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Hello Athlinks Members and Visitors -
I wanted to personally address an important issue/problem that has popped up for us this month.
October was both a fantastic and challenging month for us here at Athlinks. First, we upgraded both the software and hardware for the site with a complete rewrite and relaunch. The end result was a vast increase in speed and functionality of the site. Results pages, Profile pages, and Rivals calculations are taking fractions of what they were before the change. That increase in speed has resulted in a significant increase in membership and daily traffic to the site.
On the negative site, however - be careful of what you with for! The increase in membership has resulted in an equally steep increase in requests for missing results. October is always our toughest month with the end of season requests, big marathons, Kona World Championships, etc and quite frankly, we were late in increasing our staff to handle the increase in requests.
In response, over the past week, we have added new members to our data team, completely rewritten our request queue software, and streamlined the process by which requests are queued and responded to. As a result, there are some changes that will affect you that you should know about:
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At the end of the week, you will see a new link in your options for Requests. This will give you access to your current results and support requests and allow you to track the progress of each requests.
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We receive a lot of duplicate posts - no doubt from people who fear that we missed their request. Rest assured, we have the request and are simple backed up - we should be back to 24-48 hour wait times by the end of November.
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This process will give you better feedback than sending messages into the ether never to return.
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New requests will be prioritized by the race date - not by the request date.
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Current requests are completed on a first-come-first-served basis which means that a request for the 1986 Nowhere Marathon would be given equal attention as the just-completed RightHere Marathon from last week.
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We will be giving more weight to more recent races.
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In response to our members' repeated requests, we will be posting a guide to formatting results. If you want to expedite a request, you will be able to format the results and submit them directly to our data team.
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Our team will audit the results against the official results if found online.
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This will dramatically reduce the time for posting results if you choose to use this method.
So there you have it. We dropped the ball a bit - got a few bloody noses this month - but your feedback and suggestions have made us stronger for it. We appreciate your support and patience. We will quickly make it up to each and every one of you.
Lastly, during this process, it was learned that we have successfully answered over 108,000 support requests since we started offering this feature. 108,000! So I want to thank our guys (and gals) in the data team. That's HUGE!
All the best and as always, keep your feedback coming.
Happy Racing,
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