I sometimes get the question on how the judging interface works, so I thought I'd give everyone a peek. I should note that the current judging interface has pretty much remained the same since our second meet back in September 2007.

The meets are currently handled by a bunch of command line scripts that push the meet through its phases, from importing the lifter info into the database to creating the final results with tracker images etc. The process has been increasingly automated - the code now clocks in at a few thousand lines of code - but a few minor manual steps still remain. I will eventually integrate it with the web site to remove much of the hassle associated with registering and submitting the meet info, but for now it does the job and scales quite well to large meets without much extra work. Up next is to adjust them to handle the October weightlifting meet, but this is luckily quite straightforward to do.

The attached screenshot of the command line help for the scripts should give a decent overview of what the scripts do.

The second step, makejudgeinterface, will pull all the lifter data and video clips and create a judge interface. This is a series of password protected web pages that the judges can access individually. The lifts are ordered in the same order as a real meet going from the lightest bar weight to the heaviest, one round at a time (nine for a full meet, three for a single lift meet). The judges see all lifts one round at a time; once they have submitted their calls they cannot go back to review or change them. Much like in a real meet.

The lifts are available in their own video players so it's easy to replay a clip as many times as is needed from any point in the lift. Besides the obvious option to accept a lift or to flag it as unjudgeable, the common reasons for failing a lift recognized by the rulebook are available as checkboxes for the judges to fill in. This makes the judging a pretty smooth affair.

Attached is a screenshot of the first lift for the latest meet. Short and sweet, but hopefully this gave everyone an idea of what happens with your clips after the upload. As usual, comments and questions are highly welcome below.