Clarinot

The next version of the forum software we use is supposed to have a dark mode included, so this will definitely be coming!

I don't quite follow but I'm intrigued! would you be willing to sketch it?

I'm all ears!

We're certainly open to updating how the game works to support Winter Guard, but I'd need some recommendations on how to make it work. Also, our traffic after marching season declines significantly so I'm not sure how much interest there would be.

We don't have any plans for an app, as this would be quite complex. The forums are a 3rd party software that we license (invision community), the live blog is another, and then everything else is custom code. Getting our own code + 2 commercial packages into an app would be a pretty big undertaking. For now, we've tried our best to make the whole site/experience as mobile-friendly as possible!

Your wish has been granted 😀 I'm open to a better name for the forum

Also, I spent some time reworking the backend of the predictions game today. I believe any speed-related issues should be resolved but please add on here if you find that's not the case.

Gladly -- for this season (all 2024 events), currently the average number of prediction lists is 76.56 lists per event. This will obviously change over time, so the multipliers are recalculated every hour behind the scenes. In the screenshot below (accurate as of the time of this post) you can see 4A state has 124 submitted lists, so we take 124/76.56 to come up with the multiplier of 1.6. If you earned 10 points for correctly predicting placements, your new weighted score will be 10 * 1.6 = 16. The idea here is that when we previously had every event equal-weighted it penalized players who might not be familiar with some of the smaller contests, as those smaller contests aren't necessarily equally represented by region on the site since we rely on users to add contests for predictions (who can then predict in their own submissions).

I made a couple changes so hopefully the forums load fast going forward (it was our anti-spam logic that was slowing it down, so we'll re-evaluate if we see an uptick in spam posts) Predictions loading speed is another issue. There's a lot happening behind the scenes when the page loads to pull all the information in, so I'll need to refactor how that works, but I don't want to touch anything until after the season is over so please be patient with it for now!

We're back in business!

Last call for results! Please post in this thread if you have finals results for any of the following contests: Mesquite Marching Festival Cypress Showcase Seguin Marching Festival If not, we will remove these contests shortly to wrap our final scores/placements for the 2023 predictions game!

Sorry for this, I am working on a couple site fixes. As you likely have seen we've been getting slammed with a lot of spam on the forums lately so I've been working on a couple fixes to resolve that and overall site stability - things should be returning to normal now!

Also our prize for winning predictions in 2006 was a blockbuster gift card. There will soon be high school students that were never alive during Blockbuster’s time on earth!

done

I am certainly always open to changing how the prediction game works, as we have done in the past. For the record though, the reason it's setup in this way is intentional to force someone to make their own independent predictions before seeing others: that's why you can't view lists until you've made your own. Over the last couple of years we have tried to be better to not even add contests until we're a few weeks out (primarily because the bands attending really doesn't get locked in until pretty close in) which would allow someone to use scores from earlier on in the season to make good predictions. Additionally, if you've made predictions and the school lineup changes in any way (schools adding or withdrawing from the contest) you can edit your prediction list, even if you didn't have any of the impacted schools in your original list.