Regarding Ramons bench press, the bad attire call should come from the usage of wrist bands, correct? Maybe the permissable powerlifting attire should be added as an item to the meet check list.
Correct, wrist wraps are not allowed.
The current checklist is purposefully brief on the details in order to provide a good bird's eye view of the whole process, but also to remind lifters to at least read the most vital parts of the rules. So when the checklist asks the user to "make sure you have competition legal clothing" it should be clear that you find out what this means before checking this step as done. That section is a whole page in the rules and I think that it would be quite hard to distill it in a sentence or two without loosing details that could have you disqualified. But the idea was definitively a good one.
I think the fundamental question is whether we should continue maintaining close compatibility with the official rules of the sports or whether we should create a more permissive simplified version. My personal opinion is that close compatibility with the real-world powerlifting and weightlifting rules is well worth the trade-off of complexity as it helps prepare lifters for official meets and also gives credibility within the communities at large in a way that laxer rules would not.
Having said that, a major challenge is the lack of immediate feedback when competing virtually. In an official RAW meet where wraps are forbidden, Ramon would simply have been asked to remove them before taking his attempts. The possibility of bombing out due to an oversight like this is one of the main reasons why our rules accept any passed lift towards the rankings. Creating an authoritative video representation of what you can and cannot do on the virtual platform would help a lot, but since that is a rather large undertaking I unfortunately won't have time for it before I have finished the more pressing task of getting the completely overhauled next version of the site out the door.
Thanks for doing such a great job. I apologize for some of the screw-ups on our end. We had a lot of first time lifters. I'm sure it gave them a taste of what a real PL meet is like. I still can't get over all the yelling and screaming and cheering during our Sunday session. You would have thought it was the World Championships.
Thanks Tom. Like I wrote above, there is a lot to take into account for first timers and the occasional misses are bound to happen. On the upside, lifters tend to only make the same mistake once. But we obviously have more work to do in order to make our meets even more user-friendly. In the meantime, I think we should continue to err on the side of resolving any resolvable problem with the lifters at the expense of delaying a meet.
A slight correction. It was the UOIT ROWING team. Brittany Lee is from my youth weightlifting and was the only softball player.
Ah, thanks for the correction. I recall you earlier mentioning the softball team and seeing the text on Brittany's shirt I jumped to the pre-mature conclusion that they were all softball players.
