PYS Online

Originally posted by Woodburner So we'll carry on as normal ignore it and hope it goes away.

How can you complain about the results and that the results are all biased for inland clubs when you put absolutely nothing into the system?

Originally posted by chrisg Originally posted by Rupert A couple of times I've considered taking on the role of returns person at the club, but as someone who struggles with an excel spreadsheet once I get beyond simply filling in boxes, threads like this put me off totally. For me, and I suspect many others, just filling in a spreadsheet and clicking send is what we would consider straight forward. As soon as there are complications, the will to get returns back to the RYA withers. So you'd dismiss it before even looking into it? That's a shame. Does you club currently make returns?  If your club is already using sailwave there isn't really much to do other than filling in boxes. Once you've uploaded (a few clicks in sailwave) you can do as little as you like (bar a bit of housekeeping for class names) which is sufficient for your clubs yearly return and gives you an overall indication as to the numbers suggested for your clubs water. Or you can get into it in more depth and look at confidence factors, run reports for specific classes or time periods, or series, and link your data to other similar clubs on similar waters if you think you don't have enough data or think the national numbers aren't working for your water type.

Not dismissing it - worried by it!

The club does it - luckily, there are far more computer literate people around than me. It isn't the end result I have trouble with - far from it, I'm a fan of the changes that have been going on - but some of the comments on here suggest that deeper understanding is needed rather than just box filling.

It could well be that if no one else was doing it, that a few evenings spent scratching my head would see me up to speed, but volunteering for something you have limited understanding of is a bit of a leap in the dark.


Edited by Rupert - 07 May 15 at 11:29am

Sorry guys, if I've put a bit of a downer on this, I naively posted hoping others might be suffering similar problems and be able to offer advice, and I didnt really consider the consequences of the negativity rubbing off on potential users.

For me the PYS as a concept works really really well and should enable the RYA to gather far more info than in the past to ensure we have credible PY numbers. I'm always keen to try these new proposals out and was one of the early beta testers for PYS but often I get a little frustrated that things dont move on and progress at a pace I expect.

So undoubtadly the tool works, it needs in my opinion some drastic GUI simplification to be useable by computer illiterate retired club volunteers, and needs some of the main bugs resolved but that should all be easily doable.

What I dont want to happen is that everyone stays quiet about bugs or user issues and the RYA and Simon go around patting each other on the back for a job well done while in the background, users are struggling, hence why I wanted people to share their issues.

But please I urge people not to adopt the Fuller approach of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting la la la, as it solves nothing and makes you look like a right chump.

Originally posted by craiggo to be useable by computer illiterate retired club volunteers,

Oh crap, do I sound that old?

Beginning to think I need some lessons if I want to sound less than 70...

Funny think is, I can put a magazine together on a publishing programme no problem at all. It is spreadsheets that give me nightmares.

The problem always is data quality Rupert. We have three or four people who do results at our club, and we'll have class names like RS200, RS 200, and even RS2OO in various places and various PCs. Somehow at some stage there's got to be a process that cleans it up and converts them all to the same format so every RS200 result goes in the system... Then at our club we let people sail different classes in a series on a single entry, so you've got to disentangle the results for when Fred was sailing his RS300, not the usual RS200.