FAQ

Questions & answers.

Real questions from scorers and club officials, with honest answers. Have one that isn't here? Ask it.

What does it cost?

For clubs and class associations, it's free — and intended to stay that way. Rather than charging the people who do the scoring, Sail Scoring is funded by sponsors: a small number of Founding Sponsors and any number of Burgee Sponsors — clubs, classes, and supporters of the project — cover the modest cost of running the service, so scorers and competitors never see a bill. Individuals can use it free too. It is currently in beta and focused on Irish clubs and classes recognised by Irish Sailing, with other regions potentially to follow.

Is it open source?

Yes. The application, including the scoring engine, is open source under the MIT licence, developed in the open on GitHub. This is a deliberate part of the sustainability story: anyone can audit how a score is calculated, and the tool can outlive any single maintainer or hosting arrangement, because in the worst case the code can be picked up and run by someone else. The "Sail Scoring" name and logo remain trademarks, so a fork can run the software but not pass itself off as this service.

How is this different from Sailwave or HalSail — why switch?

Framed as what Sail Scoring is, rather than what the others aren't:

• Modern and actively developed: built on current web technology, so it keeps getting better rather than standing still.
• Intuitive: a scorer with basic sailing knowledge can set up and run an event without specialised training — the interface guides you rather than expecting you to already know its quirks.
• Shared, not siloed: a whole panel can work in one workspace, so scoring isn't trapped on one person's laptop or locked inside one volunteer's hard-won expertise. That directly eases the risk of depending on a single scorer.
• Accessible anywhere: it runs in a browser on any device, and results publish live for competitors to see the moment they are in.
• Free to clubs: because it is funded by sponsors, being online costs your club nothing.

Which handicap systems does it support?

Scratch (one-design / position-based), IRC, Portsmouth Yardstick (PY), RYA NHC, ECHO, and VPRS — and a single series can mix fleets on different systems. More can be added as clubs need them.

Can I bring my existing data over from Sailwave?

Yes. There is a dedicated Sailwave import that reads a Sailwave file and builds the series from it. For any other tool, competitors import from a CSV, so anything that can export a competitor list to CSV — HalSail included — can feed Sail Scoring. Deeper migration from other tools is on the roadmap; if you have a specific file you'd like to move, get in touch and it will help shape what gets built next.

Can more than one person from our club score at the same time?

Yes. A club or class association gets a shared workspace and can invite several people to score in it. An activity log records who changed what, so a panel of volunteers can share the load without stepping on each other.

Do competitors need an account to view published results?

No. Published results are ordinary public web pages — anyone with the link can read them. Only the scorers doing the work need an account.

Is the scoring correct, and can I check it?

Correctness is the whole reason Sail Scoring exists — and it means two things, not one.

The first is engine correctness: does the software apply the rules right? Sail Scoring implements the Racing Rules of Sailing Appendix A — tie-breaks, discards, result codes, and the full range of handicap systems — and it doesn't ask you to take that on trust. The scoring engine is backed by a published library of worked examples at reckonings.sailscoring.ie, each one readable and checkable by a scorer against the rules themselves.

The second is configuration correctness, and it matters just as much. A scoring engine can be perfectly correct and still produce wrong results if the event is set up wrong — the wrong scoring code entered against a boat, a discard rule misconfigured — and an unintuitive tool lets that happen silently: the numbers look plausible and nobody notices they are wrong. So correctness isn't only about the engine. Sail Scoring works to make the correct configuration the obvious, natural path, so it is harder to get quietly wrong in the first place.

Why doesn't Sail Scoring have fields for email, phone number, or date of birth?

Because Sail Scoring is a scoring engine, not an entry-management system — and keeping that line clear is deliberate. The test applied to any competitor field is simple: is it needed to compute or publish a result? Names, sail numbers, clubs, handicap ratings, finish times and standings all pass — and in practice they are the same information clubs and class associations have posted to the web for years. Email and phone number don't. They belong to the entry system that signed the competitor up, and Sail Scoring would rather not become a store of sensitive personal data it never needs to produce a result.

There are real uses for that data — passing an email to racingrulesofsailing.org for protests, or phoning a competitor when there's an issue on the water — but those are event-management jobs. Where Sail Scoring can help is as a relay rather than a store: a future CSV import could read an email or phone column, hand it straight to racingrulesofsailing.org, and then discard it — without ever saving it in Sail Scoring.

Age is the interesting one, because age divisions — Masters, Juniors, U21 — genuinely affect scoring and prizes, so age is a legitimate scoring field. Date of birth isn't: it is far more sensitive, and there is no single “age” formula anyway (classes and events variously reckon it on the first day of the event, on the preceding 1 January, for the whole crew or just the helm). So if date of birth is ever supported, it will follow the same pattern — calculate the age at import time under the rule that event uses, keep the age, and discard the date of birth.

Where is my data stored, and who can see it?

In the EU/UK region — the application runs in Dublin and the database in London (which has EU adequacy). Your workspace's data is private to its members until you choose to publish results. The privacy policy has the full detail on providers and retention.

What happens to my data if the project stops — can I get it out?

Yes, at any time. Every series can be exported to an open  .sailscoring  file and to JSON, and re-imported elsewhere. Data portability is a deliberate commitment: a club adopting Sail Scoring needs confidence its data will still be usable in ten or twenty years, whatever happens to the project. No lock-in.

Does it work offline, or on a phone?

It runs in any modern browser, including on tablets and phones, and needs an internet connection to work — the collaborative, always-current shared workspace is the model, so there is no offline mode. On race day that means results are entered where there is a connection, then published live.

How open are you to changing these decisions based on feedback?

Very. The boundary above — scoring, not entry management — is a genuine principle, but exactly where the line falls is a judgement call, and the first answer to any given question might not be the right one long-term. Almost every design choice in Sail Scoring came from a real scorer explaining what they actually needed; the age field itself arrived that way. So if something is missing and you can show it is needed to produce or publish a result, that is exactly the argument that carries weight. The discussion that shaped this very page is a case in point — keep it coming.