Registration form

[Tim]

I have noticed in registrations for the MIT Fall competition that many, many people do not fill in a WCA ID. In the current system for registration pages in the WCA database, this seems very easy to miss; people don't bother searching for their name since there's not much information to be entered. I suggest two alternatives:

1) Add a field for WCA ID; do not make a person search for and load their name in order to put a WCA ID in their registration. This has the downside of having to explain what a WCA ID is. On one registration form I made, I explained it as the last ten characters of your page's URL. Some people put stuff such as REYN01#444 (which would be the last ten characters of the URL if you clicked an anchor link). On the other hand, WCA ID is listed in the personal information at the top of the page.

2) As someone types in their name, automatically search for matches, so that the person does not need to go to a separate page to search for their name. We can still have all the fields listed like gender and birthdate, but put above them "Fill this in if this is your first competition". This will certainly be a harder solution to implement, and I am not skilled enough to suggest how to do this, but if anyone could implement this I believe it would work well.

[Clement Gallet]

Hello

I did a quick fix. Now for the first page, you have to search for some names. After, you have the option to fill everything.

Clément

[Tim]

Clément,

That looks great, thanks very much.

-Tim

[DanCohen]

Clement,

After some more possible issues, could you just add the "I am new" button on the first page? It seems like previous competitors wouldn't click it, but it allows for new people to just create a registration, instead of having to search their name.

[Clement Gallet]

Sorry for taking sooooooooooo long.

[jbcm627]

If there is an error in filling out the form (eg, invalid email), the form completely resets. This is inconvenient and user unfriendly - can the submitted values propagate the form? (Except for any invalid values.)

[Clement Gallet]

Hello

Now, every is kept (even the wrong values). This is a good idea, indeed.

Clément

[jbcm627]

Cool, thanks

[jbcm627]

So I also just noticed... I can look up the birthday of anyone I want using the registration form.

I thought this data was supposed to be "private". Perhaps for competitors who have competed before, the option to alter their birthdate should not appear (and data should not even appear in hidden fields), unless they don't have a birthdate recorded in the database, in which case they can create one.

[jbcm627]

I can look up the birthday of anyone I want using the registration form.

Right now the information is publicly available, but to get birthdates, I'd need to scrape the site for them. Since this probably isn't preferable, if the data is going to remain public, can it be included in the dump?