: ANYBODY can do ANYTHING they HAVE been doing without creating an account! So you can search for a dog or a club or a trial, you can view and download reports, all the same. The only thing that isn’t the same is that your “recent” entries, those “last things I looked at” quicklinks that appear under the search bar will now only show up if you have a log in. This is a technical limitation, not an intention withholding on our part.
WHY an account? Because it allows us to “remember” things across your visits to the site. In particular, it enables two things at this point. One is the creation of Packs, which I’ll explain in a minute. The other is that, with a verified email address, Judges will be able to retrieve reports on their own statistics.
Oh my gosh, I thought you said you weren’t going to report on individual judges! You are correct, I did say that. And we aren’t going to provide this information to competitors, I’m afraid, and I’m happy to discuss exactly why at another time. Although I really do expect that most judges are keeping detailed records of their own, compiling those may be a different story, as we know about Scent Work records in general and how easy it can be to forget to update your spreadsheet, essentially why we started this project. So these are nicely formatted compiled reports with Q rates per each class judged, alongside the average numbers for those classes from the database as a whole. In order to access these, a Judge will need to set up an account, and then request to be confirmed as a judge. We will manually (a human bean must be involved every time, that’s a feature, not a bug!) compare the verified email address they provide against the one in the AKC Judges Directory, so a 2-step verification, before giving them the ability to generate their own report.
Okay, so I’m not a judge, what have you done for *me* lately? Well, not as much as we had hoped. This is “Part A” of something and we’re really going to need your help for “Part B.” We’re calling what we have for you “Packs.” Packs are groupings of dogs for whom you can run reports en masse.
Why would I want to run reports for groups of dogs? Well, the thinking goes like this: if you set yourself up with an account, you can create three different types of Packs:
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- Personal Packs, aka “My Dogs.” This is a grouping of the dogs you handle, and possibly those of your friend that doesn’t really keep their own records, so you tend to do it for them. So before or after a trial, if you’ve already got a Personal Pack defined, you can run a quick report that covers everybody to make sure you know what pre-printed move-up forms to take with you (What? You don’t create those “just in case”?) or to make sure the results as reported by the AKC are the ones you expected. I know we all say we SHOULD do this, but, trust me, you really SHOULD do this!
- Club Packs. This grouping speaks to the heart of this feature, first envisioned when folks were scrambling at the end of the year to identify the dogs eligible for awards that their clubs have defined. This allows dogs whose handlers belong to particular club — Performance, Breed, Parent, whatever — to group their dogs together for reporting and associate them with a particular club. There can be multiple Packs per club, but note that we only “know about” clubs that have hosted Scent Work trials, though!
- Shared Packs. These are “Friend Packs” you create in collaboration with other handlers. If you want to group dogs for a club that hasn’t ever hosted a Scent Work trial, or if you just want to pull together a “posse” of “my peeps” for any reason, this is your avenue. I will admit to having very (VERY) vague notions of enabling some kind of cross-country “league” comparison play with these, but readily admit I have no idea how that would really work. You can create multiple Shared Packs.
So, this “Log in” business… Again, you don’t have to create an account and password to use the same features you have before. Your User ID must be a working email address, as we send a temporary password to allow you to log in to that address. PLEASE make sure you use a UNIQUE and relatively secure password! That LAST THING WE WANT is for our database to get hacked and have that expose the same information you use to log into your bank! I hope it goes without saying that we have no intention of being hacked – the security package we are using is the same on Instagram uses. Our expectation is that your email address and password will not be made available to anybody else (we are DEFINITELY not selling them or putting them on the Dark Web or anything nefarious, and my absolute greatest hope is that nobody but you ever gets to look at them again!). But we all know what the world is like, so be careful, okay? We are also asking for a name and that is just to associate with your identity as a Pack member — and we do provide a “blind” contact option, where someone can see you/your dog as member of a pack and “contact” you but your email will not be available to them unless you reply to their email to you. Many of you already use “nicknames” on Facebook etc and you are welcome to use them here, too.
All this just to be able to group dogs for reports? Well, no, and that gets us to the Part B, where we need your help. Our real hope, here, was to be able to apply ranking systems to these groupings, primarily so those volunteers that are collecting information for awards wouldn’t have to compile the data independently every time. Usually, those involve points that are awarded on the basis of something like the level of a title achieved, possibly “since the beginning of time,” but more frequently during the course of a specific time period like a calendar year. Maybe there are points for element titles, maybe it’s just a point for “any title,” so “most number of titles achieved in [Year]” is the goal. But we first had to be able to group the eligible dogs and next had to be able to create a way to allow data to persist across visits to the site, because you wouldn’t want to have to set that whole criteria system up every time you wanted to run it (hence the accounts).
And, if you look at what we’re doing here… it might also be fun/interesting/provocative to look at applying criteria for awards that one might wish the AKC to offer… such as the “earned based on accumulated achievements” Championship that doesn’t exist for this sport. So whatever system of criteria that you can create could ideally also be applied to “all dogs of a particular breed,” or, simply, “all dogs.”
ONE BIG CAVEAT to that concept — we can only use the data that has been reported in the AKC Scent Work Trial Results. That means we don’t have access to dog dates of birth; *we* cannot identify dog handlers; we know that there is a very small percentage of dogs for whom our calculated titles are incorrect because the AKC has changed the dog’s achievement record but has never amended the results; and, especially, some of the published Results are… questionable. As an example, while I’d like to include Time in the criteria offered, maybe as a ratio to the fastest time in the class? Could do max time but it never changes for Buried or Containers… but I digress. Anyway, while I’d like to include Time, there are cases where a dog or sometimes an entire class shows Qualifying score results but all have a time of zero. There are cases where dogs have impossible amounts of Faults — greater than 50, and/or with decimal places, i.e. “she had 0.02 Faults.” There are definitely situations where people have contacted me to say “I got a Fault, so didn’t get the HIT you report for me” but their Fault is not shown in the AKC Results. And there are cases where the placements reported by the AKC make no sense in terms of the times reported; we can run our own “placements” out past the four the AKC awards but, again, that depends on the accuracy of Time and Faults and… those do not appear to have had priority when it comes to recording accuracy.
I know this has already gone on forever, but I do have to insert — this is an observation about the AKC system but not a criticism of the personnel whom I’ve finally realized are basically re-entering everything they receive. It simply never occurred to me how manual this process is, which introduces so many opportunities for error and takes a lot of time and effort (no wonder NACSW results are usually available within a day or so! They only have to be typed in once, by the Score Room, and then uploaded!). And if you are doing data entry as fast as you can, and you know some of the information is not used for anything “down the road” like placements or Faults, I can see why you wouldn’t obsess on capturing those. One take-away of this, however, is that using any data that hasn’t been prioritized — which is basically anything besides the Q and the Dog ID — in calculating some hoped-for award will be very chancey… which severely limits the potential for retroactive awards. As someone with a retired and now elderly dog, this hurts my heart, but there it is.
Back before my eyes glazed over Because So Many Words, you said you needed my help? Yes. [Stern Look] Thus far, although I have asked, I have not received any requested criteria systems. In order to cover whatever it is you are already doing, we need to know what that is. I have gone to Parent Club websites and tried to figure it out, but have thus far always guessed wrong, usually with a re-direct that, no, the system you saw only contributes to points for this other award, not one specifically for Scent Work. So we have no idea what you need. And we’d really appreciate it if you’d let us know what you are doing, as well as your ideas for what you’d like to see offered as potential criteria systems! Please Contact Us!
Anything else? Well, yes, glad you asked! With an account, you can add Call Names to dog records. Hopefully, everyone will play nicely and not use Bad Words or mess around with dogs they don’t know and love, but we’re going to at least start by assuming everybody is a grown up and here to support the sport.
But, otherwise, I think that’s it! I think Doug thinks I need to make “how to” videos but I’d rather turn it loose and see how it goes. Retired, etc.
Thanks for being a part of this!