Nationals Info & Scoring

Info Pages

We keep all the info that a Nationals competitor needs to know on https://www.iac.org/us-national-aerobatic-championships-2016 (or other year as appropriate) -- with a shortcut to the current year's Nationals pages at: https://www.iac.org/nationals.

To avoid presenting the user with a ridiculously long web page, we there are several sub-pages covering the schedule, results, logistics, etc.

We also created a page called Organizer's Notes to house information that is more useful to than contest staff than to the competitors. In this case you should rename the page so that the link from the old Nationals page keeps working, and then create a new page for the new year.

Nationals Results

Overview

Whereas JaSPer is used for scoring all AC regional events, Nick Buckenham's ACRO software is used for scoring the Nationals. It outputs a large set of HTML files that it can push to a server via FTP. (FTP is inherently unsecure but we haven't succeeded in getting Nick use SFTP instead.)

Server Setup

We have created a Linux account named natresults on the IAC web server for uploading results. Contact the webmaster to get the password. The natresults home directory is /usr/local/share/drupal7/sites/www.iac.org/files/nationals-results. There is one subdirectory per year under that, creatively named 2014, 2015, etc.

The results page is simply a bullet list of years in reverse chronological order, with each item pointing to https://www.iac.org/files/nationals-results/nnnn/index.htm, where nnnn is the year. This means that the results page must be manually updated each year unless/until we write a bit of logic to build the bullet list automatically.

At the conclusion of Nationals -- or certainly no later than the start of the next year's Nationals -- the Webmaster should create a subdirectory to hold the new year's results and change the permissions of prior subdirectories to 755 in order to prevent an accidental overwrite.

ACRO setup

Here are the steps that configure ACRO to upload results to the IAC web site (valid as of 2017):

1. Start ACRO
2. Open the contest file (assuming you've already started one for the current year's Nationals)
3. On the top menu bar, click on Publish Results. A pop-up menu will appear.
4. On the pop-up menu, in the Web section, click on Files Upload ftp manager
5. You'll see a pop-up dialog box that says, Some FTP or local target folder data is required. Do you want to do this now?
6. Click Yes.
7. Another pop-up box will appear entitled, ACRO File Destination and Server / Network Control Wizard
8. If it's not already selected, click on the top radio button entitled Use the Internet server login panel...
9. Under Internet destination, select Your own website
10. Under Web server URI, enter: ftp.iac.org
11. Under Sub-folder, enter: 2018
12. Under Username, enter: natresults
13. Under Password, enter the value supplied by the Webmaster
14. Click the Save button in the lower left-hand corner of the pop-up window

Cloning Procedure

Use the following steps to create a new set of Nationals pages each year:

1. Configure the ACRO upload directory for contest results
   • Log into the web server's Linux command line
   • cd /usr/local/share/drupal7/sites/www.iac.org/files/nationals-results
   • chmod 755 *
   • sudo -u www-data mkdir nnnn (where nnnn is the upcoming year)
   • sudo chmod 755 nnnn
   • sudo -u www-data cp placeholder-indexpage.htm nnnn/indexpage.htm
   • Log out
2. Log into the Drupal web site using an account with Admin or Editor permissions
3. Using a web browser, navigate to https://www.iac.org/nationals
4. Click the Clone content link
5. In the Title field, remove the words Clone of and change the prior year to the upcoming year
6. Edit the Body of the page
   • Replace any outdated content with a placeholder, e.g. Coming soon
   • Change any remaining instances of the prior year to the upcoming year (be sure to update embedded any hyperlinks as well)
7. Scroll to the very bottom of the page and click the Save button
8. Repeat steps 4-7 for each of the Nationals sub-pages (Schedule, Competitor and volunteer list, et al.)
   • Note that the Gallery is a special case; it's much easier to create a new one than to clone the old one and remove  all the pictures. Use https://www.iac.org/node/add/media-gallery and set the Title field to nnnn U.S. National Aerobatic Championships
9. Remove the 'nationals' redirect from the prior year
   1. Navigate to https://www.iac.org/nationals
   2. Click the Edit tab
   3. Scroll down to the URL redirects section near the bottom of the page
   4. Under Operations, click the Delete link and then confirm
   5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save
10. Create a 'nationals' redirect for the upcoming year
    • Navigate to https://www.iac.org/us-national-aerobatic-championships-nnnn (where nnnn is the upcoming year)
    • Click on the Edit tab
    • Scroll down to the URL redirects section near the bottom of the page
    • Click on the link labeled Add URL redirect to this node
    • In the From* box, enter nationals
    • Click the Save button
11. Update the Nationals Results page
    • Navigate to https://www.iac.org/nationals/results
    • Click the Edit tab
    • Add a bullet to the start of the list for the upcoming year, with a hyperlink to https://www.iac.org/files/nationals-results/nnnn/indexpage.htm
    • Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Save button