THE MEET HAS BEEN RELEASED! The rankings have been updated.

Great job Kris and the judging team! Congratulation to all lifters.

Great meet, thanks.  I'll get the camera better next time on the SQ and hopefully put some weight on my numbers.
One question for the judges: what caused my 2nd bench to fail?
Thanks!
Chris

I will now start to write a script to pull the rankings from the database. I should have them out for you within a few hours if everything stays calm (i.e. the kids don't wake up for another screaming session...).

This meet will cause some big changes in the rankings both in terms of entries and high scores. Meanwhile, the impatient can always check their scores manually using the rankings calculator.

The script is almost done now, but it still lacks the ability to generate the video playlist and totals rankings. It's almost 4am, so I will wrap that up tomorrow. Meanwhile, here's an unofficial dump of the latest rankings for the individual lifts:

http://virtualmeet.net/tmp/unofficial.html

The deadlift ranking is particularly impressive! Can't believe the progress Matt has been making here... but he needs to keep that up if he is to keep Coach Boone and Chris at bay. 

Having this script is such a relief, up until this meet I did the rankings by hand... that's tedious work indeed.

EDIT: spotted one mistake in the rankings stemming from the pound bodyweight of one lifter having been imported into the kilogram bodyweight field. We indeed do not have lifters weighin 276kg (608.5lbs)... 

Finally.

The official rankings have now been updated to include this meet.

This meet was not any more time consuming than the others, but being chronically time deprived it felt like a massive undertaking. In the end, I had to cut sleep back to 3-4 hours for the last few days to push it over the edge. On the upside, much of the work went into importing all meet data into the database (previously lifter data was hand-coded and the first meet only existed as text files) and refining the meet automation scripts to also handle creating the final results and rankings. In a nutshell, our infrastructure is now in a pretty good shape and I am confident that we will be able to handle the upcoming meets in May with much faster turnaround. Ultimately, we are aiming at cutting down the meet release process to one week after the last clips have hit the server, a goal I hope we will be able to reach this year.

Enough said for now, thanks again for your patience folks! 

Well done all.
Matt, could you do me  a favor and suffer some setbacks? Nothing painful or permanent, just something to make sure I can surpass you by December. ;-) just kidding, keep pushing, I'm chasing.

A big congrats to everyone.

My goal for this meet was to put up some new PR's and not bomb out on any of my attempts.  I was successful at one of those but still managed to bomb out on two attempts, which isn't all that bad, smaller jumps next time and maybe take a little longer breaks between attempts might help for the next meet.

Matt, could you do me  a favor and suffer some setbacks? Nothing painful or permanent, just something to make sure I can surpass you by December. ;-) just kidding, keep pushing, I'm chasing.

Well, hmmmmm, let me think about this.......... 
We are all here to motivate one another, so just try and catch me 
If I do suffer any set backs from here on out, I hope you know I'm going to blame you now    And I know you'll feel bad.......

Well done everyone! This was a really good meet. Virtualmeet is starting to show it´s true potential for the powerlifting community.

I hope that me and some of the other lifters from Täby AK can join you in the deadlift meet later this year. Sadly we are hold back by the IPF(SSF) rules here in Sweden in attending PL and BP meets.

I also hope to see chris lift in a meet in the near future...

Well done everyone! This was a really good meet. Virtualmeet is starting to show it´s true potential for the powerlifting community.

Indeed. And we are hard at work on improving it. Some news on where we are going are expected to be released over the next few days.

Sadly we are hold back by the IPF(SSF) rules here in Sweden in attending PL and BP meets.

Sadly so. As the lifting members of our community knows, I submitted a request to the IPF on March 4th to clarify whether IPF lifters participating in our events may face sanctions, especially in regard to rule 14.9 in the IPF Constitution:

14.9 Participating in Non-IPF Competition
Any lifter, coach, referee or official who competes or participates in an international Powerlifting or Bench Press competition not organised, sanctioned or approved by the IPF shall not be permitted to take part in any IPF international or regional competition for a period of 12 months from the date of that non-approved competition.

I received a reply from IPF president Detlev Albrings on March 9th that the issue has been passed on to their Disciplinary Committee, but as of yet no word. I will continue to keep those lifting with us aware of the situation and will go public with their response as soon as it arrives. The Swedish IPF-affiliated Powerlifting Federation, who have their own rule additions, took the position (link in Swedish) that their lifters are not allowed to lift with us. BUT, this only affects powerlifting and bench press events and they specifically said military bench events are ok. So Olle, how many Täby AK lifters are hitting it in May?

I also hope to see chris lift in a meet in the near future...

If near future means summer/autumn and chris means kris you're in luck. I haven't had time to hit the gym for the last two months, but on Saturday I will begin my comeback training with Måns. Am considering starting a journal for this, but not sure whether that is the smartest thing to do under my current time constraints. 

I'd like to thank all the organisers for all their work in setting this up and for the opportunity to take part.

I'd also like to congratulate the participants on some good numbers, especially Matt of course.

I accomplished more or less what I set out to do but the timing and events before and after prevented a real balls to the wall effort from me.  I'll do better next time.  I'm training hard and improving gradually.

I have an incredibly dumb question, it may be because I've never done any real world meets but, what would be the purpose of that kind of rule?

Now I have to go see who owns that that real world meet I was thinking about doing.

EDIT: oh yeah the whole reason I came over here.
Kris, I commend you on using original licensed music. They really make the videos belong to virtual meets, and some what, you and I think that is awesome. Plus the music rocks in general.

[Athletes who compete in sanctioned/unsanctioned local and national meets will not be affected. It is only the world class of the USAPL family who will be effected.]

I have an incredibly dumb question, it may be because I've never done any real world meets but, what would be the purpose of that kind of rule?

This rule used to prohibit competition on all levels in non-IPF sanctioned events, but was changed in 2005 (http://www.powerlifting-ipf.co...02005%20Congress%20Minutes.pdf).  The Swedish IPF-affiliate still retains that form of the rule on which grounds they have declared that their lifters are not allowed to compete with us in the bench press and powerlifting. Naturally, I can't speak for the IPF, but I think this statement by lifter representative Eliot Feldman from just after the rule change says a lot regarding their intentions (my emphasis):

The change means that lifters who compete in international championships of other federations will not be able to compete in NAPF or IPF meets for one year. Lifting in a meet with foreign lifters does not constitute a breach. Nor does attending a non-IPF international championship. Athletes who compete in sanctioned/unsanctioned local and national meets will not be affected. It is only the world class of the USAPL family who will be effected.

My (biased) interpretation is that we do not fill the criteria of arranging international meets in the sports sense of the term (i.e. elite lifters going for world championship titles). But, as a typical internet phenomenom, Virtualmeet.net breaks these conventional boundaries by arranging meets that are international in scope BUT local/regional in level (in most cases anyway). This rule could really be read either way in our case, which is also why we pro-actively contacted the IPF headquarters to clear this up. The last thing we want is to get anyone into trouble for competing with us. In any case, this rule does not affect IPF lifters who only compete at local level meets.

I'll keep you updated. For now, the best thing we can do is to acknowledge the potential risk. We have posted clear notices on the meet sign up page for the May bench meets. I also notified all lifters privately before the March meet.

Now I have to go see who owns that that real world meet I was thinking about doing.

If it's not the IPF (or the meet is local), you should be in the clear. To my knowledge no other federation maintains this kind of rule. But you may want to peruse their rule book just in case.

If anyone finds any rules that prevent competing with us, please let us know so that we can notify our lifters about it.

EDIT: oh yeah the whole reason I came over here.
Kris, I commend you on using original licensed music. They really make the videos belong to virtual meets, and some what, you and I think that is awesome. Plus the music rocks in general.

Appreciated. Luckily good royalty-free music is available for $30-$50 US dollars a pop. Once our videos have some serious exposure, I would love to offer garage bands the opportunity to send in their material for use in our videos. That would both give us some very cool novel tracks (rough edges don't hurt one bit for our genre!) and the artists an opportunity to get an appreciative audience. I wouldn't mind giving them some prominent space on the meet page too. Personally, I have the greatest respect for those musicians who toil day after day to improve. Come to think of it, that's not a whole lot different from working the barbell in the basement. We'll see how that goes... for now royalty-free is the name of the game.