ACRS has been sunset after the 2016 competition season. This was not an IAC decision, but the decision of the individual (me) who wrote and supported it. Primary reasons are as follows:
- the identification and authentication protocols trip-up a lot of members
- login credentials differ from those at IAC.org, which confuses many
- login difficulty is especially troublesome with contest submitters/organizers
- the system doesn’t inform/remind/prod contest organizers for follow-up responsibilities after posting a contest, resulting in last-minute, contest weekend appeals for registrations and accesses
- the system and the contest sanctioning overlap somewhat, leading organizers to wonder why they’re repeating themselves, doing double work. They sometimes confuse the two.
- the system lacks a maintainer with interest in making improvements.
Note that ACRS was a registration system, not to be confused with the contest sanctioning and contest calendar (see bullets above). However the contest sanctioning has also been sunset this year. (It was Randy Owens' work.)
Since 2007, ACRS had registered about 260 contests, including the U.S. National Aerobatic Championships for ten years (2007 to 2016 inclusive). It created about 6,800 contest registrations for about 1,600 individual contestants and volunteers.
Find source code for ACRS at github.com/wbreeze/acrs . A PDF showing its functions and features is available there as well.
