Suggested Enhancements

[Tim Harding]

I'm a big fan of MapRun, but for me it would be even better with some enhancements to the "Events Near Me" search.  I understand that the standard use case is "I know which event I'm attending, I just want an easy way to select it".  However, my use case is almost always something like "I'm visiting location X tomorrow/next week/etc. and will have a couple of hours free -- is there a MapRun course nearby?"  What counts as "nearby" varies: some parts of the country have very few courses, and I'd be prepared to travel some distance; others (Edinburgh, for example) have a large number of courses, and the problem is finding those that are truly local.  I might not know which club or association to investigate (and there might be several operating in the area), and lists of MapRun courses on websites are of variable quality, so the app itself is a much more convenient and reliable source of information.

One suggestion, which for me would be a big plus, would be to sort the search results by increasing distance (which I don't think is the case at the moment), with some indication of what the distances are.

Allowing a variable cut-off for the search has been mentioned already.

In terms of selecting an area to search, actually I would be happy with something as basic as specifying an alternative lat/lon to search from (rather than my current location).

Thanks for reading this far and thanks for developing and maintaining the app ☺️ 🗺️👟

[Peter Effeney]

Tim,
Thanks for your suggestion. Yes, enhancements to "Events Near Me" along the lines you suggest  have been on the enhancement list for some time, but have not made it up the priority list as yet.

I'll see if we can push it along in the next release.

If you are in the UK - maprun.uk should help find events in the mean time.

Peter

[jpmg]

In quite a lot of the UK, there are areas where it's very desirable for a map to have marked "out of bounds areas".  These are either line segments (walls or fences that must not be crossed except at stiles), or areas (but these can be treated as a set of bounding line segments).  In each case a competitor must not cross the line segment.

A lovely (but I realise complex) enhancement would be to have the app give a warning when an out of bounds line is approached.  This does require some careful design - a common "good behaviour" would be to approach the out of bounds line and then follow it along one side to a legal crossing, and then track back along it on the other side, and the user might well be close to the out of bounds line throughout this.  It wouldn't be desirable to be continuously generating warnings;  but it might be good to also give an indication when the user leaves the "warning area".

A further  (also complex) enhancement would be automatic disqualification of competitors where the track clearly crosses an out of bounds line without any movement to a legal crossing.

I guess that the fact that this all requires testing of current position against a line rather than a point makes it non-trivial.  It also requires a new kind of marker in the course file.

It would, however, be a mechanism that could hugely help organisers convince landowners that their event will not cause harm.

[jpmg]

One set of events I've taken part in have a rather nice (though cruel) penalty system that I don't think can be currently implemented using ScoreP .
It penalises 1 point per minute for 1-5 minutes late, 2 points per minute for 6-10 minutes late, 5 points per minute for 11-15 minutes late, and 10 points per minute for 16-30 minutes late.  At 30+ minutes all points are lost.

If you're ever thinking of extending the ScoreP structure, the ability to assign multiple ranges of penalty times with different penalty levels would be great.  

Also a final cut-off time at which all points are lost.

[Peter Effeney]

Jpmg,

Thanks for the suggestion.

We'll add it to the list of considerations we are accumulating for enhancements to ScoreP.

Regards, Peter

[Peter Effeney]

Jpmg,

Thanks for the suggestion.

As you have already identified, this would be quite difficult to get to work reliably... and I don't think it would have very broad applicability.

I suggest, post-run analysis of runners tracks -> disqualification of offending runners, might be the pragmatic way to go for now... although this is not preventative during a run, except to the extent that runners are more cautious of OOB if they know they could be DQ'd.

Regards, Peter